Fantastic Mr. Fox

Crazy, Just Like Me

2009 // USA - UK // Wes Anderson // November 29, 2009 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Chase Park Plaza Cinema)

B+ - Wes Anderson's distinctive authorial signatures—the fussy, nostalgia-rich production design, the playful movements of his camera, the droll labeling of chapters and even shots—has at times been derided as a dollhouse aesthetic, more suited to playthings than real people. It's not a criticism I share, but there you have it. One might say that Anderson's latest feature, Fantastic Mr. Fox, responds to such objections by taking them at face value, as it was made using literal dolls. Well, stop-motion puppets, to be precise. A more natural fit between a particular style of animation and a living auteur would be hard to imagine, as Anderson's propensity for treating every shot as a tableau is given its most ebullient expression yet. There's something damn near perfect about the marriage of Mr. Fox's old-school animation—which heartily embraces an aura of toybox unreality—to the director's natural affinities. Anderson is an artist who thrives on meticulous attention to detail and on making every shot count, and animation provides ample opportunity to indulge such impulses.

Adapting Roald Dahl's slim children's novel of the same name, Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach necessarily expand the original tale of chicken thievery and vengeful farmers. The film bestows more human qualities on Dahl's animal characters, constructing a whimsical rural landscape where adult foxes wear suits and write newspaper columns and young foxes go to chemistry class and play Whackbat. (This is a cricket-like game played with a flaming pine cone, whose complexity amusingly and quite deliberately surpasses that of Harry Potter's quidditch.) Mr. Fox's characters might speak with American accents, but the clear template for Anderson's approach to his anthropomorphic animals is The Wind in the Willows. However, the mysticism and class allegory in Grahame's story is swapped for a distinctly American strain of ambition and discontent, and if there's one thing that Anderson knows how to do well, it's portraying talented yet dissatisfied people (or foxes, in this case).

We learn in a prologue that Mr. Fox (George Clooney) is a skilled and irrepressible thief whose exploits have a habit of getting him and his family into hot water. Having been convinced by his wife (Meryl Streep) to give up poultry purloining several fox-years ago, Fox declares that he wants to move out of their earthen den and into a picture-perfect hilltop tree. That said tree overlooks the wealthy farms of the nasty Misters Boggis, Budge, and Bean (one fat, one short, one lean) doesn't really register with Mrs. Fox. That is, until her husband starts sneaking out with Kylie the Opossum for nighttime raids and the cupboard inexplicably starts filling up with chickens, geese, turkeys, and cider. Eventually the farmers, goaded by the especially unpleasant Bean (Michael Gambon), declare war on the foxes, and a tale of escalating hostilities between men and pest ensues. Along the way, there are several sub-plots, among them the rivalry that develops between Fox's sour, diminutive son, Ash (Jason Shwartzman) and his visiting cousin, the all-around prodigy Kristofferson (Eric Chase Anderson).

The Fox family dwells in a marvelous, autumnal-hued landscape of vast skies and rolling hills, reminiscent of a stylized oil painting. Anderson constructs this postcard pastoral setting for its superficial aesthetic charms, not because he's especially enamored with its ideals. His film's farmers are not rustic men of the soil, but heartless titans of a modern, mechanized agribusiness, more prosperous kin to Chicken Run's Mrs. Tweedy. Some class- and race-tinged allusions aside, however, Mr. Fox is chiefly concerned, as all of Anderson's films are, with personal drama, most especially familial relationships and the reconciliation of desires with reality. Here that latter theme dovetails slyly—though not always elegantly—with the animal characters' struggles with their wild natures, a problem given its most succinct expression by the hero himself: How can a fox ever be happy without a chicken in its teeth? The profundity of this statement might be dubious, but Mr. Fox is ultimately less concerned with messaging than amusement, and one senses than Anderson derives a great deal of amusement out of hearing such familiar navel-gazing statements issue from a fox's mouth.

Indeed, what separates Mr. Fox from the rest of Anderson's output is not its conspicuous animation technique, but its decidedly light tone, even in its gravest moments. (A favorite line: "At the end of the day, he’s still just another drowned rat in a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant." This is delivered not as a howl of existential despair, but a gag at the expense of the film itself.) If Mr. Fox feels a tad trifling, it's because Anderson aims to tell a silly little story with such absolute precision, all while winking at us as if to say, "Relax, it's just a silly little story." The model trains that clatter through the film hint at the film's joyous tone and the director's self-awareness. Like a real-world train enthusiast, Anderson is eager for us to coo with delight at the dense texture of his fuzzy little world, but he never loses sight of the fact that he cares about its minutiae much, much more than we do. Mr. Fox is one of those rare films that feels like a painstaking labor of love for its creator, while only needing to be liked by its audience.

Much will be written about the look of Mr. Fox, with its impossibly detailed design and herky-jerky movements, which brings to mind the Rankin/Bass animated holiday specials. (Anderson, whose soundtrack choices always work more by intuition than logic, even alludes to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by including a couple of Burl Ives tunes.) Suffice to say that the film has forsaken realism for an appealing tangibility, practically inviting the viewer to reach out and stroke its character's fur or fiddle with its miniature bric-a-brac. If only 2009 hadn't also given us Henry Selick's overlooked masterpiece, Coraline, then this would be the best stop-motion feature film in years. The perfection of Coraline's gothic world is a hard act to follow, and Mr. Fox too willfully clings to its artificiality to surpass that film's sheer dazzle.

Although the source material is a children's classic, I hesitate to label Mr. Fox as a children's film. To be sure, at the screening I attended, all of the young audience members were transfixed, with barely a peep of discontent or boredom to be heard. Unless you regard drinking and smoking characters as too much for young eyes to handle, Mr. Fox is determinedly kid-friendly. One of the film's most memorable touches is its substitution of "cuss" for swear words, a gag that almost, but never quite, wears out its welcome. (I defy any adult not to titter at the phrase "clustercuss".) However, this bit of dialog tomfoolery hints that the film's primary audience is adult. While there is some cartoon slapstick, Anderson and Baumbach prefer the dry, character-centered humor that has come to characterize the former's films.

The Andersonian approach to character is in evidence throughout Mr. Fox, and while the heroes' tribulations seem less dire by dint of the fact that they are animated animals, the telltale longing and sadness are still there. The Ash-Kristofferson subplot in particular operates within the male-male rivalry framework the director favors, but it's also one of the weakest examples of such within his filmography, and the film's most unsuccessful dramatic note. However, what is most conspicuous is not the film's potency or lack thereof but the odd fit between its sensory delights and its thorny emotional landscape. (How many other alleged children's films would dare feature the line, "I love you, but I never should have married you." And then just leave it out there?) These elements are never completely at ease with one another, save perhaps in an unusual scene late in the film, one filled with a profound melancholy that is inexplicable but wholly right.

It's easy to declare that the undeniable visual artistry of Fantastic Mr. Fox reveals that the director has always been less a film-maker than a poser of action figures. Yet far from revealing the shallowness of Anderson's emotional understanding, the winsome pleasures of Mr. Fox throw fresh light on the essential humanity of the director's films, especially Rushmore and the underrated The Darjeeling Limited. In creating a fluffy fairy tale—a little starched and a little sad, as only he can do it—Anderson underscores his characters' egotistical need to control their environments, while simultaneously acknowledging how much fun it can be to fashion one's own little world.

Antichrist

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

2009 // Denmark // Lars von Trier // November 3, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

B - Antichrist is an aggressively unpleasant film, but that's not the same thing as a bad film. In fact, the latest effort from Lars von Trier, the noted asshole and self-appointed ambassador of pretentious European film-making, is the most intriguing work from the director I've yet seen. I have never understood the contempt his films often arouse, but my prior experience with von Trier has been admittedly underwhelming. Antichrist, however, proves to be audacious and original. The film is suffused with unforgettable images, seemingly plucked out of a bad dream and given a rotten, mythic life on the screen. Von Trier has achieved a fresh alchemy, blending his essential cynicism with intellectually engrossing themes and a new-found instinct for terror. While a bothersome lack of emotional heft prevents it from succeeding as a genuine work of horror, Antichrist is nonetheless harrowing, provocative stuff. It seems ordained to lurk in the cellar of cinema for years to come, it noisome bellows drawing attention to our unexamined assumptions about remorse, sex, and especially gender. You are forewarned: von Trier has summoned forth an ugly, ugly beast, and staring it down is not enjoyable in the least, but there is something nonetheless compelling in its scabrous eyes.

The film declares its interests with full-throated conviction in an unbearably gorgeous prologue, shot in luminous black-and-white and presented in ultra-slow motion. While an aria from Handel's Rinaldo evokes a sacred tone, the nameless He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg) engage in some apparently mind-shattering shower sex that eventually migrates to floor and bed. So rapturous is their lovemaking that the couple fails to notice when their toddler son leaps from his crib, opens a baby gate, climbs on a table, and steps out an open window, plummeting to a sumptuously captured death. Here von Trier entwines sex and death by means of style and storytelling, muddling their flavors to create a concoction that is simultaneously horrific and ecstatic.

She is hospitalized following the funeral, once it becomes apparent that the tragedy has utterly broken her will to live. He, a psychotherapist simmering with restrained intellectual arrogance, decides that her treatment is not working, and resolves to bring his wife home, take her off medication, and subject her to his brand of therapy. Eventually, he brings her to Eden, a cabin in the woods where she once labored on a dissertation on the history of misogynistic violence. What exactly transpires in the forest I won't say, except that it revolves around the power struggle between this devious, controlling man and this astute woman who is in a vulnerable state, and possibly losing her mind.

It's worth taking a moment here to dispose of any suspicion that von Trier, whose films have always maintained a chilly distance from his characters while subjecting them to nasty circumstances, exhibits anything like warmth for these people. He and She are potent symbols, constructed explicitly for the purpose of Antichrist's exploration of repressed fears, but they aren't really characters. We dread for them, but only because von Trier does such an exquisite job of suggesting looming calamity. And when the blood starts to fly, it's horrifying strictly because--as in Argento's baroque nightmares and the countless Saws and Hostels--we can readily imagine the pain. However, von Trier achieves something infinitely more stimulating and disturbing than mere art-house torture porn, because he tethers the scattered moments of gore to a stimulating story steeped in the elements. Spilled blood and rent flesh fit comfortably within Antichrist's motifs of natural savagery and ugliness: snow, rain, hail, gnarled trees, bloated ticks, falling acorns, and woodland animals that ooze with sinister portent.

The novelty of Antichrist is its frank tackling of matters often neglected by "serious" cinema, and long buried as a subtext in genre film, especially horror. Von Trier has presented one of first films that I can recall to explicitly invoke and critique the Othering of a gender, an Othering that goes far beyond run-of-the-mill dehumanization into outright demonization. The fundamental terror that Antichrist exploits is androphobia-gynophobia, a fear that the other gender is alien, frightening, unfathomable, and, above all, Evil. The film's cosmology--or at least the cosmology that threatens to intrude on its secular starting point--is a Manichaean one, where goodness resides in the spiritual and evil dwells in the material. With admirable agility, von Trier ties this worldview to a Christian-pagan conception of the link between nature and feminine power. Satan is manifest in the natural world; women are attuned to the natural world; ergo, women are emissaries of Satan. In her dissertation, entitled "Gynocide," Gainsbourg's She attempted to refute this superstitious and misogynistic nonsense, illustrating how it once led to witch burnings. However, one of von Trier's theses in Antichrist is the seductive nature of sexist mythologizing. Even those who should know better can fall victim to ancient bigotries, especially when they dovetail neatly with unresolved anxieties and festering traumas.

This isn't to say that She is villain of Antichrist. It's debatable whether the term is even applicable to von Trier's fable, which is intriguingly ambiguous despite the spiritual and fleshy terror it engenders. Indeed, one of the film's low-key achievements is its uncanny portrayal of a male antagonist who is outwardly selfless and reasonable but whose actions are manipulative and domineering. Dafoe's He is a supremely subtle kind of monster, whose unflappable confidence and insipid psychological exercises hold a seed of the sinister, one that only expands as the film unspools (and unravels). At one point, He tosses aside any pretense of equality or humanity in his relationship with She, retorting "You don't have to understand; just do what I say."  Von Trier's cynicism has always unshackled him from facile and flaccid romantic conventions, especially the archetypes of the Good Guy and Bad Guy. His films insist that we are all bad guys. This attitude has often led to dismal aimlessness in his films, but in Antichrist, the director exhibits a taut confidence with contradiction. He is resolute in the portrayal of He as a fundamentally despicable man, even as he provokes our pity at the horrors He endures.

Van Trier unfortunately relies on unnecessary excess in Antichrist's final act. The film's grisliest moments aren't enhanced by the director's unflinching devotion to capturing every bloody detail. It doesn't demand much skill to provoke squirming discomfort from an audience with gratuitous shots of battered, pierced, and snipped flesh. This is especially unsatisfactory given that von Trier elsewhere exhibits a hitherto unforeseen talent for restrained horror. Following in the tradition of Cronenberg at his most surreal and Lynch at his finest, von Trier renders the most banal locales with a Luciferian menace. Consistent with his theme of a natural world suffused with evil, he persuades through unnerving visuals and sound design, evoking a setting where, for example, a rustling stand of ferns becomes a lair for unfathomable malice. It is this vital instinct for the uncanny that lends the film its powerful atmosphere of dread. We are unsettled, yet we don't know why. We fear something, but we don't know what. (Or at least we cannot or will not say it out loud.) The aloofness that von Trier stubbornly refuses to shake--or simply can't shake--does nothing to diminish Antichrist's skin-crawling potency. More like this, please, Lars.

Where the Wild Things Are

It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Gets Hurt

2009 // USA // Spike Jonze // November 1, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Hi-Pointe Theater)

C* - To call Spike Jonze's bewildering, uneasy Where the Wild Things Are an "adaptation" of Maurice Sendak's trim little bedtime story strikes me as the faultiest use of the term since David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. While Jonze's film co-opts Sendak's indelible creature designs and the general thrust of his tale—a boy journeys to an untamed island, is crowned king of the resident monsters, becomes disillusioned, and returns home—it contains little else that is familiar, either from the source material or the whole history of films about children and childhood. This film is wondrous, exhausting, confused, offensive, and deeply affecting, often at the same time. Above all, it is unremittingly odd. It is without question one of the most confounding films I've seen in the past decade, and I've seen INLAND EMPIRE. The space between a film that says uncommon things in unfamiliar ways and a film that has no conception of what it is trying to say... well, that is a narrow and shadowed gap, and Where the Wild Things Are squats squarely in it. The adaptation of a beloved children's book should be a sure-fire opportunity to churn out a crowd-pleasing mediocrity. Somehow, for reasons that only he likely understands, Jonze has refashioned Sendak's tale into a challenging, fractured, and often frustrating work of cinema, and for that I still can't decide whether he deserves some sort of auteur medal or a stint in the time-out corner.

Jonze opens his film by painting a markedly unflattering portrait of Max (Max Records), a grade school terror whose response when things don't go his way ranges from violent rage to weepy petulance. On the sympathetic child protagonist scale, Max ranks well below the titular heroine of Henry Selick's exquisite Coraline, who might have been a selfish brat, but was at least controllable. Max, meanwhile, is prone to threatening the dog with a fork when he's bored, smashing things when he feels snubbed, and even biting his own mother (Catherine Keener) when she has the gall to serve frozen corn for dinner. However, even as Jonze presents Max as a little monster, he shrewdly sketches in a more tender and vulnerable dimension to the boy's home life, whether through the rambling and oddly sad story of vampires he spins at his mom's feet or the haunted terror in his eyes when a clueless teacher explains that the sun will one day burn out. Jonze asks that we assimilate these contradictory reactions to the young hero, anticipating some comeuppance for his nasty behavior and yet also evoking our own childhood feelings of betrayal, loneliness, and despair.

A vicious tussle with Mom eventually sends Max bolting out the front door and on his way to the land of the Wild Things. It's a seamless transition, with Jonze providing no obvious shift in style to signify where reality ends and Max's tantrum-born flight of fancy begins. Ultimately, however, the change proves to be quite jarring, as the film's prior realism is replaced by a mode of storytelling that has all the aesthetics of realism, but is dense with allegory and abstraction. I hesitate to say that Jonze's resolve to shoot both modes of the film with handheld cameras in a naturalistic style is a failure, if only because it's an unconventional choice that results in some singularly lovely imagery. However, it does represent a miscalculation that embodies many of Wild Things' larger problems, in that Jonze's somewhat heedless and shortsighted commitment to a set of artistic preferences often results in tonal confusion.

The Wild Things themselves also exemplify this pitfall. On the one hand, the monsters that Max encounters and eventually comes to rule are marvelous creations of costuming, puppetry, and computer animation. They are as close as a live-action film could possibly come to replicating the menace and charm of Sendak's distinctive illustrations. However, Jonze uses the Wild Things in a manner that is much more ambitious than the book' gnashing and roaring bogeymen. His story demands characters, and that necessitates that his Wild Things be distinctive and reasonably expressive. Thus, the film's monsters boast the movements of people in sports mascot costumes, the voices of adult actors, and dialog reminiscent of children Max's age. This combination proves to be a little unsettling; not exactly Uncanny Valley territory, but something related. As an example, Max's closest companion among the Wild Things is Carol, a horned ogre that walks like Sweetums the Muppet, talks like James Gandolfini, and behaves like a bad-tempered third grader. It's just as disturbing as it sounds.

The land of the Wild Things as envisioned by Jonze has none of Sendak's wonderfully textured jungles, but it's still a savage and memorable country, full of airy woodlands, vast deserts, silvery beaches, and rugged canyons. Tight shots of the monsters' shaggy bulk and toothy grins alternate with wide shots that emphasize the enormity of the natural world, contrasting Max's viewpoint with a more omniscient perspective. The Wild Things' spherical fortress takes on the tragic character of a Tower of Babel, as Max's dream of a playland with robot servants bumps into the hard reality of unfinished wood and stone. (In this, Wild Things contains a subtle retort to Up's guiltless indulgence of "secret clubhouse" fantasies.)

There isn't much of a plot, per se, during Max's tenure as King of the Wild Things. In a cascade of set pieces, Jonze employs the monsters in peculiar bits of psychological role-play, through which Max explores his conflicts with the people in his life and with facets of his own personality. It's futile to attempt to draw one-to-one parallels between the real world and the island of the Wild Things. Jonze weaves a tapestry of analogy that is so dense it sometimes wriggles out of his control, as the story flits breathlessly between events that seem to ooze with deeper meaning and yet remain obscure in their implications. There's also the occasional sedate interlude where the Wild Things talk in hushed tones and with disarming frankness about their sadness and the vain search for a simple remedy to that pain.

For better or for worse, Jonze exhibits a remarkable ability to convey the spirit of children at play, a spirit that, no matter how ecstatic the moment might prove, is always fraught with the tension of hovering trauma. Even in the moments that are supposed to be "fun"—e.g., the Wild Things howling with delight atop the cliffs as Max gleefully urges them on—there is a gnawing undercurrent of anxiety. The Wild Things are simply too reckless and too selfish for someone not to get hurt eventually, physically or emotionally. I can't say what Jonze's goal was, but if he intended Wild Things to evoke the unpredictable character of childhood, always pulling in different directions and skittering on the precipice of calamity, then he succeeded spectacularly. It's a mood I've never quite felt before in any film, and it stands as a bold counter-point to the conventional depiction of childhood as idyllic rather than erratic. If this mood wasn't Jonze's goal, then Wild Things is just a nerve-wracking ordeal whose conception of "fun" is a complete mess.

What truly renders Wild Things problematic is its off-putting morality. One can easily regard Max's rule of the Wild Things as metaphorical, a representation of his struggle to develop a mature approach to socialization. Not so the real-world sequences that bookend the film. Jonze gambles by presenting Max as a truly horrible child, and it might have paid off had the boy's time among the Wild Things prompted him to amend for his past misdeeds, or at least apologize to those he has wronged. Yet Jonze allows Max to return to his life without any consequences for his atrocious behavior. He's warmly embraced after his absence—apparently brief in the real world—and gratefully served his dinner, as though he did something worthy of reward instead of punishment. It's a vaguely repugnant message: run away when you don't get your way and your family will miss you and shower you with kisses and chocolate cake upon your return. The film's coda contains barely a hint that Max has learned anything from the Wild Things, and that's both irksome and bafflingly contrary to the aura of self-discovery that Jonze strives to evoke elsewhere.

* I have bestowed a rating of "C" on this film, partly because I have no notion of how to otherwise quantify it. It's my crude attempt to split the difference, but it captures neither the film's weird, poignant charm, nor is deeply troubling flaws.

Post-Script: I see now that the literate and always insightful Glenn Kenny nails the problem with the film's conclusion with far more precision (and a tad more hostility) than I did:

And I do believe that a big part of my problem with the film stems from what might be seen as an Eggersian attitude, for I found the film's predominant mode of being was not so much as a celebration of childhood, or a painstaking examination of childhood emotional states, as I found it to be a rather snotty privileging of childhood, specifically male childhood. I was particularly put off by the film's coda (I don't know that this is actually a spoiler, but I suppose I ought to alert you), which seems to direct a very specific message at single mothers, that message being, if you even try to carve out a minute corner of life for yourself, your little boy is going to turn on you, and then you'll be sorry, so best not to even go there.

A Serious Man

Of Few Days, and Full of Trouble

2009 // USA // Joel and Ethan Coen // October 29, 2009 // Theatrical Print (Landmark Tivoli Theater)

A - Is it even conceivably a coincidence that A Serious Man, which draws more candidly from the autobiographical outlines of Joel and Ethan Coen than any of their films to date, is also one of their most desolate and sobering meditations on human suffering? The film brims with mordant wit and a plethora of grotesque, wretchedly amusing characters, but it doesn't aspire to be a black comedy-of-errors in the mold of Burn After Reading. Rather, the Coens have delivered a work of spiritual and mortal terror that manages to be both absurd and disquieting, a much closer relation to Barton Fink and No Country For Old Men than any of the brothers' screwball pleasures. In the hands of the Coens, the tribulations of a Jewish professor in 1967 suburbia become the stuff of hoary musings on misfortune, culpability, and the seeming uncaring cruelty of God. Make no mistake: A Serious Man is a miserable film. It's also an exquisite example of the Coens' unparalleled talent for blending the grim and the droll into a bewitching cinematic gestalt.

The film opens with a fable: in a snowbound shetl—the year is never specified, but the environs look appropriately Tsarist—a husband and wife quarrel about an esteemed rabbi (Fyvush Finkel) that the husband has met along the road and invited home. The wife maintains that the rabbi has been dead for three days, and that her husband has unwittingly brought a malevolent spirit, a dybbuk, into their household. The husband sees only a friendly and respected old man, and desperately attempts to paper over his wife's anxiety; she perceives an emissary of misfortune and resolves to act accordingly. The connection between this prologue and the primary story is not apparent at the outset, but the Coens repeatedly allude to its themes: the different ways of perceiving adversity and the different strategies for dealing with it.

We then journey from the Old World to the New, as the Coens usher us into the life of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at an unspecified Midwestern college where the tumultuous 1960s haven't quite alighted yet. Larry's life is hardly unbearable, but it is filled with indignities. Most conspicuous are his ungrateful kids, a menacing thick-necked Gentile neighbor, and his unemployed brother Arthur (Richard Kind, perfectly cast) who is sleeping on the couch and monopolizing the bathroom with his cyst-draining rituals. Still, Larry is devoted to his job and his family, and while he isn't especially observant in the faith, he believes he has a good handle on what it means to be a moral person. When a flunking Korean-American student (David Kang) turns up to haltingly appeal for a passing grade, Larry painstakingly explains why this would not be fair to the other students. This doesn't deter the young man from passing Larry a bribe that he discovers only later.

It is roughly at this point that cracks begin to proliferate throughout poor Larry's life. While some are fresh calamities, others have been forming for some time, unbeknown to Larry. His wife Judith (Seri Lennick) suddenly confesses her "friendship" with a local widower, Sy (Fred Melamed), and demands a divorce—for no apparent reason other than her boredom with Larry. For his part, the verbose and peculiar Sy is disturbingly affable about the whole thing, as though being Larry's pal were more important than bedding his wife. Larry puts up a weak protest, but soon finds himself living out of the local fleabag motor lodge. Things get worse. Arthur, who is likely mentally ill, runs afoul of the law. Larry's teenage son and daughter may be stealing money, to fund their marijuana purchases and nose job, respectively. Someone has been writing anonymous letters to torpedo Larry's application for tenure. His divorce lawyer's fees are piling up. He gets in a car accident. A collector from a record club won't stop calling him at work. To add insult to injury, the housewife next door, Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker), has taken to sunbathing nude. Larry's son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), meanwhile, contends with his own problems: a confiscated transistor radio, a hulking drug-dealer to whom he owes money, and a looming bar mitzvah. (The record he uses to practice the Hebrew cant serves as a soundtrack to the crumbling of the Gopnik household.)

One of the little strokes of genius in A Serious Man is that while Larry is bookish and a tad fretful in the way one envisions a Midwestern Jewish academic would be, he isn't a nebbishy caricature. Thus, when it begins to seem as though God is smacking him around out of sheer malice, his progressively hysterical state scans as authentic distress, rather than the overreaction of a neurotic. In his desperation, Larry eventually turns to the synagogue, and seeks the wisdom of three separate rabbis, none of whom prove to be much use. Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg) spouts airy pabulum; Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner) offers only chuckles and a bizarre anecdote; and the venerable Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandell) won't even see him.

There are echoes of the biblical tale of Job in Larry's plight, but the resemblance is only passing. Larry is hardly the most reverential man in his community, and while the book of Job is focused as much on God and dialectics as the man himself, the Coens' film is most assiduously about Larry's travails. Although the American Jewish experience provides the backdrop for the film's explorations of personal and theological despair, A Serious Man is a marvelously universal work, one that any filmgoer should be able to relate to. It is about that nagging question that presents itself whenever life takes a steaming crap on us: Why is this happening to me? In other words, A Serious Man is, at bottom, the Coens' theodicy film, a religious companion to No Country's pitiless confrontation of ethics and justice in a post-faith world.

Yet the Coens, resisting some of the shallow mirth that characterized Burn After Reading, have deeper ambitions than mere goggling at the awfulness of life. Larry's mantra of protest—"I didn't do anything!"—operates under the flawed assumption that the world follows crude karmic logic, where every calamity must necessarily have a corresponding sin at its root. Sometimes shit just happens. On the other hand, Larry's blamelessness is not so clear. His lament can also be read as "I didn't do anything!," which is an apt description of his approach to life. Larry has spent his adulthood coasting, blind to the forces that are slipping past him and arraying themselves against him. His existence is characterized by inertia. The dybbuk of the prologue is evoked explicitly when a dead man begins to torment Larry's dreams, but also more subtly by his repeated lament. The evil spirit, it is explained, appears when living relations fails to sit shiva for the deceased. Misfortune therefore results from a sin of omission, from "not doing anything." In this the Coens establish a somewhat provocative moral order, where the mere act of being an oblivious doormat is a kind of sin that invites doom. On the other other hand, sometimes shit just happens.

It's a testament to the Coens' talent that it now seems perfunctory to acknowledge that, aesthetically speaking, their latest film is nearly pitch-perfect, a paradoxical pleasure given Larry's wretched misfortunes. The performances all shine, but Stuhlbarg is the fulcrum, and as Larry he skillfully conveys the sense of a man in free-fall, flailing for any handhold that presents itself. Longtime collaborator and cinematographic virtuoso Roger Deakins provides the kind of lensing to the Coens' vision that is all the more remarkable for the breathtaking consistency of its excellence, dead-on and mesmerizing down to the final image. And what an ending A Serious Man boasts! The naysayers who groused over No Country's sudden and deeply affecting cut to black will likely be perplexed again. The Coens cross-cut across scenes where calamity suddenly looms over two separate characters, one who senses with gnawing horror what is approaching, the other oblivious to his peril until it may be too late. We don't know what comes next. Except that someone will ask, "Why me?"

Paranormal Activity

Things That Go Bump

2007 // USA // Oren Peli // October 27, 2009 // Theatrical Print (St. Louis Cinemas Moolah Theater)

C+ - Ever since The Blair Witch Project slithered into theaters in 1999 to become the most profitable movie of all time, audiences have been periodically subjected to horror films that attempt to replicate various aspects of its formula, evidently with the hope that this will lead to a similar windfall. The staggering hype and backlash that attended Blair Witch's somewhat unexpected success—not to mention a subsequent decade of dispiriting decline in horror cinema—seem to have obscured an obvious truth. Namely, that much of the attention surrounding Blair Witch was driven by its astonishingly slick marketing campaign, one that gave viewers the impression that a fictional film was comprised of authentic found footage. The problem, of course, is that the public can theoretically be punked only once, and for this reason alone Blair Witch would seem to be a once-in-a-lifetime sort of phenomenon. Granted, there have been some satisfyingly scary attempts to rebottle the lightning, most notably the Spanish zombie thriller [•REC], but there seems to be little likelihood of a Blair Witch successor emerging when the original so ruthlessly exploited (and demolished) the credulity of contemporary horror film-goers.

Nonetheless, this hasn't deterred enthusiastic boosters from bestowing that dubious honorific on a little ghost story entitled Paranormal Activity. And I do mean little. Writer-director Oren Peli, shooting the entire film in his own house on a notoriously anemic budget of $15,000, has doubled-down on the notion that a horror movie doesn't have to be grandiose, polished, or even artful to be frightening (and I mean that in the best possible way). With a video camera, two actors, one location, and a few post-production flourishes, Peli delivers a post-Blair Witch take on the familiar haunted house scenario. With these limitations in mind, I'm inclined to be generous when assessing a film like Paranormal Activity, which is essentially a horror movie at its most elemental, a contraption designed to evoke terror. Only one question truly matters: Is it scary? The honest answer is, "Not really, but..."

In one of the film's fresher twists, we enter the story of Paranormal Activity after the spooky stuff has already been underway for some indeterminate amount of time. Micah (Micah Sloat) has just purchased a high-end digital video camera, complete with a night-vision setting, for the express purpose of documenting the odd goings-on that have been plaguing the suburban San Diego house that he and girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherstone) share. Initially, these phenomena are nothing more than weird noises that emanate from somewhere in the house, but this is sufficient to provoke Katie's anxiety and Micah's curiosity. Determined to prove or disprove the supernatural character of the strange occurrences, Micah begins carrying the camera everywhere and documenting everything. Most conspicuously, every night he mounts it on a tripod in the bedroom and switches on the night vision setting, in order capture anything unusual that might happen while he and Katie slumber.

Peli takes his time to lay the groundwork for the frightening stuff, dwelling on banalities early in the film in order to establish the layout of the house and sketch just enough of Katie and Micah's personalities so that he can put the screws to their outwardly solid relationship. The film portions out the morsels of creepiness very, very slowly, and they are initially so subtle that they almost seem like non-events. The first supernatural occurrence that the audience witnesses on Micah's camera is a rumbling sound that persists for a few seconds while the couple sleeps. That's it. The disturbances progress from there: sheets rustle, a door moves a few inches, a lamp sways, a shadow flickers across a wall. These occurrences aren't so much frightening as they are unsettling, partly because of the film's unvarnished visual style, and partly because it's so easy to imagine the weird things that might go on in our darkened bedrooms as we slumber.

Although Katie and Micah respond differently to the ghostly phenomena, neither one of them fits precisely into the Believer or Skeptic archetype that are staples of the genre. Katie is uneasy, reproachful, and eager to be rid of the entity has taken up residence in their house. For Micah, meanwhile, whatever fear the disturbances evoke in him is less potent than his urge to study them, and perhaps to understand what the intruding presence wants. Katie has her suspicions about that. Early in the film, she brings a psychic (Mark Fredrichs) to the house for a consultation, and she confesses that these phenomena have been following her since she was eight years old. Without much evidence at all, the psychic explains that Katie and Micah are being terrorized not by the departed soul of a human, but a demonic spirit bent on destruction. Peli doesn't devote too much time developing a mythology for his tale or even attempting to rationalize the strangeness, preferring to chalk up Katie's malevolent hanger-on to one of the universe's random cruelties. He does, however, connect it to her tale of a childhood fire, and adeptly calls back to this bit of history with a couple of downright haunting details.

The fundamental flaw that bedevils Paranormal Activity is that isn't particularly scary, which is troublesome in a horror film whose entire gimmick is its realistic aesthetic, one designed to trick the viewer into believing that its events actually happened. Peli exhibits admirable patience in maintaining a deliberate pace throughout the film, but at times this does a disservice to the film's mood, especially in the third act. Paranormal Activity begs for a narrative that plays out like the smooth tightening of a vice, but instead it just plods along, betraying Peli's lack of authorial sophistication. The disturbances caught by Micah's camera intensify over the course of the film, and while in the moment they are often gooseflesh-inducing, there is a disappointing lack of tension to the overarching story. Perhaps it's just that the found footage conceit has officially passed its sell-by date, but Paranormal Activity isn't especially convincing as a narrative. It doesn't help that the film concludes with a scene that proves neither enlightening nor shocking, with a dollop of creepshow gore that seems out of place amid the film's tone of slow-burn doom. (Certainly, the contrast to Blair Witch, whose most horrifying visual is simply a man standing in a corner, is not favorable.) Paranormal Activity's most enduring moment occurs earlier, when Peli offers a harrowing vision of a childhood nightmare: a sleeper snatched by the ankles and dragged screaming and clawing in vain from their bed into the hungry darkness.

Zombieland

These Rules Are For Your Own Safety, People

USA // 2009 // Ruben Fleischer // October 8, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - In the wake of Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, a film that managed to be both achingly funny and rather vicious, it was probably a safe bet that another genuinely imaginative zombie horror-comedy would be a long time coming. Happily, a scant five years later, Ruben Fleischer, in his assured feature film debut, delivers a zombie film that should make any aficionado of the genre stand up and whoop with delight. There's nothing particularly artful about Zombieland, which is exactly the creature it appears to be, no more, no less: the comical tale of a group of ragtag survivors at the end of world. Is it unambitious? Certainly. It's also damn funny and even occasionally exhilarating, if only as an example of film-makers uncovering fresh meat in a horror scenario nearly drained of its power by direct-to-DVD mediocrity. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wet their beaks in television, don't go looking for a new wrinkle to add to the zombie film's now well-establish parameters. Instead, they change the angle of their approach, throwing their sympathy behind the misfits for whom life in undead America isn't an especially difficult adjustment.

Our narrator for this little jaunt through the post-Zombocalypse U.S. is known only by the name of his hometown, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg). A self-effacing dork who admits he spent his pre-zombie life playing World of Warcraft and guzzling Mountain Dew, Columbus is one of America's last breathing humans. He's not the most likely survivor, but his personality traits have kept him among the living: he's naturally wary, utterly lacking in sentimentality, comfortable with loneliness, and, most importantly, compulsive. Columbus has a list of rules for survival in the land of the dead, you see, and in what is easily the film's most enjoyable flourish, he explains them with voiceover narration, animated text, and concrete examples. Rule # 1: Cardio. (Develop your stamina, as the fatties were the first to get caught, bitten, and turned). Rule #2: Douple Tap. (Always finish a zombie off with a second shot.) And so on.

Columbus eventually joins up with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who is a tall drink of southern-fried orneriness most of the time, except when he's whacking zombies, and then he turns downright gleeful. The pair then quickly fall in with Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), a pair of ruthless, sweet-as-sugar grifters who somehow manage flawless hair and makeup even in the aftermath of civilization. Fleischer and his performers maintain a sense of rumpled sympathy for each of these four principals, keeping both the characters' essential humanity as well as their frustrating flaws close to the surface. In contrast to most zombie films, no shifty traitor or natural victim emerges within the group. All four are dead serious about surviving, and while they are suspicious and hardened by life in Zombieland, none of them are Bad People. Fleischer primes us to share the elation of their victories, even when those victories are as simple as living to see another dawn or the sweet pleasure of an unspoiled Twinkie. (Rule #31: Enjoy the Little Things.)

On the horror-comedy spectrum, Zombieland is tilted decisively toward the comedy end of things. Fleischer doesn't strike the same exquisite balance of wit, pathos, and grisly terror that Shaun achieved, but that's perfectly acceptable, since he isn't aiming for it. Zombieland is most concerned with the funny, and on that score it acquits itself nicely. (The film's only significant moment of poignant, despairing horror proves to be a clever fake-out.) The writing is sharp and pleasurable without coming off as excessively droll given the ghastly circumstances, and the film gets plenty of mileage out of the essential absurdity of zombie film tropes. There may be a saturation point where zombies getting smacked with car doors stops being an inherently ticklish sight, but I don't believe we've reached it yet. The film-makers wisely keep the self-aware preciousness to a minimum, and while Zombieland assumes that you've seen your share of zombie films before, the characters don't speak openly of the genre's conventions. Columbus and his allies don't know they're in a zombie film. Rather, they seem to be wandering through the backlots of higher profile zombie films, codifying the rules of engagement that the characters of those other films should be following, if they were smart.

Eisenberg, who has often been unfavorably compared to Michael Cera, emerges as a smart casting choice. His awkwardness isn't particularly charming, but as a narrator his observations sound like the wisdom of a kid who's been kicked around the block more than once, and his criticisms of himself and his companions have real bite. Harrelson demonstrates that his best comedic niche is a gentle parody of a drawling tough guy, whom we don't mind cheering when he kicks ass and snickering at when he deserves it. While Stone and Breslin aren't as memorable, they adeptly sell the thick slathering of feminine swagger that Wichita and Little Rock sling around, whether of the lithe Bad Girl variety (Stone) or no-nonsense preteen pluck (Breslin).

Which leads me to the film's most aggravating problem: the complete abandonment of the reasonably equal footing it gives to its male and female leads in the third act, in favor of an old-fashioned damsel-in-distress rescue mission. It's not just the presence of this contrived twist that annoys. It's the fact that it's predicated on Wichita and Little Rock making an unbelievably stupid decision with virtually no thought to the consequences. In other words, it's a glaringly unrealistic and insulting plot development, given that these young women have been surviving by their wits for untold months in the zombie wastelands of America. It doesn't help that this coincides with Zombieland's stumble into that unfortunately common trap for all modern comedies: the lethal loss of narrative steam in the third act, which runs a little too long for its own good. Fleischer loses his way somewhat at this point, and his marvelously entertaining zombie comedy becomes a routine zombie actioner. The tone of the film has already established that nothing truly tragic is going to happen before the credits roll, so it's strictly a matter of waiting for the heroes to pull off their escape, however they manage it. Unfortunately, action without tension leads to tedium, and while Woody Harrelson mowing down zombies with pistols blazing is at least cursorily entertaining, it feels like a downshift from the engaging humor that predominates elsewhere in the film.

These complaints aside, however, Zombieland is an almost shamefully pleasurable ride, especially if, like me, you have an unreasonable affection for all things zombie-related, and perhaps even if you don't. Fleischer delivers the sort of slick entertainment that gives slick entertainment a good name, a gratifying and gleeful slice of adult storytime that is worth every penny of that multiplex ticket.