"Les Misérables" (2012)

 

Tom Hooper’s “Les Misérables” is a spectacular failure in that it is extremely ambitious and that it fails all the more due to that ambition. To be fair, any attempt to adapt “Les Misérables” to the big screen, be it Victor Hugo’s novel or in this case the stage musical it inspired, is inherently ambitious. Victor Hugo’s novel is a door-stopper that covers decades of a man’s life as he witnesses early 19^th century France’s history, climaxing in the failed popular uprising of 1871 known as “La Commune”.

Given the novel’s social realism as well as its scope, it makes perfect sense for a film adaptation to reflect this. This, however, is not an adaptation of the novel but of the stage musical it inspired. Traditionally speaking, musicals are not “realistic”. They are fantasies, idealized visions of us and our world. Lars Von Trier made a brave attempt to deconstruct this with “Dancer In The Dark”, which similarly tried to combine a certain degree of social realism with Griffithian sentimentalism. In  my opinion, “Dancer In The Dark” was a fascinating failure – its primary success being a spellbinding lead performance by Björk – undone by an uncharacteristically lazy attitude towards conveying increasing blindness by jittering a handheld camera around its actors.

Tom Hooper, a passable but far less talented filmmaker than Lars Von Trier, follows a slightly similar logic: He wants us to simultaneously feel the story’s epic scale and the character’s psychological turmoil. His way of conveying that is to both recording the singing live and shooting their performances in a semi-handheld way with lots of wide-angle lenses and Dutch angles. The result is a bloated, aggressive mess with choppy, poorly-edited spectacle scenes (the barricades come to mind) and a camera that is so close to the actors' faces it often feels like they're screaming at yours, trapping you with them and forbidding you any emotional or intellectual distance. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but it doesn’t work well for what is supposed to be a romantic musical. More on that later.

 

The only time Hooper's approach really works is with Anne Hathaway's heart-wrenching rendition of "I Dreamed A Dream". Her face is contorted with pain and anguish, she hyperventilates and yet it never feels forced or calculated, and her singing is always spot-on. It's filmed all in one take, and we really feel Fantine's pain and lost dreams. It works here because it's warranted, because Hathaway is embarking us in a whirlpool of emotions which I didn't suspect the song contained. It acquires an almost Cassavetesian grandeur. A more talented director could have succeeded at making the entire film that way, but Hooper is no more a John Cassavetes than he is a Ken Russell. A combination of both directors would have been required to make the approach work.

Ken Russell’s 1975 rock masterpiece “Tommy” was a pure musical, without any spoken dialogue, as close to a visual album as a film ever got. The transition between songs was fluid and smooth. By contrast, “Les Misérables” mostly feels like one, long, continuous song bellowed at the camera for almost 2 ½ hours with varying degrees of talent. It’s loud, tiring, and, quite ironically, distracts from the character’s emotions that they are so aggressively displaying.

This is where the John Cassavetes comparison comes in. In such films as “Minnie And Moskowitz”, “The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie” and “Gloria”, Cassavetes showed a great gift for taking the basic outlines of specific film genres – the romantic screwball comedy, the film-noir and the gangster thriller respectively – and stripping them from their codes, conventions and artifices, leaving only characters. Complicated, unpredictable characters, pure creatures made of motion and emotion. Cassavetes would then invite us to spend an hour or two in the lives of these characters, uncomfortably close to their faces and feelings. Cassavetes, like Bergman and Dreyer before him, seemed to believe the human face to be the most fascinating subject a filmmaker could want to shoot. Hooper seems to believe that too, but with the exception of the aforementioned “I Dreamed A Dream” scene, he does not reach the intended emotions. Unlike Bergman or Cassavetes, Hooper doesn’t seem to want to get close to his actors and actresses’ faces in order to study their emotions but to try and aggressively snatch an emotional response from his audience. This is why his approach is wrong-headed: Instead of commanding his actors to feel what their characters are feeling, he is commanding the audience to feel what he thinks we should feel.

A Cassavetes-inspired approach is not entirely incompatible with the musical genre, but it would perhaps require a radical re-writing of the film’s content. It would demand a greater interest in showing us what the characters feel, and require the film’s more spectacular content to be toned down considerably. Sobriety over sentimentality. Humility over grandeur.

I can only imagine how challenging the shoot must have been for the actors, having to sing live with Tom Hooper’s camera close to their faces. Their efforts are clear, but regrettably few manage to make them worthwhile. Anne Hathaway certainly tops the cast in spite of – or maybe because of – her limited amount of screentime, and deserved her Academy Award nomination though Amy Adams should have won it for “The Master” – on which I hope to write more another time.

While most critics – particularly fellow bloggers– mocked Russell Crowe for his perceived subpar singing as the unfettered Inspector Javert, I actually found him to be one of the better performers in the film. I will admit his too-fast delivery did elicit a few sniggers from me in his first two songs, but he improved tremendously as the film went on. Crowe carries the role of Javert with gravity and compassion, doing a particularly good job of displaying his character’s inner turmoil with his eyes.

 On the other hand, you have Hugh Jackman as Jean Valjean. I have no doubt that I am part of a small minority, but I consider his to be the worst performance ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Jackman is a competent and likeable actor, and good Lord is he trying his hardest, but it unfortunately isn’t good enough. He is disastrously miscast in every way imaginable. As an actor, he lacks the gravitas, world-weariness and ruggedness to be a convincing Jean Valjean. As a singer, his voice is too high-pitched to suit the songs. It was actually quite painful to listen to an otherwise good singer spending most of the film singing off-key in so loud a voice you can practically hear the strain on his vocal cords.

As the Thénardiers, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen share good chemistry and are a lot of fun to watch. The downside to these good performances is that they kept reminding me of just how superior in every way Tim Burton’s adaptation of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street” was.

On a more completely positive note, I advise moviegoers to watch out for Samantha Barks. She’s sure to be an actress to follow. Her subtle, heartfelt performance as Eponine is one of the film’s saving graces, and indeed should have been the center of more of the film’s attention. Her character – whom I could see reimagined as a Lars Von Trier heroine – is one of the most fascinating and complex of the story, and appears to typify its themes of love, self-sacrifice and guilt. However, having to my shame neither read Victor Hugo’s epic novel nor seen any previous film adaptations, I cannot comment much further on her character.

I cannot fault Tom Hooper for being ambitious, nor can I deny the obvious hard work that went into making this film. However, I would advise him to be a little more humble in picking his next project, and to learn from his disaster. For it is a disaster, but one that, in spite of all the annoyances it caused me, I can respect for what it was trying to do.

A. I.: Artificial Intelligence.

As the images, emotions and memories of this film go back and forth in my mind, so too does my opinion of it. If it isn’t Steven Spielberg’s most perfected and accomplished film, “A. I.: Artificial Intelligence” is almost certainly his most complex.  The story behind it is almost as interesting and complex: Originally one of Stanley Kubrick’s many unfinished projects, it was nurtured for more than a decade, with Kubrick and his lifelong friend Spielberg each suggesting the other should direct it.

It should have been the combination of the best of both worlds: Kubrick’s immaculate cerebral ponderings on human nature combined with Spielberg’s soulful capture of the magic of childhood. Two ingredients used to tell a philosophical fairy tale about a robot boy’s quest for his mother’s love. A story that would dare to make us ponder the very nature of love and humanity. A combination of “Blade Runner” and “Pinocchio”.

After Kubrick’s untimely death in 1999, Spielberg ultimately decided to direct and write the film himself, as a personal favour for the man who had been his friend and mentor. The challenge was enormous, due to the scope of the film’s philosophical implications as well as Spielberg’s relative inexperience in screenwriting; his previous screenwriting efforts, not counting the short films he made as a teenager, consisted of three films he himself had directed: The passable “The Sugarland Express”, “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” (one of his masterpieces) and the decent “Poltergeist” (officially directed by Tobe Hooper, though Spielberg was also an uncredited co-director). He had also written the popular but insufferably overrated “The Goonies”, which Richard Donner had directed. Bottom line, Spielberg is by no means a bad screenwriter but it clearly isn’t his strongest suit. Yet who else could have brought his friend’s vision to life? It was, as stated previously, an enormous challenge.

Did he pass it? After watching the film, reading and watching reviews and thinking about it, my answer is “mostly”. No, the film does not quite reach the heights it aspired to. It is indisputably flawed and falls short of the masterpiece it could have been. But it tries very hard, it dares to dream and to climb those heights, even if its journey is ultimately incomplete. To this day, it remains a polarizing film, derided by many, adored by some. Many legitimate criticisms can and have been made towards this film, and I will certainly repeat some of them. But if there is one thing that nobody can deny this film, it is its sincerity. Spielberg and Kubrick’s shared passion for the project is present in every frame, and Spielberg’s successful evocation of his friend’s unconsummated passion makes his love and respect towards Kubrick equally ubiquitous within the film. This itself gives “A. I.: Artificial Intelligence” a singular emotional power.

Look at the backwards tracking shots and the perfectly symmetrical framing. And observe the bright lights, occasionally coming out of the windows. Steven Spielberg has not only imitated Kubrick’s style, he has resurrected it and balanced it with his own. I can barely find the words to express how entrancing the world, sets and robots are. There is not one wasted frame, not one moment where I was not lost in the film’s intoxicating beauty. In terms of futuristic environments, it rivals the original “Star Wars” trilogy, “Blade Runner”, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and both versions of “Metropolis”, surpasses “Tron: Legacy” and the vast majority science-fiction films made in the past 10 years, and that’s including Christopher Nolan’s honourable “Inception”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Much like Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, this visual enchantment is not merely an end unto itself, it serves as a way to convey the film’s themes and ideas as much as the screenplay does, often compensating the screenplay’s weaknesses. It is as much an experience as it is a story, if not moreso. It is indeed David’s experience, his sensations and emotions that the audience is invited to share. This is where Spielberg greatest strength: his knack for discovering uncommonly gifted child actors and bringing uncommon depth out of them. This is something he demonstrated beyond any doubt with Henry Thomas in “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial” – still the best performance ever given by a child in film – and Christian Bale in “Empire Of The Sun”. And in Haley Joel Osment, who had already stunned audiences two years beforehand in “The Sixth Sense”, he found the film’s heart and soul, the very key to making it all work. I don’t know how, but he completely nails what may be the most difficult role ever conceived for a child. His nuanced balance of artificiality and authenticity is perfect. David is a robot who starts out as obedient, not quite understanding his “parents” but eager to please them. Programmed to love his mother, he neglects the father and treats him more as one would respectfully treat an acquaintance or family friend than our father. When the parents’ biological son Martin (Jake Thomas) unexpectedly recovers and mistreats him out of jealousy and resentment, Osment’s eyes make it clear he yearns to be his brother’s friend and thus is easily manipulated by him. Observe Osment’s repetition of the word “no” when his mother abandons him, notice how the first “no” is small and artificial-sounding before it gradually increases in volume and despair, along with Osment’s face. None of this feels calculated or pre-programmed, yet I constantly wonder if the character’s responses are or not. Not many adult actors could pull that off, let alone a child. Why Haley Joel Osment hasn’t become as respected and successful as Christian Bale or Leonardo DiCaprio, and why this monumental performance wasn’t nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, are two of Hollywood’s most maddening mysteries.

The film contains an interesting reflection on artificiality that takes place in the flesh-fair scene. The flesh-faire is a thinly-veiled and somewhat elitist jab at the NASCAR-loving working classes of middle America, depicted here as a frenzied mob of anti-robot luddites who capture robots to destroy them for their pleasure and excitement. David, having been abandoned by his mother, ends up as one of the many unfortunate captured robots. As he and sexbot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) are about to be executed, David does something the crowd has never seen a robot do before: He frantically pleads for his life. This prompts the fair’s organizer (played by Brendan Gleeson) to comment on how perfectly robots – as far as he can tell from David – have been programmed to replicate human emotions, but tells the crowd not to be fooled, because it is only an illusion. Is he telling this only to the crowd in the scene, or is it also a challenge to the audience, asking us to question the behavior David has exhibited so far? Given the film’s themes, I like to think so.

 

This moment, however, is slightly undermined by a previous scene that appears to contradict it: Earlier on, the first robot victim we see executed – fired inside a cannon through a ring of fire – is a comedian robot (a cameo by Chris Rock). As he is shoved into the cannon, the robot tries to talk to his indifferent executioners in a humorous effort to convince them not to kill him. While he does not “plead” in the sense we traditionally understand, he still displays an attempt at self-preservation that serves the same purpose.

 

Regardless, the brief reflection on artificiality reminded me in some respects of  the pivotal Club Silencio scene in “Mulholland Drive” – the greatest film I have seen as of 2013, which came out on the same year of 2001. In that scene, our two protagonists witness a show that, in spite of the bandmaster’s repeated previous reminders that it is all an illusion, moves them – and the audience – to tears until the illusion is broken. The Club Silencio scene had greater profundity and emotional weight because the illusion’s rupture is the precursor to the film’s second, de-glamorized half, the beginning of Naomi Watts’s mental and emotional degradation as she wakes up to face reality. It connected with the audience because, more clearly than the flesh-fair in “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”, it reminded them of the fabricated illusion that is traditional classic Hollywood cinema.

 

If its emotional impact is almost equally bittersweet, “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence” nonetheless takes a distinctly more optimistic approach to the matter: David never gives up his search for his mother and the Blue Fairy even when indisputable evidence shows his quest to be an illusion. He still believes in the Blue Fairy even when it doesn’t respond for 2000 years, even after it shatters upon the alien robots’ touch.

This brings me to what is easily the film’s most controversial aspect, the element for which it has received more criticism than any other: Its ending, or rather the continuation of its ending. Is it necessary? Maybe not. Maybe it should indeed have ended beneath the sea, with David praying to the inanimate statue of the Blue Fairy to become a real boy and gain the love of a mother he will never see again. But what follows is full of amazing ideas that somehow do not overflow the film; it still keeps going because of them.

 Consider: 2000 years have passed, Earth has entered a new ice age (somehow I doubt it would take such a small amount of time for that to happen but it doesn’t matter) and what appear to be ambiguously robotic aliens discover David and Teddy frozen in their vehicle. They have the slender appearance of the “little grey men” of “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind” but no faces, and they appear to have circuitry. Are they cyborgs? Have robots become so human-like that robot and human somehow ended up merging as one? Or did Gigolo Joe’s earlier prediction that robots will outlive humans come true? The latter theory is made most likely by one of the film’s most moving and evocative images: An alien touches David, and as he does so, his memories are transferred to the alien and projected on his face. The aliens then form a chain of sorts, all sharing David’s memories.

 

The implications of this image are poignant: The robotic alien beings are using the android David to communicate human experience to each other, collectively sharing the memory of an extinct species by using the closest thing they have to it. And while his experience in humanity has been all too brief, David has unwittingly played an invaluable role in the preservation of the human race’s memory, making him as good a human as any that ever lived.

 David then awakes in a recreation of his old home, based on his memories, where he finds a simulation of the Blue Fairy (voiced by Meryl Streep’s beautiful voice) who, despite openly explaining to David that she and everything he is experiencing is not actually real, is nonetheless able to grant his wish to bring his mother back to life, for one last day.

 This is achieved thanks to Teddy, who had kept a lock of the mother’s hair David had been persuaded to cut by Martin, as part of a cruel trick to scare the parents into thinking he was trying to harm her. Yes, it is completely implausible. There is no reason why Teddy would have kept that lock with him, other than to serve as this blatant deus ex machine. It appears just as implausible that the hair survived these 2000 years without crumbling to dust. All this came to my mind when the lock was produced, but I pushed the thoughts aside. I was captivated by what the aliens were doing to David, and what it implied. Were they using him as a lab rat to study the closest thing they had to a living human? Or were they rewarding him for his contribution to further knowledge and understanding of humans? Both are likely and equally fascinating possibilities.

 Aside from the hair lock issue, there are other logical and philosophical problems posed by the film’s screenplay. Consider the parents’ decision to have David killed after he accidentally grabs Martin and falls in the pool with him to protect himself from bullies. Why didn’t they consider having scientists look into his perceived malfunctions? And when it comes to the decision to abandon him rather than kill him, it certainly fits the film’s fairy tale tone – the situation has appeared most famously in “Hansel & Gretel” and “Le Petit Poucet” – but it comes across as out of character for the mother to do so. Wouldn’t abandoning him in a world he doesn’t know appear more cruel to her than simply killing him to avoid further pain? It would have made much more sense for the father to do so: He was never called “father” by David, who treated him with the polite respect one might treat a family friend, rather than a parent. Conversely, he himself showed a lack of tact and sensitivity towards his wife and David when proposing they could “substitute” their comatose son with him and assuring her they could dispose of him if she wasn’t satisfied. He did not take his wife’s feelings and pain into consideration and – as most people probably would – talked of David as a product rather than a potential person. Abandoning him would be a way of getting rid of him without having to deal with his wife’s grief on his conscience.

The film’s biggest problem, however, arises when David finally arrives in the ruins of Manhattan and literally meets his maker, Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), who created him in the image of his dead son. Dr. Hobby tells him that he is the first robot to want something without being told do. That is completely nonsensical: David was programmed to love his mother once she spoke specific words. It was specifically stated that this love would be irreversible, impossible to undo. His quest for the Blue Fairy was a quest to find a means to achieve the goal of being reunited with his mother.

 

So it would appear that the film’s biggest shortcoming is the fact that it doesn’t really address the question of how real a robot’s love can be. If a robot is programmed to love, is its love real? If not, can it become real? The answer is never clear, because the screenplay itself seems uncertain.

The film also does not address the fact that David received a lot of help from Joe and Teddy, who are also robots. Do they do it because they care for David? It could be argued that Joe just did it to get away from the police, but he could have done that in many different ways. And yet, upon closer observation, Joe’s actions do not seem to be motivated by emotional attachment to David so much as curiosity. He seems excited at the prospect of David’s discovery, but we don’t get any unequivocal evidence that he feels any kind of sincere, selfless attachment towards him. As for Teddy, it seems more likely that he is programmed to serve and follow his owner. He used to belong to Martin until the latter fell gravely ill, and spent a long time in a box until David’s arrival. By spending a long time with him and him alone, David had effectively become his owner. This was made clear when, in order to settle this matter of ownership, Martin and David both ordered Teddy to walk towards them and Teddy walked towards Martin.

Also incompletely addressed is whether David is capable of loving someone other than his mother. Had the screenplay made it clear he became attached to Joe and Teddy, it would have made it clear that a robot programmed to love can choose to love independently. Yet, upon closer examination, David seems to want Martin’s love as well, even if he doesn’t mention him after being abandoned. Perhaps it isn’t so much love itself that makes us human so much as the desire for love.

 Films like this raise a wide variety of complex questions. It is impossible for them to give satisfactory answers, let alone answer them all. But it gives a good try. As a futuristic fairy tale, it works beautifully. Does it work as a philosophical tale? I go back and forth on whether it does or not. Above, I described how I felt the film failed to properly address the subject of love and whether or not it can be programmed. But has it really? David’s journey, particularly the much-criticized ending, raises many questions, not just about love, but about the human experience in general. Maybe the fact that I can never properly make my mind up on this constitutes, in and of itself, a remarkable achievement on the film’s part.

"Amistad"

If “Empire Of The Sun” was the quintessential Steven Spielberg film, “Amistad” can be considered a caricature of his cinema. Just about every negative trait Spielberg’s critics – of which I am not – associate with his films can be found in it: Cloying sentimentality, transparent emotional manipulation, one-dimensional characters and a tragic/controversial/important passage of American history reduced to childish black-and-white morality with no interest in the characters as people with consciousness of their own.

 

In this case, the historical issue is slavery, treated here through the story of the slave revolt onboard the ship “Amistad” and the slaves’ subsequent trial in the United States; a trial that, if this film is to be believed, played a large part in precipitating the Civil War due to the recognition of the slaves as free individuals rather than private property.

 

The film starts promisingly enough, with the revolt itself, closely shot, darkly lit and exciting, carried by the considerable screen presence of Djimon Hounsou as the leader, Cinque. The dialogue alternates between Mende – the language of his people – and Spanish as spoken by the only two surviving slavers. The version I saw had Portuguese subtitles but I still understood the essentials of what was being said without much effort. As the slaves and slavers do not speak each other’s language, there is visible tension and we are allowed a little glimpse into their mindsets, as each party seeks freedom. However, that is about as morally complex as the film ever gets, and all subtlety goes out of the window as soon as they arrive in America.

 

The film’s complete disrespect for its audience’s intellect can be summed up in one single risible scene, during which prosecutor Holebird (the late, underrated Pete Postlethwaite) is interrupted by Cinque. Lit from the back by sunlight from the window, Djimon Hounsou’s head is shot with a slow pan that rises as he does, supported by a rising heavenly choir, as he repeatedly cries out : “Give us us free!”. Medium shots of moved black audience members, as well as a visible flying American flag outside the windows, complete this forced, unnatural picture.

 

 It’s the kind of scene that you’d expect to find in a parody of Hollywood films. Every conceivable gimmick in the book is used to bully the audience into feeling something. Had this come from any interchangeable Hollywood yes man, I would have simply laughed. Instead, I felt bitter disappointment. This is exactly how Steven Spielberg’s detractors see his films: Infantilizing, ham-fisted and reeking of Hollywood phoniness. Hounsou might as well have been shouting “Give me my Oscar!”

 

Sadly, little of this is denied by the rest of the film. Take the scene in which Cinque is questioned by his lawyer Roger S. Baldwin (a charismatic Matthew McConaughey) and his interpreter Covey (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who would later go on to act in better films and TV series), as they try to convince him to tell the story of how he became a slave. It feels like an obedient step-by-step enactment of a passage from Joseph Campbell’s “Hero Of A Thousand Faces”: The hero is reluctant to take his journey, doubts his abilities and self-worth, and thus has to be convinced by the quest-givers:

 

-          You’re a great man! You killed a lion! Your people look up to you!

-          No I’m not, I’m a lucky man. I killed him by accident.

-          Yes you are a great man! Now, tell us what happened!

-          Okay then, here’s my flashback.

 

This flashback is another illustration of Spielberg at his worst: It tries to make a terrible thing – in this case, slavery – beautiful, exciting and aesthetically appealing. Not only does this approach fail, it is horribly misguided. It worked in “Empire Of The Sun” because that was a young boy’s adventure, a seen through his eyes. Thus it was perfectly acceptable for us to feel as excited, amazed and star-struck as he felt. This is not the case here. This is an adult’s story, an adult’s memories as recalled by that same adult. It’s supposed to be a key scene in which we’re confronted with the horrors of slavery for the first time. But aside from the bloody whipping of another slave, the horrors we see could almost pass for a Spielberg-directed TV commercial: Muted-out sound, elegant camera pans, flashes of blue-white lightning during storm scenes, lingering close-ups of faces and meaningful looks…and above all, John Williams’s wretchedly demonstrative score that is practically commanding us to feel emotions rather than gently accompanying the images. None of the sobriety and relative restraint Spielberg showed in “Schindler’s List” is found here.

 

This lack of subtlety is also present in David Franzoni’s simple-minded treatment of historical characters. President Martin Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne) is reduced to a somewhat dim-witted buffoon more interested in his doomed reelection campaign than in the trial’s moral question. Anna Paquin, as pre-pubescent Spanish Queen Isabel II (Anna Paquin), is treated as just that, a pre-pubescent girl. As if to further cement this, the final shot of her character shows her jumping happily on her bed with her doll. Matthew McConaughey’s Baldwin seems initially promising, as he appears to be more interested in the challenge than in the cause, but that aspect of his character is quickly forgotten as he submits himself to the needs of the plot. Morgan Freeman, who for some reason got top billing, is utterly wasted, relegated to the background as a former slave-turned-lawyer, a character whose uselessness is all the more irritating when you know he’s a fictional creation.

 

That being said, none of these actors give bad performances. They’re just not provided with interesting characters. Indeed, aside from Hounsou, the only actor whose time does not feel wasted, and the film’s true saving grace, is Anthony Hopkins.

 

His performance as cantankerous old former President John Quincy Adams was rightfully nominated for an Oscar, and it’s easy to see why. With the right balance of dignity and mischief, he moves and wheezes along like a reluctant old lion, here to give his cubs one last lesson in something obvious to all but them, before going back to his rest. His final speech is so well acted it almost makes up for John Williams’s superfluous, cloying score. The same score also ruins an otherwise decent scene leading up to the speech, between Adams & Cinque. Spielberg and Williams apparently don’t have enough confidence in the performances of their actors or in David Franzoni’s dialogue.

 

Between this and “The Lost World: Jurassic Park”, 1997 was not a good year for Steven Spielberg. 

"Empire Of The Sun"

If there is one thing Steven Spielberg is good at – among many others – it is the difficult task of conveying childhood emotions and mindsets without simultaneously infantilizing his adult audience or talking his child audience down. It is a rare gift that he showcased splendidly in 1987’s “Empire Of The Sun”, in which he revealed Christian Bale to the world.

In many respects, “Empire Of The Sun” could be seen as the quintessential Steven Spielberg movie. It has just about every trait associated with his cinema: A child as a protagonist or prominent supporting character, parental separation (in this case, the child is separated from both parents), parental surrogates, a prominent featuring of World War II, a sweeping camera, prominent lighting, and, most prominently, a strong love of flying objects – in this case, planes.

 

That love of planes is what primarily identifies Jim Graham (Christian Bale), a spoilt young English boy living in English-occupied territory in China. It is the cause of his first encounter with Japanese forces, as he plays inside a real plane, pretending to shoot at his toy plane, in one of the film’s most gorgeous scenes. The camera alternates between first-person subjective shots and close tracking shots, as it might in a scene of an actual flight. It is a perfect example of Spielberg’s ability to make us feel his characters’ experience, particularly childhood wonder. John Williams’s score couldn’t be more perfectly placed, neither superfluous nor used as a last resort to make the audience feel what lesser directors and editors might fail to have conveyed with images. It is as if the music conducts the images just as they conduct it.

 

Love of planes in “Empire Of The Sun” is also the cause of Jim’s separation from his parents during a crowd panic as the Japanese army breaks into the city. Just as the previous encounter, it involves real planes – the astounding-yet-menacing swarm of Japanese fighter planes looming over the city, seen from Jim’s point of view, the camera slowly drifting from right to left as he is– and the toy plane Jim drops in the moment’s excitement.  In three shots of varying degrees of closeness, the damage is done and Jim’s bond to his parents is severed.

 

From then on, Jim is lost in a world and conflict he does not understand, surviving through luck, resourcefulness and unrelenting optimism. Even in a now-empty house that officially belongs to the Japanese, Jim still rides his bicycle and eats in the dining room, trying to act as if nothing much has happened. But the outside world and its chaos are inescapable, and Jim soon finds himself in the company of an amoral, cynical smuggler named Basie, played by John Malkovich in an efficiently droll, smug performance that recalls Robert Mitchum’s devil-may-care roguish anti-heroes.  After making the mistake of visiting his house again when it has been taken over by practicing Japanese soldiers, they all find themselves in an internment camp. This is the heart of the film.

 

Basie is effectively a cross between J. J. Sefton from “Stalag 17” and a less-romanticized Han Solo, a rugged individualist put in a position where his “survival at all costs” attitude seems indeed very justified. Yet he seems to have a soft spot for Jim. Perhaps he admires the boy’s resourcefulness and refusal to give up, or maybe he simply finds good use for his small stature and speed. Indeed, Jim quickly becomes the camp’s equivalent of Red from “The Shawshank Redemption”, the go-to boy for finding and trading stuff. Basie acts as a father figure of sorts, in that he teaches Jim how to survive and make the best of his bad situation. The camp’s father figure is Dr. Rawlins (Nigel Havers), Basie’s opposite number of sorts: His education is similarly practical – he teaches Jim Japanese – but also more human, as he tries to counter Basie’s influence. In a key scene, Jim tries to help him perform CPR on a dying woman but only succeeds in bringing blood back to her brain for one second. Rawlins has to pull him off to convince him when to stop.

 

I have said that the internment camp is where the film’s heart is. It is true both in that it contains the film’s greatest strengths as well as its greatest weaknesses. Said weaknesses are mostly due to a large amount of cuts made to the film, which are particularly obvious here: Robert Stephens’ face appears for one shot, in which Jim wakes up at the camp under his observance. He is never seen again. Miranda Richardson plays Mrs. Victor, with whom Jim becomes acquainted, but her character drifts in and out of the film, giving the impression of playing a larger role in an uncut, longer version of the film that might be lying in a vault somewhere.

 

The film’s greatest strength lies without a doubt in Christian Bale, whose performance is simply one of the best I’ve ever seen given by a child in a film. He carries the film almost singlehandedly, with a rare earnestness that humbles most of his adult costars. Like Jim, he is constantly on the move, his eyes always focused. He helps turn some of the script’s worse lines good, particularly an early conversation with his father about God being in our dreams and unnecessary lines meant to bring more emotion out of a scene where the mere actions are enough. The film is it at its best when Bale and Spielberg’s camera work in harmony to communicate his sense of wonder even at the darkest of times, such as the extraordinary air raid scene, in which Jim climbs to the top of a building to gaze at the planes and the destruction they bring, before collapsing in the arms of an alarmed Dr. Rawlins to reveal that he cannot remember what his parents look like.

 

 

The film’s most famous scene is without doubt Jim singing the Welsh lullaby “Suo Gan” when witnessing a pre-flight kamikaze ceremony. A scene so deeply moving it transcends the moral problem it presents with a western protagonist serenading enemy pilots (could we imagine a similar scene today, in which a western hostage of jihadists would serenade suicide bombers about to carry out a terrorist attack?). The song beautifully underscores the tragic absurdity of the fighters’ suicidal ideology. The shared love of planes comes in play again: It is something he and the enemy share, and that is present through much of the film, notably in the distant friendship Jim strikes up with a young kamikaze. Perhaps the message, that a shared passion can overcome war rivalries, is a bit naïve but it is effectively conveyed. Spielberg would later use it in a grimmer, more pessimistic and bittersweet way in “Saving Private Ryan” with the character of the German soldier who loves “Steamboat Willie” and whom Jeremy Davies gets spared, only to shoot him dead at the end when he finds him back in action.

 

Another beautiful and morally complex scene comes in later, though it is undermined by the aforementioned cuts made to the film: As the war nears its end and the camp is evacuated, the detainees come to a stadium filled with stolen & forgotten property, including the Grahams’ old family car – a very oneiric image. Most detainees leave, but Jim chooses to remain by the dying Mrs. Victor’s side As she expires, the Hiroshima bomb is dropped miles away in a beautiful flash of light. The juxtaposition of a personal, close death and the deaths of thousands never seen would have carried more weight had we gotten to know Mrs. Victor better. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Nevertheless, the close-up shots of Christian Bale’s face keep the scene beautiful. Which is why it is morally complex: Can it be right to make the unseen deaths of so many people beautiful?

 

But I have gone on and on describing the film, and yet I still feel I have not done it proper justice. Is it one of Steven Spielberg’s best? Perhaps not. It’s obvious cuts make it feel incomplete, like a land with unexplored patches. Yet it is precisely its incompletion that give it a staying power. Perhaps it could be best described by the expression of Spielberg’s mentor and other great child director François Truffaut, a “great sick film”. If nothing else, see it for Christian Bale’s outstanding performance. Why it wasn’t nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role at the 60^th Academy Awards is beyond me.

"Weird Science"

Yeah, I've been having a John Hughes week of sorts, having never seen his films until now. After watching five of them, I came to the rather unpopular opinion that, while not untalented, he is certainly an overrated filmmaker. And out of all 5 films I have seen, "Weird Science" is not only the worst (in fact, it is one of the worst films I have ever seen) but it is also the one that cumulates just about every problem I have with his films, including his best film, "The Breakfast Club". Namely the following two:

- Annoying and above all unfunny ethnic stereotypes.

- Flattery of his teenage audience's desires and ideas about themselves.

"Weird Science"'s artistic repugnance is not due to the fact that the latter is what it does at its core, so much as its pretense to do otherwise. This is a film that panders to adolescent male fantasies while simultaneously pretending to deconstruct them.

The film's premise - a hybrid cross between "Frankenstein" as performed by horny and geeky teenage virgins, and "Mary Poppins" if the title character was sexy and modern - certainly had a lot of potential. It could have been an interesting examination of adolescent male virgins' ideas of what sex and women must be like, and how culture affects our expectations of sex, beauty and heterosexual relationships.

What the film actually is, however, is essentially "Ferris Bueller With Boobs". The created fantasy-woman, Lisa (played surprisingly well by Kelly LeBrock), is essentially a sexy Manic Pixie Dream Girl, trying to persuade the boys to let their hair down, have a good time and get real, non-created girlfriends. Not too bad a premise in and of itself. In execution, however, we get far too much of the first two and barely any of the latter. Most of the film consists of Lisa taking the boys out in a bar (in which we get a cringe-inducing example of unfunny ethnic stereotypes, as Anthony Michael Hall's character gets drunk and gives an imitation of a black American pimp so stupendously annoying that it defies description), forcing them to deal with their cartoonishly over-the-top relatives (a bullying maniac of a big brother played by a young Bill Paxton, ridiculously stuffy parents and grandparents) and throwing a wild teen party. No laugh is found in any of these situations. And it gets worse when the two boys try and get real girlfriends.

The problem is very simple: The two girls in question have absolutely no personalities to speak of. They spend most of the film dating a pair of school bullies (one of them played by a young Robert Downey Jr., with surprisingly feminine eyes) and rolling their eyes at their antics as parents would to naughty but cute children. The bullies see Lisa and decide they want to swap their girlfriends for her. They don't actually get her of course, but it's a rather telling aspect of the film's portrayal of women.

While one could argue Lisa is a fairly strong and isn't solely defined by her body, as Megan Fox would later be in the loathsome "Transformers", she still serves a pretty misogynistic agenda: Women are never seen beyond the lens of writer-director John Hughes’s stereotypes of how teenage boys think. They are either mystical creatures full of promise of sexual wonder, annoying grandmothers/mothers, cool big sisters or prizes to be won. Take, for example, the scene in which Lisa conjures up a bunch of "Mad Max" rejects (their leader played by "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" villain Vernon Wells) to crash the party, wreck everything and terrorize the guests. The boys at first behave with customary cowardice. Only when they threaten their two prospective girlfriends, with whom they have only exchanged a few words in the bathroom without getting to know them, do they take action and stand up to them. Is that really how one should see male and female gender roles? Taken straight from the pages of bad comic books?

Actually, Lisa's powers are part of another problem I had with the film. The screenplay gives her magic powers that allow the film to amp up the crazy with giant phallic missiles, "Mad Max" rejects and thunderstorms so powerful they rip a Playboy model's clothes off. But all this madness does nothing except give the film more running time and hide its lack of ideas. Hughes does not use camp insanity as Ken Russell masterfully did in "Crimes Of Passion" to comically illustrate and dissect his characters' sexual fantasies, he only uses them for effect.

"Ferris Bueller's Day Off"

 

While "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" has its share of good scenes and laughs, they aren't enough to distract me from the film's pandering. We do not see anything wrong with Ferris Bueller's life or Cameron's, other than what the latter whines about his father. Tellingly though, we never even see him. John Hughes panders to his teenage audience by giving them a "cool rebel" and blaming adults for what amounts to mostly imaginary problems.

 

There isn't really anything to rebel against: Ferris Bueller has loving parents whose love he shamelessly abuses, has a pretty girlfriend who follows him unquestioningly and seems to have virtually every student in school worship the ground he walks on. He's a fantasy of what teenagers would love to be, not the representation of anything real. We're supposed to root for him in spite of the way he manipulates and pressures his friend Cameron to do things he doesn't really want to do. We're supposed to think Principal Ed Rooney is the villain for just being overzealous in doing his damn job, when really the only thing wrong with him is that he's played by (then-future) sex offender Jeffrey Jones.

 

In fact, Principal Rooney and his quest to catch Ferris Bueller is the most interesting aspect of the film because his scenes are the funniest in the film. He is a character we are supposed to laugh at and, indeed, we do. We laugh at him because of Jeffrey Jones's excellent comic timing. Look at the anger and frustration in his eyes whenever he gets humiliated or loses his temper. Look at one of the final shots, during the end crédits, where he, like Ferris Bueller, breaks the fourth wall and looks at the audience in a silent plea for sympathy. It is strongly reminiscent of the way Oliver Hardy would often look at the camera in the "Laurel And Hardy" shorts after being on the receiving end of yet another of Stan's gaffes.

 

 

 

The scenes with Rooney are the funniest and most engaging of the film because he's taking Ferris's truancy far too personally and because he is constantly struggling to reach a goal, a goal that I actually wanted him to reach and that, I suspect, most audiences secretly wanted him to reach. Why? Because we want to see what would happen then. What will happen if Rooney manages to catch Ferris in the act? Will he get expelled? Will Ferris try and pull another trick out of his sleeve to get away with it? In "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" John Hughes would similarly (and more successfully) provide us with a character whose goal is made inaccessible by a series of comic obstacles and whose reaction to said obstacles we laugh at, all while hoping he reaches the goal in spite of them. In the latter's case, it's because it's a goal - to be with one's family - that most of us can identify with and desire. In the case of Ed Rooney, it's because, no matter how ridiculous he may be, even John Hughes seems to know, deep down, that he's right.

 

This is all the more engaging for the audience because, conversely, when the film switches its attention to Ferris and company, there is no such suspense and the humour is mostly derived from Cameron's and others' negative reactions to Ferris's hare-brained schemes. The film never allows Ferris to look anything but good and cool. We, like Cameron, are essentially brainwashed into accepting him as the guy we'd all want to be, the cool rebel who just wants to have fun and let his friends have fun. But herein again lies the problem: Nobody was preventing Ferris from having fun in the first place, nor did we see any evidence of Cameron being suppressed. All we have are comments about how his father loves his cars more than he loves his wife, with little attention being devoted to backing this up. Ferris essentially becomes the spokesman for the right of wealthy middle-class kids to eat at expensive French restaurants, drive Ferraris and lead the whole of Chicago in a rendition of "Twist And Shout". I wouldn't mind the film so much if it was completely honest about its amorality. A braver film would have been even more anarchic, wouldn't have put so much effort into trying to make us side with its protagonist. Think of "American Psycho" for teens, as directed and written by Gregg Araki, and you might have a decent idea of what an ideal "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" would look like to me.

About me (and why I started this blog)

While I've loved watching films since I first laid eyes on one of the classic Disney animated films as a toddler (must've been either "Bambi" or "Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs"), it wasn't until about high school that I started considering making films the centre of my life. I blame Peter Jackson.

And "The Lord Of The Rings" film trilogy. 

Actually, no. I blame whoever directed and edited the making-of featurettes and documentaries on the DVDs. Top-notch job there, people: A whole generation of wannabe filmmakers born from your efforts. 

Like me, they saw the cast having a whale of a time, joking and bonding together. They saw the crew and all the effort and passion they put into creating the awe-inspiring set-pieces, shots and visual effects. They saw Peter Jackson commanding troops of horsemen to ride in the field for a big sweeping shot, then the post-production crew as they increased their numbers digitally.

And like me, they told themselves: "Yes, this is it. This is what I want to do."

And from then on, it's either during or after film school that all these hopes get dashed to shreds as we learn the hard truth about working in cinema, either from the mouths of our teachers, from disillusionned struggling artists or ex-artists or from first-hand experience.

In my case, it was more or less the latter, in that my experience working on end-of-year short film projects taught me that I couldn't direct worth a damn. No sense of space. No authority. No way with people.

It was no big deal though. I had an ace up my sleeve. Something I always liked doing but hadn't seriously put in practice: Writing. Also, hours spent in class trying to absolve the mechanics of film analysis. And no, I'm not talking about the idiotic "nothing-is-accidental" approach that essentially consists of looking for hidden symbolic meanings in every shot of the film, down to the colours of the character's clothes. But rather a more objective approach, consisting of simply describing everything you can see, without giving an opinion, and then how the scene or film affects you. And then figure out the connections: How does the way this is shot/edited/acted make me feel this or that emotion? Is it the correct emotion? Is there even a correct emotion to feel?

It was a challenge at first. I resisted it initially. I racked my brains trying to make sense of it, until I did. And eventually, I figured it out: I had to be a critic. To voice my opinions and feelings on film. What I love. What I hate. Why I love, why I hate. What's overrated, what's underrated, etc., etc.

So, to cut a long rambling short, this is what this blog is going to be: A collection of reviews and essays of sorts, in which I talk about films I have seen. While I will occasionnally address some of my favourite films, I'd rather focus on films that haven't been endlessly talked about and dissected by far more intelligent and educated people than myself. I will also provide mini-reviews for virtually every film I watch, just a few words to sum up how I felt.

Thank you in advance to whosoever had the time and patience to read all this. I hope my writing skills improve.

It goes without saying that all film screenshots and posters are properties of their respective owners, none of which include me.