"Two Days, One Night"

How strange it is that a single human element can simultaneously be a film’s greatest strength and the source of most of its shortcomings. But such is the case with Marion Cotillard’s lead performance in the Jean-Pierre Dardenne & Luc Dardenne’s 9^th feature-length film Two Days, One Night. Such a high-profile star casting decision rose more than a few eyebrows in the cinephile community, as the Dardenne Brothers had spent the quasi-totality of their filmography casting non-professional or unknown actors, of which three — Olivier Gourmet, Fabrizio Rongione and especially Jérémie Renier — subsequently rose to certain prominence. However, their previous 2011 effort The Kid With The Bike had starred Belgian actress Cécile De France, so one may see the decision to cast Cotillard as a logical step forward. Regardless, fears that such an international star would stick out like a sore thumb in the Dardennes’ restrained and neorealist-influenced portrayal of working-class Belgium have proven to be only partially justified: Against all expectations, Marion Cotillard delivers a startlingly unglamorous and unassuming performance without once giving the impression of making ostensible efforts to do so; an achievement all the more impressive considering the potential her role — a depressive mother and wife struggling to keep both her psychological composure and her job after a sick leave — had to be used as a vehicle for patent award-baiting. However, the star-struck reverence with which Dardenne Brothers film her suffering ends up handicapping the film by its consequent relegation of smaller but no-less important actors to the sidelines.

 

Much of the film consists of variations on the same scene: Sandra (Marion Cotillard) goes to visit a coworker, explains her predicament and the upcoming revote that will decide her future, and then asks them to give up their pay bonus in order to save her job. Much of her dialogue in each of these scenes is the same, with several details – such as the number of remaining votes needed – changing throughout. In the best of these scenes, Cotillard’s performance takes a backseat in favour of her coworker’s, allowing their characters to grow and feed each other harmoniously. An example: During Sandra’s explanation of her situation to a stone-faced Julien (Laurent Caron), the camera pans from a close shot framed around her neck and shoulders to a similar shot around Julien then briefly goes down towards his son as he sends him away, before moving back to frame both characters in the same shot, a position it holds until a defeated Sandra turns around and walks back to her car only for Julien to come back in the shot for a few more hard questions about whether or not her boss still needs her. The entire scene takes place in a single shot that conspicuously abandons its protagonist in an attempt to extract what little emotions might slip through the cracks of her coworker’s seemingly inflexible face. Taken out of context (almost the entire film is shot on handheld cameras), the process may call attention to itself but is quickly eluded by the weight of the actors’ words and the discreet, tranquil force of their barely-moving bodies. Aided by the almost amateurish basicness of its setup – two people in front of a brick wall, the stiffness of Caron’s body language and vocal delivery, far from hindering the film’s attempts at realism, marvelously complements Cotillard’s slightly hunched posture, her blemished, heavily-lidded eyes and their persistent habit of lowering whenever she looks at her interlocutor for more than a couple of seconds. It perfectly encapsulates the dilemma and resulting inner conflict Sandra has to deal with: She needs her salary to afford her house, but she knows full well that many of her coworkers have a similar dependence on their promised pay bonus. She needs help, yet she is afraid to seek it out of a mixture of pride, growing hopelessness and the knowledge that she is interfering in others’ lives and plans.

There are sadly many other scenes that do not succeed as well with that premise, and that is where the Dardennes’ usually impeccable actors’ direction becomes problematic. In scenes such as her meeting with Willy (Alain Eloy) or virtually every scene involving her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione), their camera is practically pasted to her and her control is rarely questioned, thus preventing a more thorough survey of any hidden feelings the scene may hold. An additional problem that tarnishes both the film and the Dardennes’ record is their uncharacteristically clumsy dialogue. Having apparently forgotten their knack for making the most banal and pedestrian words and phrases we use every day sound fresh and unpolished, the Brothers have peppered their script with heavy-handed emotional exposition that, far from the uncompromising simplicity of their greatest films such as L’Enfant or Rosetta, seems intent on taking the audience by the hand and telling them what to feel. This is evident from the very first scene, which sees Sandra waking up to a phone call, listening to the unheard bad news then walking to her bathroom to pop a pill and repeat to herself “I mustn’t cry…I mustn’t cry…”. The viewer does not yet know what has made her so upset, but the blatancy with which the scene attempts to grab their attention as well as its instruction on what to feel through dialogue that could come across as a form of reverse psychology, makes it a particularly clunky introduction. Part of this can be once again ascribed to the rapture that appears to have taken possession of the Dardenne Brothers as they follow Cotillard around the room struggling to maintain composure, as if to say “Look how amazing our actress is!” Which, it bears repeating, she is indeed. But as a general rule, a filmmaker should always keep the focus on the character rather than how good the character’s performer is.

 

It is a great shame that the Dardennes’ overreliance on their star performance prevents their film from reaching the heights they previously attained with just-as-truthful performances from good-but-not-quite-as-great actors. Theirs is a world of sound and sobriety, where the greatest bursts of beauty often come from the moments where their camera holds still for a while and allows all senses to converge as one. Such scenes are present in the film: the long close-up profile shot of an emotionally depleted Sandra in the front passenger seat of her car as her mobile phone rings insistently off-screen, goes silent and is subsequently replaced by Manu’s who picks it up; the masterfully-filmed suicide attempt scene, comprised of a very long medium shot from Sandra’s back with her face reflected in the bathroom mirror as she takes out all the Xanax tablets out of their plastic bars to swallow them. The sound team makes sure that every single rustle of plastic as the tablets come out of their containers is heard, that not a single gentle clank of them touching each other as she puts them in the cup is omitted, as the true nature of Sandra’s gesture slowly dawns on the horrified viewer.

If it has not supplanted The Son as the weakest film in the Dardenne Brothers’ filmography yet, Two Days, One Night is an arguably greater and more frustrating disappointment considering the amount of talent on display. After having achieved a certain kind of naturalist poetry with The Kid With The Bike, the Dardennes appear to have fallen back on a certain kind of formula based on a mishmash of their previous successes: Handheld cameras, a working-class setting, a sympathetic migrant worker or two, a couple of actors from the old guard (Rongione, and Olivier Gourmet, who has appeared in every Dardenne film since 1996’s The Promise) and an acclaimed female star in the leading role of a woman fighting for her fate. There is of course nothing inherently wrong with using familiar tropes, but comparison to previous films cannot help but induce the unpleasant sensation that the Dardenne Brothers might have run out of breath. Let us hope they will catch up soon.

"Obvious Child"

Worthy indeed is the goal that Gillian Robespierre’s Obvious Child sets itself on: To honestly tackle the subject of abortion from a female feminist perspective. Still a taboo subject in an allegedly progressive Obama-era America, abortion’s portrayal on film – in Hollywood or otherwise – is consequently rare. Indeed, aside from made-for-television-or-cable movies, abortion is very rarely made the centerpiece of American films. Whenever the subject is brought up in films such as Juno or Knocked Up, it is quickly evacuated with the same uncomfortable haste with which a show host might display in trying to get a particularly offensive comedian off the stage before the crowd gets too angry. Knocked Up, for all its candid portrayal of relationships and adult immaturities, was too afraid to even mention the word, preferring to instead say that it “rhymes with shmashmortion”. So desperately in need of authenticity in its cinematic depictions is this subject that Obvious Child’s ultimate inability to live up to its own objectives is rendered all the more disappointing.

From the opening credits, Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) is introduced to the audience as a human avatar of what the film aspires to be: A charismatic, abrasive stand-up comedian who derives her humour from demystifying the female body with scatological jokes about sex and bodily functions based on her own life experiences. Her best friend Nellie (Gaby Hoffman) even makes the point to spell out to her – and the viewer – that the greatest thing about her is that she is “unapologetically herself”. Almost every scene in the film’s first 15 minutes seems consciously designed to incite the audience to like and relate to the protagonist: After getting dumped by her cheating boyfriend, she spends the night getting comically drunk and attempting to call him only to get evicted from her flat the following day, forcing her to sleep at her father’s (Richard Kind); when she isn’t being told by her entourage what a brilliant and funny person she is, she’s being chastised for wasting that brilliance. As if to further make twentysomething Americans nod their heads in recognition, she also has to pay off student debts.

It is sufficiently annoying when mainstream films make visible efforts to forcefully obtain their audience’s support of their protagonist; when allegedly independent-minded films intended to provide more realistic and flawed characters soften their blows by embellishing these flaws as elements to be admired through laughter instead of accepted as they are, they demonstrate an unwillingness to take risks that severely impairs their aim.

Aside from the breakup-induced drinking that gets her pregnant during a one-night stand with Max (Jake Lacy, who looks like a slightly beefed-up Michael Cera), none of the aforementioned issues ultimately matter. Her financial problems are casually mentioned from time to time without getting any more relevant and her parents exist mostly to dispense life advice and comfort at dramatically convenient times. This is one of Obvious Child’s major failings: In its endeavor to subvert abortion clichés, it allows itself to wallow in romantic comedy clichés and ends up losing on both fronts: None of the characters ever break out of the prepackaged set of rules they’ve been assigned: The supportive female best friend, the mother who appears somewhat cold and out of touch but turns out to have more in common with her daughter than the latter suspected, the gay male best friend whose sex life and love life is discussed but never actually proven to exist… These characters have no true individual identity of their own and remain firmly inside their boxes. Nellie does tease the possibility of standing out among them when the topic of her own past abortion is brought up, but never goes through with it.

Indeed, the pinnacle of her characterization comes in the form of an indignant rant following the suggestion that Max might deserve to know about the situation. Asserting the priority of Donna’s needs over those of a man she barely knows, she callously refers to the soon-to-be-aborted fetus as “that fucking thing” and deplores the legislation of women’s vaginas by “a bunch of weird old white men in robes”¹. She later reassures Donna that abortion doesn’t hurt apart from a few subsequent vaginal cramps similar to period cramps, and that’s as far as we’ll ever get to know her as a person. As for Max himself, Jake Lacy’s warm performance never manages to transcend his character’s bland predictability. His everyman persona presents opportunities for a broad range of emotions with regards to Donna’s awkward interactions with him, her secrets and the eventual revelation of her situation, but Robespierre squanders the most important of them. Max consistently remains an idealized Nice Guy^™, whose acceptance of Donna’s pregnancy and plans for abortion is all the more remarkable in its unconvincingness considering she reveals it to him during a stand-up routine for all to hear – echoing the film’s opening, where her public jokes about her boyfriend’s penis and their sex life, all while he was in the audience, accelerated their break-up. Sure, his first reaction is to leave the room but he gets over it the very next day, just in time to accompany her to the abortion clinic where they can start their relationship on a new ground and get a hollow happy ending, obtained with far too much emotional ease and contrivances to be believable. Nobody really got hurt, nobody grew up organically.

This pattern repeats itself throughout the film: Supporting characters appear, a potentially uncomfortable situation is created only to be defused and quickly forgotten. One standout is David Cross’s appearance as a fellow comedian who invites Donna in his car just as Max was coming to see her in the club, setting up the detested bane of romantic comedies that is the third-act breakup. David Cross’s character shows a certain promise: A cynical comedian back from Los Angeles after selling his first pilot who, despite talking to Donna as he would a friend, still makes transparent attempts to seduce her – at one point accidentally-on-purpose spilling wine on his shirt then returning with a woman’s camisole that, combined with his rather full beard and hipster glasses, makes him look like a cross-dressing gay Bear. He makes passes at her in a joking tone that, rather than being creepy, hints at something theoretically interesting. His words and actions appear motivated less by genuine lust than by a desire to act upon a perceived lack of self-worth. Yet Robespierre steadfastly refuses to make the scene uncomfortable to watch, choosing instead to use comedy as a way to deflect pain and embarrassment rather than transcend it. Donna leaves and David Cross is never seen again. Drained of all its potential, the scene is reduced to little more than a time-filling plot contrivance.

Limited as it is by its reluctance to make the audience uncomfortable, the courage of Gillian Robespierre’s screenplay limits itself to making abortion its main subject matter, taking an openly pro-choice stance on it and including explicit jokes and discussions of women’s body parts and their functions. When it comes to more subtle and potentially more frightening areas of human behaviour and feelings, such as the process that led Donna to realize her own immaturity and inaptitude at child-rearing, Robespierre plays it disappointingly, depressingly safe. The conventionality of her writing is matched by her directorial choices: Jump-cut montages of Donna getting drunk or writing on a bench, postcard-shots of New York as a guitar plays trite indie music on the soundtrack, a color palette comprised almost exclusively of warm colors… Less evident but all the more damning is the poverty of Robespierre’s visual grammar: the majority of her shots are static and framed up to the characters’ waists or chests with the occasional wider, transitory shots. Lack of frame diversity isn’t necessarily in and of itself a huge problem in narrative film if the shots are composed, assembled and edited in such a way that there is always something aside from the general events going on both within them and between them. In Obvious Child’s case, the scenes are filmed and edited with a generic predictability that is completely at odds with both its subject and Robespierre’s intended treatment of it. Only Donna and Max’s reunion in the library stands out as an example of Robespierre exploring a visual element – Donna sitting in a cardboard box – to its visual potential. As a whole, the film looks and feels like a ready-made assembly line product with the Sundance stamp of approval on it. It serves as proof, along with such similarly unadventurous fare such as 50/50 and Robot & Frank, that much of the so-called “independent” American film industry is really just a lower-budgeted Hollywood with the same plastic ideas and emotions.

Thankfully, there are still remains of what the project could have looked like had it blossomed into the acidic flower of subversion it was supposed to be, and most of them are contained in Jenny Slate’s spot-on performance. Although most of Donna’s stand-up jokes aren’t exceptionally funny (and Robespierre’s attempts to convince the viewer otherwise through shots of the audience laughing and smiling in appreciation and support do nothing to change that), Slate imbues her with a disarmingly self-conscious corporal expressiveness that communicates all her character’s feelings and impulses spontaneously. Her nasal Brooklyn tones counter the script’s excessive attempts at garnering sympathy by eliciting just the right amount of annoyance. Whether her lines are funny or not, Slate never tries too hard to make them so. In fact, it is in her more dramatic scenes that Robespierre’s direction manages to build up enough strength to expose a few moments of truth to the screen. Would to Heaven that she could have maintained that course for more scenes; perhaps a truly interesting comedy about abortion could have come out of it in spite of the screenplay’s inadequacies.

¹If Nellie was referring to the Supreme Court, that’s not quite accurate: As of 2014, of its nine justices, one is an old black man, one is a middle-aged Hispanic woman, another is a forty-four year-old white woman and another still is an old white woman.

"Wings Of Desire"

Most moviegoers likely know the climax of The Devil’s Advocate, in which Al Pacino’s Satan vociferously denounces God as a sadistic prankster who continually tempts Man with promises of pleasure only to hold him back at the last minute by reminding him of the moral shackles that bind him: “Look, but don’t touch! Touch, but don’t taste! Taste, but don’t swallow!” 

Although Satan had humans in mind, his line – the most memorable moment of an otherwise mediocre supernatural thriller – is better suited to describe the condition of angels in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings Of Desire. In biblical tradition, angels are holy messengers who act as intermediaries between Man and God. Subsequent artistic and media portrayals enhance their roles by making them reincarnations of departed souls, guiding the spirits of those they left behind towards a path of righteousness, protecting their lives and/or escorting them on their journey to the afterlife. Here, they are immortal beings who bear witness to our daily lives and record them as a collective memory. Omnipresent and omniscient, they can listen to our thoughts and appear wherever they want. These powers aside, their abilities are limited; while they can provide subconscious comfort to depressed or dying souls, they cannot directly interfere in the course of their lives. This is tragically illustrated when the angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) attempts to use his proximity to prevent a suicidal man from jumping to his death, and fails.

 

Thus Wings Of Desire portrays a world made of walls, the most obvious of which is the permanent invisible one that exists between humanity and angels. But this wall highlights another, less obvious one, which exists between individual humans: From the perspective of angel protagonist Damiel (Bruno Ganz), humans are rarely seen communicating with each other. Most of those he sees don’t even move that much. Rather than talk to one another, they think and worry about whether or not their girlfriend loves them, or whether or not their son will get up and do something with his life. Matters whose exploration would require actual communication between concerned parties, communication Damiel – and thus the audience – never sees. As Professor Ray Carney remarks in his notes on the film¹, it is most appropriate that the film is set in Berlin, a city whose infamous wall typified the tragedy of the Cold War’s alienation of peoples from one another. But as the angels know only too well, it is merely a physical representation, built from the countless emotional and intellectual walls that human beings naturally erect between each other. 

Wim Wenders’s camera – operated by master cinematographer Henri Alekan – witnesses all this with the same omniscience and sad empathy as his angels, gliding slowly above and around is subjects at a respectful distance, calmly observing the gentle irregular flow of human life and emotions but never participating in it. Scenes at the circus, where Damiel falls in love with trapeze artist Marion (Solveig Dommartin), are exceptions to that rule. Marion and her coworkers occasionally talk to each other, but it is mostly about the circus’s impending closure and departure due to a lack of money. The circus, like life’s greatest moments, is a fleeting island of controlled chaos in a static ocean.

Most of the time, Marion is left to herself, looking and acting like a sad parody of Damiel: Literally "between heaven and earth"², dressed as an angel with small fake wings, and longing for company. When she isn’t practicing her number, she spends most of her time inside her caravan, listening to music and wondering what direction her life will take. As she is alone and keeps most of these thoughts inside her head, Damiel is the only person to know and understand them.

 

Another important subplot involves actor Peter Falk – playing himself – coming to Berlin to shoot a World War II film. Not much is seen of the shooting process itself, it serves mostly as a reminder of Berlin’s past. With archive footage and dialogue, Wenders links personal, everyday struggles and problems to a large and heavy historical past – World War II, the Holocaust and the allied bombings. The angels were all here to see it but could do nothing but witness and wonder – passivity comparable to that of ordinary non-Jewish non-Nazi Germans. 

Perhaps this is what drove the fictionalized Peter Falk to accept his part – and use it as an opportunity to observe and draw the people around him on a notepad – as he turns out to be a fallen angel himself. Like Damiel, he could no longer content himself with knowing life intellectually and rationally from above; he needed to experience it carnally. To undergo pleasures and sensations so common to humans that they barely acknowledge their existence, let alone their importance: The taste of coffee in his mouth, the feel of his hands rubbing against each other when he’s cold, the taste and smell of cigarette smoke…

This wonderful role showcases what an underrated actor Peter Falk was. With his hoarse New York-accented voice and keen attentive eye, he always seemed an old soul; someone with a long and rich emotional life and plenty of time to reflect upon it. It is quite impossible to imagine anybody else who could have played such a part with such natural ease.

 

His love for Marion and the same envy Falk once felt eventually drive Damiel to renounce his immortality and become human. There are two stages to his fall: First, a simple pan from right to left while the photography goes from black & white (right) to colour (left) – as it has done previously to indicate a human point-of-view. Then, after a peaceful establishing shot and pan show him lying on the ground the morning after, he is woken in a way that is as sudden and brutal for the viewer as it is for him: The loud clanging of a metal coat of armour hitting his head just a second after a close-up of his face.

After an encounter with a stranger who helpfully introduces him to different colours, the camera follows Damiel on his way to a pawn shop in a long tracking shot. It is there that we notice another major difference from the way he and the world were filmed when he was an angel: Rather than gliding independently, the camera movements are now quite ostentatiously motivated by his own movements. Sounds are louder and clearer, signifying his clearer perception of the world in its totality.

After selling the coat of armour that was mysteriously dropped on him, Damiel ditches his angel uniform to buy different clothes. It is perhaps because his ability to see colour is so recent that his new wardrobe is so tacky: His loud tacky jacket, old grey hat, grey trousers and striped black, grey & white tie are comically mismatched. At this point, the beauty of Bruno Ganz’s performance shines through more than ever as the marvel of subtlety that it is: As an angel, he speaks very little. His eyes and posture express compassion and controlled longing. When, as a human, he arrives at the circus where Marion worked only to find an empty circle, he jogs around it, kicking the sand in anger and frustration with each stride much like an agitated child would. For a child he is, as far as tactile knowledge of the world goes. He is not unlike the child from the poem that opens the film and is repeatedly quoted by him; ephemerally happy with a life devoid of worries, fear or pain, yet hungry for existential knowledge.

After many efforts, he finally locates Marion at a Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds concert where he saw her earlier and the two greet each other as if they had always known each other – echoing the feeling of lifelong kinship many couples share. In a long, pensive monologue, Marion speaks of the loneliness she’s felt her entire life and of the positive loneliness she desires to achieve with a man and achieves with Damiel: To be lonely with him means to open herself to him and let him know her in every sense of the word. Communion with him means communion with the entire world.

That monologue holds the key to the closest thing Wings Of Desire has to a solution regarding the isolation of humans from one another. Unlike the well-acted and occasionally entertaining but comparatively shallow American remake City Of Angels, this isn’t a case of love conquering all. Rather, it is the meeting of two people who share the same fundamental and deeply human desires – to love, be loved and experience life at its fullest – while coming from two contrasting perspectives. In doing so, they achieve a symbiosis of sorts. As Marion puts it, they’re “representing the people now”. It is through this sharing of perspectives, this marriage between intellectual knowledge and hands-on experience that people have the best shot at better understanding each other and breaking down their emotional barriers.

^{1, 2}http://people.bu.edu/rcarney/newsevents/wingsofdesire.shtml.

"A Beautiful Mind"

Since its release to commercial and critical success in 2001, and doubly so since receiving the 74^th Academy Award for Best Picture, A Beautiful Mind has received a great deal of criticism for many things. Prominent among them are its omission of many aspects of John Forbes’s life and personality – such as his anti-Semitic outbursts, alleged bisexuality and marital infidelities – that might have made him too controversial or hard to like, its casting of white actress Jennifer Connelly as his Hispanic wife Alicia, as well as its depiction of his real-life auditory hallucinations as elaborate fantasies involving an imaginary best friend and a fictional government agent.

All of these criticisms are valid, but it is the modification of the nature of Nash’s hallucinations that poses the biggest problem as it synthesizes all the film’s shortcomings in a nutshell. Rather than try and creatively convey the experience of progressively sinking into one’s own world of delusions and conspiracies, Ron Howard and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman resort to the much easier tried-and-tested tactic of adopting their protagonist’s troubled point of view in order to draw the viewer into his fantasy world, essentially treating schizophrenia less as a crippling mental condition and more as a means to thrill and excite.

Adopting the point of view of a person in the process of losing their mind and deriving thrills from it is not an inherently bad thing. Notable sufferers Guy De Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe drew from their own personal struggles to write such harrowing tales as “The Horla” or “The Tell-Tale Heart”. The power of these stories lies less in the horrific nature of the events or thoughts described by the narrator and more in the vividness with which he describes them. Like those short stories, the best mystery thrillers told from the point of view of mad protagonists are not content with exploiting their condition for excitement and scares; they take the viewer on a trip inside their minds in order to better understand them as characters. They are not necessarily intended to be “realistic” as a video project made by psychiatrists about their patients might be. Rather, they are audiovisual renditions of their characters’ states of mind and emotions. The labyrinth of memories and visions explored by the titular character in David Cronenberg’s Spider and the slow dance towards the precipice of self-annihilation undertaken by the two protagonists of William Friedkin’s Bug are two of the most successful recent examples of such an approach; gothic dramas that placed their characters in genre narratives and used these narratives as a canvas to paint their feelings on.

A Beautiful Mind’s attempt to apply such a narrative to Nash’s schizophrenia fails due to the blatant falseness of the conspiracy subplot and Howard & Goldsman’s complete lack of appropriate distance from his subject. They lose sight of the paradox that makes Nash’s story so rich in potential – that his uncommonly logical mind formed theories that enabled a better understanding of a reality it was itself incapable of fully recognizing and appeared less functional when operating more closely within it. Their choice to turn his paranoia into a standard Cold War thriller reduces the unexplainable terror of irrational fears and their tenacious grip on the human mind to a matter of car chases, gunshots and imaginary friends. It doesn’t help that the intended “twist” – again cheapening a real person’s suffering by making it exciting rather than frightening – is rendered predictable by the way Ron Howard films the hallucination scenes with many heavy-handed hints that dull their effectiveness. It’s like he saw The Sixth Sense and was attempting to imitate its foreshadowing: Imaginary best friend Charles (Paul Bettany) and shadowy government agent Parcher (Ed Harris) almost invariably make their presences known on the soundtrack before appearing on screen, and there’s usually a fairly wide shot of Nash alone in the room without them in the frame after their exit is confirmed.

Scenes that supposedly portray Nash’s daily struggles with schizophrenia do not fare much better. Howard’s typical emotional button-pushing imprisons Russell Crowe’s dedicated performance in a series of pity paintings that rarely allow him to do more than tug at heartstrings. Whether he’s bluntly insulting his coworkers’ intelligence or awkwardly expressing sexual desire towards his future wife, the scenes never truly allow the actors to go beyond their parameters and show the audience anything new. When he’s not drowning him in James Horner’s aggressively maudlin score or making his mental illness a quirky and “funny” character trait, Howard attempts to showcase his mathematical genius by flashing numbers and letters from papers and boards, as well as background elements forming patterns. Aside from being a lazy technique that Howard would later repeat in his atrocious The Da Vinci Code, it’s a distracting gimmick that fails to immerse the audience into Nash’s mindset.

A particularly egregious example of Howard’s trite Hollywoodian sentimentality can be found in the scene where Nash is shown a (unsurprisingly) fictional ritual in which fellow Princeton academics pay tribute to a noted member by placing pens on his table. It’s an obvious setup for a “triumphant” echo later in the film where Nash gets the same treatment as an old man, serving no other purpose than to deliver gratuitous artificial emotions to the audience in lieu of communicating anything profound about Nash’s desire for recognition.

 

All these cheap tricks further diminish the effects of the film’s rare moments of genuine emotion and humanity – such as when Alicia first visits John in the mental hospital and tries to convince him that he really is sick – and expose the thriller subplot’s artifice and incongruity. Visionaries like Michel Gondry, Terry Gilliam or Ken Russell could have made it work by using their genuine understanding of how pop culture images and politics affect our perceptions of reality and turning it into a delirious trip inside the protagonist’s head. Being only a competent filmmaker used to making entertaining but unsophisticated crowd-pleasers, all Ron Howard can do is make a clunky Oscar-bait machine disguised as yet another inspirational tale about love conquering all. Sadly, it worked.

"This Is 40"

Five years after Knocked Up combined romantic comedy codes and fratboy humour to concoct a surprisingly candid look at an unplanned pregnancy and its effect on the lives and growth of its two protagonists, Judd Apatow returns with a “sort-of sequel” that ditches crass jokes in favour of a more restrained though no less overtly comical examination of the married life of Peter and Debbie, a peripheral couple from the original film that served as a quasi-anti-model to protagonists Ben and Alison. In Knocked Up, they were mostly simple and defined primarily by flaws that threatened their marriage – Alison was a control freak, Peter was an immature milquetoast who preferred to retreat into secret juvenile pastimes rather than honestly discuss his feelings with her. Here, they are fully-fledged human beings. More than comical exaggerations of real-life emotions and situations, the daily problems Peter and Debbie encounter in the days leading up to Peter’s 40^th birthday draw their effectiveness from Apatow’s refusal to settle for mere laughs.

Consider for instance Peter’s repeated attempts to get his wife and daughters to appreciate rock & roll music. A lesser film would be content with mocking either him for being an embarrassing and hopelessly out-of-touch dad, or his wife and kids for having shallow taste in music. But Apatow won't content himself with obvious clichés. When Debbie dances with the girls to Nicki Minaj & Eminem’s “Roman’s Revenge”, neither Apatow nor Leslie Mann are inciting mockery of her. The scene’s humour comes less from the communication problems themselves and more from the patience with which it observes the characters’ reactions to it. And this remains consistent throughout the film: whether it’s Debbie feeling up her sexy younger employee’s breasts and lamenting how her daughters “sucked the meat right out” of her own, or Peter getting guilt-tripped by his mooching father (Albert Brooks) into giving him money, the film never treats its characters as one-note stereotypes waiting for their turn to push the “laugh” button. Laughter is caused not by inciting the audience to distance themselves from them and mock them with the comforting thought that they would never be as wacky as they are, but rather by reminding them of their own humanity, recognizing it in those characters and accepting it.

 

While This Is 40 still uses Hollywood narrative codes (most of the couple’s problems are resolved in the last 10 minutes, including a miraculous appearance by Ryan Adams at the very end that suggests he will save Peter’s record label from going bust), it avoids artificiality by treating the characters as only-barely fictionalized embodiments of real people. In that respect, it is not unlike David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, whose narrative conventions were similarly uplifted by first-rate acting and keen direction that enabled them to coax additional little truths out of their performances. Among other things, this allows Megan Fox as Desi – the aforementioned sexy younger employee of Debbie’s clothes store – to prove that she can act when given a good script and directed as a human being instead of a sex object. While her body is still the subject of comments from many characters, it isn’t filmed in a way that reduces her solely to it. The scene in which she allows Debbie to feel her breasts and express her admiration and envy for them is filmed mostly in medium shots and medium close shots that, while giving the audience a good view of her chest, do not focus the entirety of their attention on them. What matters isn’t Desi’s body so much as the negative image Debbie expresses of her own body. Fox is not objectified as she was in Michael Bay’s execrable “Transformers”; she may be conventionally attractive by Hollywood standards and, as she later reveals, an escort, but she is not solely defined by her sexuality nor is she exploited for it. Desi may not the most complex character in the film, but she is a step up from posing on top of cars and bikes for teenage heterosexual adolescent male virgins to ogle at.

This Is 40 has been criticized by many reviewers for its length – 2 hours & 17 minutes – and while it certainly does present flaws, the fact that it is long is not one of them. What is one of them is the not-inconsiderate amount of trimming present across the film, obvious results of compromises to make the film more marketable. Some scenes – such as a visit to an Indian doctor whose accent Peter mocks – have clearly been cut short and end somewhat abruptly just before they get too uncomfortable. Similarly, certain conversations have clearly been abridged; the first party will say something in one shot, followed by a shot of the other party’s response, which shows clear signs of not having started quite as presented in the film; there was perhaps a slight pause or a line or two that the editor removed. In other cases, the reply clearly came from a different take, as evidenced by differences in their body’s positioning when compared to a previous wider shot showing both parties.

More insightful, subtle and fully-fledged than its predecessor, This Is 40 bears witness to Apatow’s growth as both a filmmaker and an artist. He isn’t afraid to make his viewers uncomfortable by making his characters behave and speak in annoying ways, and while the love he has for them may occasionally impair his judgment – as evidenced by the conclusion of a subplot involving Peter and Debbie verbally abusing their eldest daughter’s schoolmate for insulting her online and getting away with it – but given how complex they are, particularly when compared to most modern comedy characters, it it is an acceptable price to pay.

"Don Jon"

On paper, “Don Jon” had everything going for it: a fertile subject matter – pornography addiction and how gender stereotypes perpetuated by mass entertainment affect heterosexual relationships, a gifted and intelligent actor in both the lead role and the director’s chair and a supporting cast that includes Scarlett Johansson and Julianne Moore. The major concern would be the fact that this is Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s first feature-length film, but even then one might be confident that he would have learned a lot from having worked with such luminaries as Christopher Nolan and Gregg Araki.  What could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything as it turned out. Rarely have I seen a film with so much potential crash and burn so spectacularly and never recover. From the first voice-over that reveals Gordon-Levitt’s hammy Italian-American New Jersey accent to a predictable happy ending, “Don Jon” betrays its own purpose by wallowing in ethnic and gender stereotypes and using a PSA character arc as a substitute for a journey of genuine self-exploration.

The most immediately obvious flaw that torpedoes the film’s credibility is the way its characters are written and acted. Take Jon’s family of working-class Italian-Americans: While the mother makes pasta and pesters her son about getting a nice woman, he and his father sit at the table in front of an American football game wearing tank tops and turning every little thing into a loud thick-accented argument. All that’s missing is a black-clad grandmother clutching a rosary while speaking nothing but Italian. It’s like watching a cartoon parody of a Martin Scorsese film.

 

In fact, the entire film resembles little more than a substandard attempt at doing a Martin Scorsese exploration of toxic ultra-masculinity. This is especially obvious in the recurring scenes in which Jon goes to church with his family as part of his daily routine – always the same shots of the same church parts with the same camera angles framed the same way, just in case the audience might have missed its ritual nature – and, as a formality, confesses his sins of lust to his priest who repeats the same instructions of contrition. These scenes – particularly the close-up shots detailing religious iconography – are blatantly aped from Scorsese’s own feature-length debut “Who’s That Knocking At My Door”. But whereas Scorsese used such shots to express the conflict between his protagonist’s feelings and the morality he was brought up in, Gordon-Levitt merely uses them as a tautological joke whose final punchline – the priest doesn’t care about Jon’s sins any more than Jon himself did, thus the promises of comfort offered by religion are as fake as those offered by Hollywood and porn – is a foregone conclusion.

The rest of the characters fare little better. Scarlett Johansson, who has proven in films such as “Under The Skin”, “Her”, “Lost In Translation” and even Woody Allen’s overrated bore “Match Point” to be a versatile and charismatic actress, would normally prove ideal as Barbara, Jon’s idealized object of desire. Indeed, her full lips, voluptuous figure and blonde hair can sometimes make her appear as strangely unreal as some of the porn stars Jon watches, yet the humanity she brings in her best performances is indisputably real. Unfortunately, her character amounts to little else than a shallow dumb blonde caricature, not helped by Johansson’s distractingly exaggerated New Jersey accent. Her love of romantic comedies offered great potential in exploring the false expectations they incite in relationships, but it is only slightly touched upon and never truly examined, let alone deconstructed the way John Cassavetes did in his masterful “Minnie And Moskowitz”. Much like his character, Gordon-Levitt never manages to see past Barbara as a stereotype. The only difference is that Jon’s stereotypes revolve around her looks, whereas Gordon-Levitt’s revolve around the personality she displays.

As an older student in Jon’s course recovering from a personal tragedy and tasked by the plot with showing him what really meaningful sex is like, Julianne Moore is given a similarly stereotypical character, one whose sole purpose is to help Jon become a better person and hook up with him at the end. However, she is also the only actress in the entire main cast who succeeds in acting like a believable human being, so credit where credit is due. With her pale face and her world-weary, self-deprecating smile and eyes, Moore has mastered the art of portraying complicated women still smarting from the pain they have gone through, but enduring nevertheless.

 

It is greatly disappointing to see an actor as sensitive as Joseph Gordon-Levitt give a bad performance, even moreso when it is in a film in which he appears to have put a lot of effort and thought. His performance is a never-ending series of affectations that clog up his character like an overstuffed toilet; all struts, squints, sneers and smirks in a thick, over-the-top accent. It’s impossible to take Jon seriously as a human being when he acts like a young Steven Seagal trying to do an impression of Robert De Niro. Perhaps Gordon-Levitt intended this as a manifestation of Jon’s constant need to prove his masculinity, but it just ends up being another example of the film’s heavy-handedness, and the caricature ends up devouring the character.

 The subject of sexually dysfunctional masculinity is too often treated as a joke for bad films such as “Don Jon” to be allowed to pretend to shed any real light on it. Viewers in search of a more authentic work on the matter should turn to independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi and his devastating autobiographical docu-dramedy “I Am A Sex Addict”. Not only did Zahedi dare to examine his personal demons and expose them with brutal unflinching honesty, he used comedy in a way that enhanced the experience rather than soften it, and in doing so earned his happy ending both in the film and in real life.