A Trend Toward Loneliness
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen A Trend Toward Loneliness By Raphael Shargel Loneliness loomed large in the movies of 2002—perhaps reflecting our current political anxieties. In the 1990s and early in this...
...Dreadful banalities are made to emerge from her mouth and her pen...
...Shattered, starved and secluded, he is transformed from a charming, unassuming introvert into a scraggly, jerky scarecrow, an animal who exists to forage and hide...
...The story of vengeance will be familiar to anyone raised on Warner Brothers epics of the 1930s and '40s...
...Donald is the kind of screenwriter the real Charlie Kaufman clearly despises...
...Scorsese opts to crowd his canvas with detail...
...Rather than enjoy racing from coast to coast and all over Europe, the thief is so starved for human contact that he makes it a Christmas tradition to telephone the agent doggedly pursuing him, simply to have a conversation...
...It features a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) who is stymied by the project of adapting an unfilmable novel...
...The screen's commercial and critical successes last year—from Spider-Man to Signs, from Insomnia to White Oleander—spent a good deal of time underscoring the agony of isolation...
...In the 1990s and early in this decade, audiences could believe the superpower status of the United States would go unchallenged...
...Cage's unattractive nerd is a satiric exaggeration of the self-hating artist—but it is a fullblooded one, lacking the actor's usual histrionics...
...DiCaprio and Diaz, with their incongruously soft looks and movie-star ease, give the impression of having stepped into this savage place from a soap commercial...
...Some of it is exhilarating...
...his Nebraska upbringing has bred it out of him...
...Benigno is gentle and warm, but his strange, one-sided relationship with Alicia is more meaningful to him than any other...
...A man aching from abandonment since his wife recently killed herself finds himself in the orbit of a planet that has the power to see his dreams and create living embodiments of those who haunt his mind...
...it also protects us from witnessing the evils of the Final Solution...
...Of all living directors, Polanski is the master of terror and paranoia...
...The filmmakers nonetheless wisely resist making him into the classic doppelgänger—an evil influence...
...After losing both early on, he grows desperate and plunges into a quest to forge something meaningful from the remainder of his days...
...Marco rejects this notion and soon finds himself helpless to prevent the tragic events that befall Benigno as a result of his obsession...
...In the trilogy's first entry he was accompanied by a group of strong warriors...
...Even though we watch him playing once again in concert, clean-shaven and surrounded by a full orchestra, it is impossible to believe anyone could truly recover from the madness of his experiences...
...Soderbergh thus reverses Tarkovsky's earthier vision, where the retreat into fantasy was rejected...
...Pedro Almodovar has suggested that his magnificent Talk to Her could carry the alternate title Loneliness, I Guess...
...Die Another Day is far from cocktail entertainment...
...The parallel stories feature jejune bombshell revelations and superficially "arty" dissolves from era to era, reducing the author's work to tedious melodrama...
...it is thrust upon them...
...And a good deal of the new movie does indulge in this style, especially toward the end...
...He knows his appalling saga will articulate its horror more powerfully without those effects...
...As if to provoke the suicidal thoughts that supposedly peak during the holidays, films on that topic were particularly plentiful in November and December, when the industry puts forth its biggest prestige pictures that spill over into the new year...
...Director Roman Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood, adapting Szpilman's own memoir, have chosen to tell the story of a survivor...
...When young Amsterdam Vallon witnesses the murder of his father (Liam Neeson) by ruthless gang leader William "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), the boy vows revenge...
...The latest homage to the swinging early 1960s similarly dwells on the anguish of going it alone...
...Their dizzying shifts in mood and tempo serve only as references to the dubious cleverness of their authors...
...The beginning makes it clear Schmidt felt isolated even when he had a job and lived with his cloying wife...
...The new chapter emphasizes Frodo's increasing awareness that the oppressive weight of the ring, which eats away at his body and soul while hanging on a chain around his neck, might be borne solely by him...
...They could unfold their insecurities alongside their indomitability in sequences that also furthered the action...
...The latest one, marking the 40th anniversary of the franchise, instead rolls its titles over a montage showing the superspy being tortured by the North Korean military and locked in solitary confinement...
...Talk to Her is the most affirmative picture of the season...
...His performance is all the more astonishing because he also plays the role of Charlie's twin brother Donald, a stupid, extroverted version of the protagonist...
...Gentile friends later rescue him from the ghetto on the eve of the April 1943 Jewish uprising...
...Lydia's lover, Marco (Dario Grandinetti), visits her often in the coma ward, although hehasbeen warned that she will never awaken...
...The subject is a fascinating one rarely treated in cinema: turf warfare in the streets of 19th-century New York...
...Some fluffy ironies throughout notwithstanding, the sad center of Adaptation gives it credibility and seizes one's attention...
...G? the tales they tell, characters generally do not choose solitude...
...He selfishly demands of each that she give him a fresh chance at love...
...Instead, Donald remains in awe of his brother, even while penning a horror movie bound to be more successful by Hollywood standards than Charlie's...
...Today faith in American righteousness is probably undiminished, but an intense paranoia has crept in...
...While he complains about being stranded among petty, unreliable rogues, he sings a variation on the year's theme...
...One of the triumphs of About Schmidt is how it puts us on the protagonist's side when he is confronting the milk-fed mediocrity of his culture—then shows how difficult he can be with his daughter and her future in-laws...
...It is a bad sign that the screenwriters felt the need to insert a late-night confession so we can see the vulnerable side of The Butcher...
...He has always been somewhat unpredictable, yet it is strange to see him fighting bitterly with his own agency and defeating the obligatory cartoonish villains without his customary exuberance...
...The film nevertheless valorizes his cankered will, allowing him to finally plunge into a domestic paradise where his beloved has at last learned to embrace him unconditionally...
...The pretentiousness of The Hours was outdone by Solaris, Steven Soderbergh's misguided remake of Andrei Tarkovsky's brilliant science fiction movie...
...Much of the story is set in a medical clinic...
...this time around he needs to be rescued by the British Secret Service, much to his chagrin...
...After undergoing the nightmare of the ghette to along with his family, Szpilman is fortuitously pulled away from the rest when they board the train for Treblinka...
...His good fortune allows the chronicle to go beyond 1945...
...He is estranged from his only daughter, who is about to marry a nincompoop he despises...
...It is the gloomiest installment in Bond history...
...still, the scene is a tired and uncompelling way to disclose a layered personality...
...It follows the fortunes of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Jewish concert pianist living in Warsaw during Hitler's time...
...The opening credits of James Bond movies are traditionally superimposed over images of silvery naked women caressing men in tuxedos and springing from the barrels of enormous guns...
...Old-time directors that Scorsese admires, like Raoul Walsh and William Dieterle, would have cut this sprawling narrative to the bone, stressing plot over character, keeping things moving to distract us from predicting the inevitable outcome of the climactic confrontation...
...In The Hours, presenting variations on themes from Virginia Woolf's life and her novel Mrs...
...Perhaps tellingly, it is the only movie reviewed here that was not made with U.S...
...When he pleads with her to reconsider, he succeeds only in inflaming her passive-aggressive nature, pushing her further into the lover's arms...
...Unfortunately, viewers and critics have developed a taste for such sophomoric nonsense...
...Uninhibitedby American anxieties, it views loneliness as a mistake, or a disease to be cured...
...What he composes thereafter turns out to be the very movie we are watching...
...Die Another Day also breaks with a brighter past...
...IF About Schmidt is the season's most successful vision of contemporary life, The Pianist is far and away its best historical epic...
...There is no such optimism in Adaptation, the very American film by scenarist Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze...
...No recent film offers a more effective portrait of a person making peace with being alone...
...Over the course of the narrative, several successive versions of his dead spouse appear before him...
...Filmmakers cheerfully invited them to worship the Bravehearts, Gladiators and American Beauties who lashed out at family and outside authority with enthusiasm, crushing adversaries with the force of their rectitude...
...Productions such as Flirting With Disaster, Dogma, Nurse Betty and Jonze and Kaufman's previous collaboration, Being John Malkovich, register contempt for both character and plot...
...But judging by what it includes rather than what it omits, The Pianist offers a better recounting of events than nearly any of its predecessors...
...Here the conclusion, gratifying all the protagonist's desires, plays like a throwback to the bullheaded hero worship of the '90s...
...Nicholson plays Warren Schmidt, an insurance salesman on the verge of retirement...
...Scorsese never had to call for such moments when he worked with Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, the leading men of his heyday...
...Except for a few recycled quips, the good humor the series is known for is gone...
...The trailer made it out to be another in a recent genre that should cuttingly be called the comedy of "whimsy...
...This is a man incapable of expressing real rage, at least in public...
...There he meets Benigno (Javier Câmara), a nurse caring for another comatose patient, the ballet student Alicia (Leonor Watling...
...Studies of desolation were not limited to releases focusing onmen...
...Not since The Garden of the FinziContinis (1971) has a picture so chillingly depicted the growing sense of foreboding in the Jewish community as the Nazis' restrictions close in...
...In contrast to even the more sophisticated 1990s "chick flicks," no lover, no new cause rescues the heroines from the threat of suffocation...
...Echoing them, he skirts the religious life of captive Jews (a subject almost untouched in Holocaust cinema) and, with the exception of a few disquieting scenes, downplays Polish anti-Semitism...
...Here is the ultimate espionage hero, humorlessly played by Pierce Brosnan, getting his lumps from minions of a member of the Axis of Evil...
...Director Steven Daldry, working from Michael Cunningham's book, did well to cast Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep as the forlorn leads...
...After hiding out for years, the adult Amsterdam (Leonardo DiCaprio), cleverly gains the confidence of Cutting, who now controls the notorious Five Points area, and takes up with one of his mistresses (Cameron Diaz...
...Yet Adaptation rescues itself by rooting us in Charlie's desolation...
...Nicholson is famous for impersonating savage types, but his Schmidt has not a hint of Chinatown's Jake Gittes or The Shining's Jack Torrance...
...In spite of an elegiac mood and some disturbing twists, however...
...Most of the genuinely worthwhile films of last year dealt more deeply and beautifully with the experience of isolation...
...Writer-director Payne, who previously created Election and Citizen Ruth, is building a reputation as a satiric poet of Midwestern mores...
...He lives on only as a forsaken creature, dodging beatings and bullets at every turn, witnessing the deaths of almost everyone he knows...
...Whatmakes The Pianist a major Holocaust film is the way it represents Szpilman's degradation...
...The Bond of yesterday was too suave and resourceful to carry a crutch...
...repeating many points, it long overstays its welcome...
...In addition, Gangs of New York teems with memorable secondary characters, most notably the smiling, corrupt Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and the amoral killer for hire, Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson...
...After years of tending to her, he has descended, Solaris-like, into an intimate inner world where he is the only sentient player...
...The on-screen Kaufman is a pathetic introvert, consumed by selfloathing and uncomfortable in the company of others, particularly women...
...the movie begins and ends with Woolf's suicide...
...Nevertheless, here he refuses to titillate either with his customary pyrotechnics or his trademark sardonic East European humor...
...Frequent flashbacks reveal that the man treated his real wife as insensitively as he does these new incarnations...
...The Pianist may be a survivor's tale, but its virtue lies in portraying the terrible cost of staying alive...
...While the widespread lack of enthusiasm for Solaris is certainly due to its uneventful plot and glum pacing, it may also be a testament to how poorly the director has judged the tenor of his times...
...Brody is brilliant in the title role...
...The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers continues tracking the hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood) on his journey to the dark land of Mordor, where he plans to throw the ring of power into the fires that forged it...
...The lawlessness of abustling,stinkingcityisportrayed with feverish intensity...
...It is the most powerful example of a burgeoning thematic trend in movies that has given us stronger work this season than we have been accustomed to seeing in recent years...
...At least The Hours is serious enough to envision the pangs of alienation as a problem without a simple solution...
...Like the makers of The Hours—except much more imaginatively—Almodovar highlights the onanistic romance of the misunderstood and tortured soul, yet never implies turning inward is noble or admirable...
...financing...
...The actor's technique of showing without telling is carried out beautifully by Jack Nicholson in Alexander Payne's About Schmidt, an effort less technically accomplished than Gangs yet more emotionally complex...
...Every figure in it, he has said, is weighed down by the malady, from the key players to the wild bull that is abandoned in the ring after it gores Lydia (Rosario Flores), a female matador...
...An Omaha native like Payne, Schmidt is enraged by his insignificance and inability to be taken seriously...
...The three leads are not convincing enough to make us ignore the clutter...
...Dalloway, women from three different periods contend with the shallowness and indifference of loved ones, face the deaths of others, and think of suicide...
...Their battles are ongoing and not always successful...
...In several speeches about controlling the world by force, Cutting comes across as a simple brute...
...Benigno encourages Marco to regard Lydia as he does Alicia...
...Polanski thus follows a road well traveled by earlier filmmakers who surveyed this territory...
...meanwhile they, like the original, feel stifled by his narcissism...
...The central figure of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can is a master of forgery and fraud who eludes the FBI formany years...
...I walked in to Adaptation expecting to hate it...
...Indeed, the lush, autumnal tones of his uncharacteristically conservative style here stand in painful contrast to the sadistic acts the camera captures...
...The overall effect of this three-hour drama is exhausting, however...
...Martin Scorsese's first film in over three years, Gangs of New York, is a much better work, though it has sore points as well...
...Day-Lewis is a powerful presence, but as has been the case before when he played insensitive men, he is incapable of showing us an inner life...
...Still, the aimless film, with a David Hare screenplay, insults the memory of Woolf by trivializing both her struggle with dementia and her considerable artistic gifts...
...Starving and deserted toward the War's conclusion, he is helped by a kind German officer...
...The movie is punctuated with very funny voice-over narration, but it never lapses into the simplistic declarations of The Hours or Gangs of New York...
...Some secret burden prevents their reintegration into society...
...He eventually overcomes his writer's block by building the script around himself and his struggles with the book...
Vol. 86 • January 2003 • No. 1
