ON SCREEN
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Muted Rebellions By Raphael Shargel After A summer of releases by minor figures like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man 2), M. Night Shyamalan (The Village) and Michael Mann (Collateral),...
...Neither Nair nor Julian Fellowes, the accomplished writer of Gosford Park who doctored this film's script, make much of their story's title...
...On the page, George Osborne is even more self-centered than Becky, yet he is also sufficiently brave to risk disinheritance when he chastises his father for asking him to jilt Amelia...
...She even has Becky rebelliously chuck out the window of her carriage Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the schoolmarm's gift to departing students...
...I understand Nair's inclination to place the burden of Victorian prejudices toward women and foreigners on the shoulders of men...
...Becky, distraught that she has lost the opportunity to marry into nobility, confesses to Sir Pitt and his sister that she has already secretly wed Rawdon...
...But she proves incapable of the mischief, joy and mimicry Miriam Hopkins brought to Rouben Mamoulian's less faithful 193 5 version of it...
...Nair, who like Thackeray was born in India, chooses intriguingly to focus on the racist and imperialist attitudes of the novel, preserving the characters' sickening remarks about Africans and Indians...
...Moreover, the director's attention to the minutiae of plot is matched by herpictorial scope...
...As his story progresses, its main character becomes as daunting as she is irresistible...
...We also meet Miss Swartz (Kathryn Drysdale), the heiress whom Mr...
...The monarch is advancing his ambition to unite the territories that will one day make up modern China...
...In Zhano Yimou's Hero (Ying xiong) war takes center stage...
...Thackeray's hysterically funny social satire and devastating critiques of egotism remain resonant...
...Nair contrasts the dismissive farewell given to Becky with the fuss teachers and classmates make over Amelia, their favorite...
...All three of these directors could have ironed out their films' inconsistencies by maintaining faith in the viewer's ability to tolerate greater complexity and depth...
...Rhys Meyers flattens him into a mere cad, and it is hard to understand what Amelia sees in him...
...My reaction to Margarethe von Trotta's Rosenstrasse is ambivalent as well...
...She has been working continually, but Rosenstrasse is the first of her movies to achieve general release in almost a decade...
...Von Trotta's gritty sense of human frailty does not prevent her from making all the women we encounter resistant to the regime...
...While Thackeray's satire tilts at such worldly follies, Nair and her company restrain themselves from creating anything more than a colorful, and engaging, diversion...
...Becky Sharp is one of the most vivid creations in Victorian literature...
...He exhibits none of the decrepitude that results in readers being mystified by Becky's attraction to him...
...Yet I think Nair's work comes across as mild instead of bracing chiefly because she rejects the comic, tragic and ironic impulses that inspired the characters and situations the film preserves...
...Nair substitutes fairy-tale endings for the bittersweet ones Thackeray reserved for them...
...Even Nameless' concluding resolution is a disappointment...
...Ruth, a child rescued by one of the brave wives, has now grown old and is mourning the death ofher husband...
...It refers not only to Mayfair, the London neighborhood where much of the story is set, but also to a scene from John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress...
...Using his powers of deduction, the monarch retells Nameless' story...
...The movie retells a fascinating anecdote from Hitler's persecution of the Jews...
...Magnificently selfish, unrepentantly vain, she nevertheless delights readers with her sneaky scaling of the social ladder...
...Osborne (Jim Broadbent) attempts to betroth to his son George (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), though the family long ago pledged him to penniless Amelia...
...Letting the women be whisked away by dashing and adoring lovers reinforces a patriarchal supremacy Thackeray never conceived...
...She also erases Becky's contempt for Amelia, remaking her into as good and decent a friend as she is a wife...
...A condolence call by a dark woman Hannah has never met inspires herto learn more about her mother and to unravel a psychological puzzle rooted in events surrounding the demonstrations at Rosenstrasse...
...For all its virtues, the social and political relations depicted in Rosenstrasse are schematic...
...With her wide sarcastic smile and flashing eyes, she does resemble the illustrations of Becky that Thackeray drew to accompany his story...
...Casting the American Reese Witherspoon for the role seems an odd decision...
...But Thackeray darkly depicts the ease with which she accommodates herself within the world of her superiors...
...Despite some serious shortcomings, Mira Nair's opulent Vanity Fair, Margarethe von Trotta's World War II drama Rosenstrasse, and Zhang Yimou's martial arts epic Hero merit more praise than they have received...
...more recently, they have drifted toward the fantasy of the latter...
...Soon after their controversial marriages, Becky and Amelia accompany their soldier-grooms to Brussels, where the men are dispatched to confront Napoleon's forces...
...A few minor characters are consolidated into composites...
...Even so, the fighting occasionally looks overchoreographed and at times devolves into the sort of jokiness that marred Ang Lee's otherwise intense Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000...
...Though her film is almost as long as Vanity Fair, it never loses momentum...
...As if to counter this strain, she includes several musical numbers toward the end that nod toward Bollywood spectacle and slow the progress toward climax and denouement...
...Yet in other respects, Hero is a departure for the maker of those quieter masterpieces...
...A secular Jew, she insists upon sitting a traditional shiva...
...The pace is brisk and the canvas of locale and characters diverting...
...Her Marianne and Juliane (1981) and Rosa Luxemburg (1986) stand up to the best of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog...
...Their talent for visuals is nonetheless exciting, and their willingness to relate unusual, provocative and entertaining narratives is refreshing...
...The wealthy Lord Steyne (Gabriel Byrne), has been transformed into a dashing aficionado of fine art...
...After a short time in his home, Becky moves to London to work for the wealthy spinster Miss Crawley (Eileen Atkins), Sir Pitt's sister, and begins an affair with his second son, Rawdon (James Purefoy...
...Most of its running time is devoted to swordplay, and in the combat scenes the director reveals why he is China's premier filmmaker...
...The picture, which has its basis in Chinese legend, concerns a warrior (Jet Li) who, like Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's spaghetti Westerns, has lived a life so obscure that he lacks a name...
...Thackeray's scenes of confrontation are dramatically gripping...
...Around the events of the past, von Trotta has woven a moving contemporary story...
...Nameless, who claims fealty to the King, is reputed to have murdered them...
...Similarly, although Thackeray's Rawdon was an affectionate buffoon, Nair visualizes him as dashing and intelligent, a match for his witty spouse...
...In the drawing that accompanies the author's description of Becky's unconcern, she is sleeping blissfully in a double bed whose other inhabitant is conspicuously absent...
...A film that ultimately preaches the resignation of individual autonomy to a powerful dictatorial force may please Chinese authorities, but it contradicts the subversive themes that have marked Zhang's works in the past and made them not only pictorially beautiful but life-affirming...
...In the past, German films tended to fall into the former category...
...And the sheer number of protracted battle scenes becomes wearying after a while...
...The hero then revises it once more, explaining he learned something from Broken Sword that has turned him against fighting altogether...
...Zhang's frequent use of slow motion distracts the viewer...
...The film contains none of the novel's noxious slurs directed at Hebrew moneylenders...
...Like Nair's film, Witherspoon is more stylish than substantial...
...Before leaving, Rawdon frantically lists for his wife the items in their little household that she can redeem for cash should he be killed at the front...
...Arriving at the house of Sir Pitt Crawley (Bob Hoskins) to work as a governess, Becky mistakes him for a porter when he answers the door...
...But she ignores Thackeray's equally disturbing attitude toward Jews...
...Even the matron who wears a Nazi pin and the hostess who welcomes Joseph Goebbels as her guest of honor work against the interests of the party...
...He knows that China will be united under the King of Qin, but only after many thousands fall by the sword...
...In Hero we move ever closer to learning what really happened, until the climactic personal revelation that leads Nameless to spare the King...
...Ruth's daughter, Hannah, is bewildered by this sudden obsession with Jewish ritual...
...As the film opens, he enters the palace of the King of Qin (Daoming Chen) expecting to receive a reward...
...Where the picture falters is in reproducing the tone and main themes of the novel...
...She remains an excellent craftsman and a fine storyteller...
...Because the women refused to back down, even before soldiers threatening to shoot them, the husbands were eventually released into their custody...
...Attracted to her, he momentarily plays the servant and derives amusement from informing her of his true identity...
...Witherspoon never loses her cool and Hoskins, shrugging his shoulders, says, "Ah well—worth a try," then exits hastily...
...On Screen Muted Rebellions By Raphael Shargel After A summer of releases by minor figures like Sam Raimi (Spider-Man 2), M. Night Shyamalan (The Village) and Michael Mann (Collateral), whom many critics lauded as if they were top-level auteurs, I'm relieved to report that early autumn has treated us to pictures from a pool of genuinely talented international directors...
...Nameless then admits he is in fact a native of one of the lands ravaged by the Royal Army, and it becomes clear that the three assassins have sacrificed themselves so that Nameless, taking credit for their deaths, can get close enough to the King to kill him...
...Von Trotta's film has more psychological depth than Vanity Fair, but it is too idealistic to be credible realism...
...The two shrink from Thackeray's brutal vision by softening Becky's character...
...Becky is dismissed from the affections of the elder Crawleys, and her new husband is written out of his aunt's will, leaving the young couple dependent on his income from gambling...
...The story's psychological games, the director's preference for filling shots with a single dominant color, and the film's discussion of individual suffering under the boot of militant power recalls Zhang's best work—Raise the Red Lantern (1992), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992) and Not One Less (1999...
...Seated before a high throne, Nameless relates how he set the three against one another and took advantage of their emotional distress to overcome them in combat...
...One of the book's most vividly telling scenes comes after Rawdon leaves Brussels to fight the French Army...
...Gorgeous costumes and lavish sets swirl by cinematographer Declan Quinn's camera...
...The author hints that swarthy Miss Swartz may be the illegitimate daughter of a black woman and states outright that her wealthy father is Jewish...
...Osborne for trying to corral a dimwitted twit with an Eastern European accent, Nair recasts her as a graceful, beautiful mulatto, an innocent object of George's implicitly racist rejection...
...Vanity Fair is the rare adaptation of a classic work that rewards those familiar with its source...
...While Zhang's earlier efforts expressed a yearning for justice and peaceful relations, Hero gleefully indulges in violent impulses...
...In the film, Becky is as distressed as Amelia...
...The film opens with two young women, Rebecca Sharp (Reese Witherspoon) and Amelia Sedley (Romola Garai), taking their leave of Mrs...
...Thackeray, too, mocks the heaving bluster of 19th-century males, but his women are too complex to be liberated from prejudice...
...A fair held in the allegorical city of Vanity showcases a populace that values earthly possessions, including honor and rank, over the spiritual quest that leads to salvation...
...Von Trotta is one of the finest directors to emerge from the German New Wave...
...Becky and Amelia triumph in the novel and the film...
...When Sir Pitt, making a surprise visit, drops to his knees and proposes marriage to Becky, a servant eavesdropping at the keyhole rushes to inform Miss Crawley...
...His efforts were threatened by three brilliant assassins—Sky (Donnie Yen), Flying Snow (Maggie Cheung), and Broken Sword (Tony Leung)—infuriated by his bloody conquests...
...After recovering from the shock of rejection, he calls her a sly little devil and promises to be her friend...
...most remain intact...
...The narrative is wonderfully executed and the acting superb...
...At least during the film's first two thirds, the myriad details Nair weaves into it do not weigh it down...
...Where Thackeray in his drawings accentuated the girl's ugliness and condemned Mr...
...Thackeray's Amelia has charm, but is also prudish and narrowminded...
...In 1943, when the Nazis rounded up and imprisoned Jewish men who had married Aryan women, their wives held a vigil outside the building where they were confined...
...In the film, they pass by halfheartedly...
...When he concludes, the King realizes that parts of his story are contradictory...
...When, in the novel, Becky is forced to reject Sir Pitt, she falls to the floor in despair...
...Amelia lies sick with worry about George...
...Pinkerton's Academy to enter the adult world...
...She is best known for playing airheads in the television show Friends and the two Legally Blonde movies...
...Hero has been compared to Akira Kurosawa's classic Rashomon, where several eyewitnesses offer divergent accounts of a crime...
...The film provides three different versions of the same tale, but unlike Rashomon, it does not leave the true course of events an open question...
...In dealing with the stance of "ordinary" German citizens, there are two types of Holocaust movies: those that admit at least some of the populace collaborated with the Nazis, and those that insist the common people were all oppressed by a fanatical military dictatorship...
...Still, I am troubled by a film that, despite its grand sweep, very narrowly represents Berlin culture under Hitler...
...Abandoning them, Nair turns the book's wine into grape juice...
...He tends to keep two sparring figures within the frame, lending to their dueling a realistic dimension, a welcome technique in a genre that relies too frequently on unconvincing editing...
...He has been frantic about the security of his bride, but Thackeray lets us know Becky cares more about the neat little fortune he has bequeathed her than whether he lives or dies...
...A work of art, of course, should be judged on its own merits rather than those of its source...
...Nair runs through the scene hastily and without passion...
...The stunning Garai plays her with a seductive simper and a worldly wink that drains the tension and contradiction from her character...
...nor could any filmmaker do justice in two and a half hours to the enormous panorama of Thackeray's 900page tome...
...She wisely refrains from the jittery, hand-held maneuvers that made her otherwise charming Monsoon Wedding (2001) a trial to sit through...
...By the end of the novel she has indulged in adultery and probably murder...
...Nair preserves moments of the 1848 William Makepeace Thackeray novel set in the Napoleonic era that most adapters would remove in the interest of saving time...
...This is Zhang's first martial arts film...
...Ifher intention was to mount a feminist revision of the novel, she fails...
...We are treated to glimpses of the pompous Lady Southdown (Géraldine McEwan) and the mild Lady Jane Sheepshanks (Natasha Little...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
