Mixed Morals
SHARGEL, RAPHAEL
On Screen Mixed Morals By Raphael Shargel Toward the end of Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express, three weary children board a locomotive on their way home from the North Pole. It has been...
...If in Hollywood movies the indefinite concept of "belief " is uttered in hushed, reverent tones, the vague notion of "morality" is nearly always seen in a negative light...
...The director has inadvertently assumed the role of Dr...
...Enrique sets out to discover his star's true identity as well as the fates of Ignacio and the man who tormented them...
...Jack and Stephanie's coupling is essentially a physical affair...
...The first is instructed to trust others...
...The film's consistently engaging story, about a family of superheroes who feel the strain of living undercover in a version of the witness protection program, is full of unexpected twists and bits of comic business running in all corners of the screen...
...Innocently rejoicing in the individual talents of each family member, The Incredìbles is the perfect antidote to the darkly submissive ethos of The Polar Express...
...Payne took us on jaunts through picturesque towns populated by sunny, smiling locals, always dauntlessly cheerful despite his heroes' best efforts to rile them...
...We follow a trail of abuse, anger and revenge that springs from the primal rape...
...It does not help that the voice and body movements of most of the characters were provided by the unversatile Tom Hanks...
...Condon gulps down the bulk of his subject's career, from childhood to middle age...
...Jack and Stephanie promptly hop into bed...
...Bill Condon's long-awaited biopic about the famous zoologist who studied human sexual behavior fails to capture the complexity and danger of the man and his work...
...Jack, who lacks Miles' passion for wine, sees the road trip as an opportunity for a final sexual fling before he ties the knot...
...Earlier that night a humorless conductor parked his engine outside their bedroom windows and bullied them into making the trip...
...Alexander Payne's Sideways and Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education (La Mala Education) manage to be both moving and entertaining, in no small part because they do not wear their ideologies on their sleeves...
...Condon deserves credit for his ambition, but his story devolves into a montage of magazine covers and snippets of conversation...
...The sterile landscape they inhabit allows no outlet for their aspirations for happiness and success...
...The stunningly animated feature riffs on plotlines and incidents from famous comic books like Watchmen, The Avengers and the early days of Tlie Fantastic Four...
...For a moment, we are not sure whether he will offer him a Christmas present or crush him to pulp...
...Nor does Zemeckis do much to expand the short book's thin plot...
...The Incredìbles celebrates the pleasures of having one's own superpowers...
...And despite the lip service paid to trust, leadership and belief, The Polar Express is bereft of any ideas that transcend the artificial world fashioned by its animators...
...We suspect that Miles and Maya were insecure and lonely people before their spouses left them...
...Indeed, the tagline on the film's promo posters seduces viewers with an echo of the climax: "This Holiday Season...
...he is after a far more passive response, something like stupefied awe...
...have imposed a hierarchy of values on the story, with faith as their top priority...
...The film's characters fall into two categories: prudes, who are shocked by Kinsey's work and try to stop him...
...Like Sideways and Almodóvar's own most recent works, All about My Mother and Talk to Her, the film concerns the ramifications of calamities years in the past...
...When Kinsey confesses to his wife (Laura Linney) that he slept with one of his male researchers, she is initially devastated...
...FORTUNATELY, this season offers another group of films that touch upon serious issues yet deal with the viewermore honestly...
...There is nothing pat about Bad Education, no simple maxim to salve the brutal actions at its core...
...By suggesting that his priggish persona was molded by trauma, Condon sets up the father as another justification of Kinsey's work...
...Kinsey views morality as a set of restrictions repressing any carnal relationship that is not monogamous and heterosexual...
...Belief" implies an act of imagination, but The Polar Express absolves the protagonist of the need to make such a leap...
...Kinsey's pace is too rushed to explore any one era of the sexologist's life with any detail or subtlety...
...A more mature and assured work, Sideways dispenses with the cartoon portraits but retains Payne's vision of a lonely, sanitized America...
...The second finds the word "leader" hammered into her billet...
...Payne has crafted a poignant study of adults too shy or afraid to nurture their desperate romantic yearnings...
...But unlike most peddlers of the Santa-and-Rudolph myth, he does not make even a passing reference to "the true meaning of Christmas," or the birth of a savior...
...The characters' skin is as smooth as that of porcelain dolls...
...A record-breaking opening at the box office...
...Throughout the journey, the conductor barks restrictive and illogical orders...
...On the road they encounter a pair of attractive waitresses, Maya (Virginia Madsen), whom Miles knows slightly from previous trips, and Stephanie (Sandra Oh...
...Now he collects their tickets and carves words into them with a hole puncher, handing the stubs back as lessons for the kids to study...
...The process is not yet sophisticated enough to duplicate the nuances of facial movement...
...I have seen movies approved by the government of mainland China that represent the wisdom of authority figures more equivocally...
...When the filmmaker reads the autobiographical tale, he recognizes the details of his affair with Ignacio: Father Manolo, their literature professor (Daniel Giménez Cacho), harbored a grand passion for Ignacio, molested him, and expelled Enrique from school after discovering the two boys together...
...Ignacio hands him a short story he wants Enrique to read and possibly turn into a film, with himself as the star...
...Preachiness of precisely that sort is refreshingly absent from the eponymous Chris Van Allsburg picture book that is the basis of this animated film...
...Santa Claus himself enters here to an enormous crowd of elves who are anything but jolly, marching in step and chanting in unison...
...He is eager to dispel his friend's malaise by finding a lady for him as well...
...Late in the film, he confesses that at an impressionable age he himself was the victim of sexual torture...
...Similarly, most directors would play the scene where Miles declaims his love of Pinot to Maya and she responds with shared enthusiasm as a seduction, but Payne strikes a deeper note...
...A similar technique transformed the actor Andy Serkis into the skeletal figure of Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the technology has never been deployed on this scale...
...Enrique Coded (Fele Martinez) is a movie director with one success under his belt now stumped for subject matter...
...their eyes are cold and glassy...
...We glide along with a curious eagle to the top of a mountain, then zoom into a frozen lake when the locomotive flies off the rail and skids over thin ice...
...Condon raises some serious objections to this idea but dismisses them summarily...
...He is visited by Ignacio (Gael Garcia Bernai), an actor claiming to be his first lover at boarding school a decade before...
...Stephanie exudes an air of casual invulnerability, yet as soon as Jack declares love she is wild to return his affection and believe they could commit to one another...
...in the aftermath of their losses, they have wrapped themselves in cocoons...
...Zemeckis aims for holiday-classic status, for securing his movie a place among the animated tales aired annually on television...
...Another fully realized vision can be found in The Incredìbles, a second entry this season from Pixar and director Brad Bird, whose wonderful The Iron Giant remains underrated...
...The marvelous Sideways follows Miles (Paul Giamatti) and his friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on a tour of California wine country the week before Jack's wedding...
...Such rapid dismissals are the inevitable result of a sweeping narrative style that has been the undoing of many biopics...
...Its ending, though, is unnecessarily tidy...
...A film for grownups that disdains and lectures the audience, Kinsey, does not fare much better...
...Testosteronedriven Jack views Stephanie as a more exciting alternative to a marriage he seems, at times, to dread...
...When they smile or frown, the corners of their mouths turn only slightly, as if resisting strong feeling...
...Believe in what...
...He is also waiting to hear from a publisher about the novel he recently completed, a 700-page tome— partRobbe-Grillet, part Thomas Wolfe— that is a marketing nightmare...
...The film's most stringent moralist is Kinsey's father (John Lithgow), whose vicious treatment of family and neighbors correlates with his conservative views of sexuality...
...What we get is a film drained of human physicality...
...She is recently divorced from a professor and hesitant to make the first move .Miles is reeling from Jack's news that Victoria has remarried...
...The film's use of a system that creates digital simulations of live actors' movements marks an advance in computer animation...
...Lithgow tries valiantly to bring depth and inner pain to the patriarch, but Condon's one-dimensional dialogue defeats him...
...Instead of breathing life into Allsburg's haunting drawings, he creates an army of the virtual undead...
...When our hero stands beneath Santa, the bearded figure looks like a tower of menace...
...And the film's unnamed hero is advised to "believe...
...But the man who brought Enrique the story, whom he casts as the lead in his film adaptation, is not who he claims to be...
...Like Sideways, they were character studies, but they broadly satirized easy targets...
...The verisimilitude of digital effects...
...Biographical films tend to be more effective when they treat a particular period of their subject's life in depth...
...Miles and Maya hold back...
...It is disheartening to watch a film with pretensions to ethical instruction that locates good behavior in unblinking obedience to authority...
...Soon afterward she begins her own affair with the young man, and for a short while the arrangement seems fine...
...they are straining for new careers with one foot stuck in the well of alcoholism...
...On the train, a devilish hobo constantly goads him toward danger and then inexplicably comes to his rescue...
...Sideways is Payne's first film set in California...
...Almodóvar's shots are stunningly composed, and his characters are bigger than life...
...he is too busy devoting most of the screentime to digressive experiments with his new digital toys...
...The hero is proved a fool for not believing his parents' stories about Santa...
...His earlier works—Citizen Ruth,Election andAbout Schmidt—took place in the Midwest...
...Kinsey and his antagonists occasionally bring up love and we very briefly witness contention in his team of researchers, some of whom experiment with one another's partners...
...He contrasts their confident expressions of passion for different wines with the hesitation both feel—especially Miles—in letting down their emotional barriers...
...Both troubles must have loomed large in Kinsey's life, but we hear of them only once, in passing, and they are never referred to again...
...they are tin soldiers one moment, rag dolls the next...
...They portray his obsession with his novel and his fanaticism about wine as sympathetic indices of his personality, not neuroses...
...At one point, someone mentions as an aside that the government is hostile to him because he refused to help J. Edgar Hoover identify homosexuals in the State Department...
...The adult figures of The Polar Express are frighteningly dispassionate, yet they are always right...
...The Polar Express raked in over $23 million during its opening weekend, a sum that came nowhere near satisfying the producers, who spent $ 150 million on it...
...It has been an eventful Christmas Eve for these little doubting Thomases enlightened by the sight of Santa Claus commencing his annual journey...
...and those who respond warmly, usually because they themselves wish to follow an alternative lifestyle...
...The motion of their bodies is either too stiff or too fluid...
...The children are dispatched on pointlessly rapid chases on the train and around Santa's North Pole city...
...Enrique uncovers the past but cannot prevent the tragic events that ensue...
...The children are commanded to revere and obey and seem unable to curry anything stronger than grudging approval...
...Sideways is about divorce's debilitation of the ego...
...Payne and Giamatti handle Miles' depression beautifully...
...He insists that his work is divorced from any concept of morality...
...Its villain, a brilliant scientist, is so jealous of the heroes' gifts that he cannot enjoy his own...
...PEDRO Almodóvar's Bad Education, an exquisite mystery story, is even more impressive in its unfolding...
...Alfred Kinsey (Liam Neeson) defends his sexual studies on scientific grounds, claiming he wishes to do nothing more than classify human sexual behavior so it will be better understood...
...Just as quickly, the film skims over the conflicts, and Kinsey reaffirms his cold clinical view...
...Almodóvar's narrative shifts from past to present and back again, often spinning tales within tales...
...Ultimately, the director does not seek to capitalize on the moviegoer's capacity to believe with these tricks...
...Believe...
...After he collapses during a lecture, a doctor informs us that Kinsey has overdosed on barbiturates...
...He meets Santa in person and takes home a magical trinket—proof the next morning that the night's escapade was no dream...
...Miles, a fiction writer, has been suffering from depression since his wife, Victoria (Jessica Hecht), divorced him two years ago...
...He seems miserable, weighed down uncomfortably by his huge belly, and glowers at the boy...
...In the broad sense of the term, Kinsey himself is a moralist, frothing with conclusions about human nature and what people ought to believe in almost every scene...
...Predictably, Condon savages the former group and adores the latter...
...Frankenstein...
...Director Zemeckis and coscenarist William Broyles Jr...
...He and the film maintain that sexuality is a purely biological act—a means of attaining pleasure with no necessary connection to love or fidelity between partners...
...the scene appears to have been modeled on rallies for Hitler in Lem Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
