Nearly incomprehensible but stylistically dazzling outing from von Trier, Europe’s answer to David Lynch and David Cronenberg. While deep in a hypnotic trance, a detective (Elphick) recounts his investigation into a series of murders. In trying to track down the killer, he applies the psychological tools picked up from his mentor –all of which the aging, eccentric mentor compiled in the titular criminal psychology manual. Suffused in irradiated brown-orange tones and superbly expressive visual tricks, von Trier succeeds in creating an apocalyptic tone, a sense that the unfolding story is but a figment of some fever dream. As impressive as that is, The Element of Crime is a strangely muddled affair, hardly compelling in terms of character and narrative drive, possessed of a dark, deviant sexuality and a nightmarish grittiness that seem to exist for their own sake, as an homage to the underbelly elements of noir. Element is definitely another entry in the Style Over Substance category of moviemaking; von Trier would have far greater success fusing his extraordinary aesthetic with a fully developed storyline years later in Zentropa.
Grade: C+
Directed by: Lars von Trier
Screenplay by: Tómas Gislason, William Quarshie, Lars von Trier, Niels Vørsel, Stephen Wakelam
Cast: Michael Elphick, Esmond Knight, Me Me Lai, Jerold Wells, Ahmed El Shenawi
This low-budget noir (the production truly looks held together by spit and string) from bargain-basement maestro Ulmer involves sad sack musician Al (Neal) caught in a web of circumstance while thumbing his way cross-country to L.A. to reunite with his girlfriend. Al’s luck goes from bad to worse when, after assuming a dead man’s identity, he gets tangled up with a femme fatale (Savage) who blackmails him into doing her bidding. Well-paced and forthright, Detour doesn’t boast a particularly sharp protagonist (Neal’s pouty-faced Al, in fact, is about as a resourceful as a kid lost in a carnival) nor a robust storyline–the events precipitate from one shouting match between conniver and victim in a connect-the-dots fashion. But, with its fatalism and conflating of sex and danger, this is quintessential noir territory. For fans of the genre, it’s a dark and lovely landscape that Detour hitchhikes through.
Grade: B
Directed by: Edgar G. Ulmer
Written by: Martin Goldsmith
Cast: Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake, Edmund MacDonald
If wouldn’t surprise me if Brick was eventually canonized by film geeks as a cult classic in much the same way as Reservoir Dogs and Donnie Darko. Like those movies, Brick demonstrates an aggressively talented filmmaker making his feature directorial debut. Clearly enamored with ’40s-era hardboiled fiction, Rian Johnson cleverly grafts the lingo and tropes of that genre onto a high school setting, building a mystery thriller around the murder of a teenage girl. The girl’s lover–an ostracized student and loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), still carrying a torch for his dead beloved–determines to investigate. His search leads him into the high school’s drug underworld, and into the clutches of its kingpin (Lukas Haas). More than anything, Brick is just an elaborate noir send-up, and an enjoyably kooky one at that. It’s a funhouse ride in which pubescent characters pop out of the darkness, spouting fermented hardboiled slang. But, ultimately, it’s just an inauthentic and pointless gag; more often than not, we get the feeling of post-modern actors dressing up and approximating noir roles in a high-school milieu: the jaded private dick, the capo, the heavy, the manipulative cop (a fantastic Richard Roundtree, by the way) and, of course, the femme fatale. They’re all here, going through the motions we might find in any of classical Hollywood’s Hammett-Chandler adaptations, but they can’t get their mouths around Johnson’s archaic dialogue. And without the snap and spunk of actors who know how to deliver that old-time verbiage, we’re left with a lot of incomprehensible, marble-mouthed blathering, uttered with tiresome hipster somnolence; the clash of the old and the new just doesn’t light any sparks. Still, Johnson’s connect-the-dots noir script gives him the chance to experiment with atmospherics, which owe a debt as much to Blue Velvet as to The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon. When it’s over, though, and Brick’s novelties and stylistics have worn off, we’re still wondering what greater meaning any of this is meant to convey. Like his aforementioned indie-brat forebears, Johnson may be just another filmmaker with the resources to get his rocks off, but with nothing original or of any consequence to actually say.
Grade: B-
Directed by: Rian Johnson
Written by: Rian Johnson
Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nora Zehetner, Lukas Haas, Noah Fleiss, Matt O’Leary, Emilie de Ravin, Noah Segan, Richard Roundtree, Meagan Good
A quintessential French crime film, enamored of its Hollywood antecedents yet distinctly French in its blasé attitude to sex, women, and the daily doldrums of the post-War Parisian male. Melville shot this over a two-year period in piecemeal fashion as finances allowed, and that explains the slipshod, somewhat chintzy, feel of many of its scenes; intentionally or not, Bob le Flambeur’s from-the-hip shooting style–using hand-held cameras in cars, on streets, etc.–helped usher in the French New Wave at the end of the ’50s. All that aside, this is, ultimately, a generally absorbing and sometimes funny look at the capricious nature of Luck.
Bob, a hardluck gambler in Paris’s Montmartre section, is on a losing streak but that doesn’t stop him from being generous to Paolo (Cauchy) and Anne (Corey), a couple of reckless, dreamy-eyed kids who look up to him. When he hits rock bottom, Bob decides to rob a Deauville casino–a haul that would make him and his co-conspirators comfortable forever. True to the heist genre, then, Melville follows Bob as he goes about financing his operation, painstakingly planning it step by step. The minutiae of Bob’s safecracker perfecting his trade is so engrossing it’s a testament of Melville’s talent for dramatizing the tropes of the crime genre. An impetuous murder and a police inspector hot on Bob’s trail wrinkle the gamblers’ plans, but Lady Luck–that most coveted and fickle of women–shows she hasn’t completely abandoned Bob, her most dedicated of suitors.
Flambeur’s casual commodification of women–going so far as to depict them as untrustworthy and emotionally disloyal tarts–is charmingly jokey up to a point, and Melville’s lurid gaze at Corey’s supple lines is enticing. But the sexual politics at play here, as Anne nearly derails Bob’s heist scheme out of nothing more than feminine whimsy feels cheap and gimmicky, as does Paolo’s girl-crazy naïveté. Still, Le Breton and Melville’s script knows how to bring it all home in a climax in which our sympathies for Bob, the lovable rogue dutifully chasing that winning streak, are marvelously realized and rewarded.
Grade: B
Directed by: Jean-Pierre Melville
Written by: Auguste Le Breton, Jean-Pierre Melville
Cast: Isabelle Corey, Daniel Cauchy, Roger Duchesne, Guy Decomble, André Garet, Gérard Buhr, Claude Cerval, Colette Fleury
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s serial killer novel The Lodger was first and most famously adapted by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927, catapulting the then-unknown filmmaker into the front ranks of young British directors of the era. Set in modern-day Los Angeles, David Ondaatje’s update doesn’t seem poised to launch a similarly legendary career, constituting as it does a series of baffling moments that elicits only unintentional chuckles and sighs, as in one peculiar scene in which the film’s murder suspect is asked by his landlady why he’s rooting around the backyard grill with a poker and he answers with deadpan gravity, “I was trying to dry my trousers…and they caught fire.” Read it here…
A handful of movies released in 2008 will stay in my mind for the forseeable future (and perhaps even beyond), movies that broke from the pack of mindless mediocrity pressed into our collective viewing experience between the months of January and December.
There were only two releases — both American — that, to me, deserve to be ranked as the best of the bunch. Otherwise, I’d like to dispense with numbering the rest of the batch — all strong movies, all of which captured the beauty and power of the movies in their own singular ways.
You may not have heard of a few of the titles below (I only caught Late Fragment, Shot In Bombay, and The Matador at the SXSW Festival this past March, but none of them as far as I know received significant buzz theatrically). But do give them a chance on DVD or online. Nowadays, there’s always a way to watch:
THE TWO BEST OF 2008:
MILK
I wonder what it was like to be in the presence of Sean Penn’s performance while making Milk, Gus Van Sant’s valentine to the political rise of San Francisco’s Harvey Milk in the 1970′s. Penn’s work, his best since 1995′s Dead Man Walking, had a Brando-esque audacity and poetry about it, an immersion into a role so complete that you see it happen only rarely. Everything about this film, from the performances to the gorgeous evocation of the 70′s Castro, radiated pure love and conviction from a filmmaker in peak, purposeful form. Read my full review here.
THE WRESTLER
In Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke was not only re-born, but his masterful turn made him the King of All Cinematic Comebacks. The Wrestler could so easily have become an embarrasment for all concerned, but the results were just the opposite: Thanks to the daring and singular commitment of Rourke, Aronofsky and supporting performers Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood — both fabulous here — The Wrestler was a warm, soulful exercise in humanism and vivid proof that American cinema, when done right, is the best stuff on Earth. Read my full review here.
THE REST TO REMEMBER 2008 BY:
IN BRUGES
Bruges, Belgium, a medieval masterwork of a city was rendered as both hopelessly kitschy and spookily gothic in Martin McDonagh’s comic thriller In Bruges. McDonagh’s terrific writing and directing kept Colin Farrell at his lunatic best while his co-star Brendan Gleeson became the film’s center of gravity in this tale of thugs who think they’re hiding out when in fact they’ve made themselves sitting ducks for Ralph Fiennes’ deliriously evil mob boss. In Bruges was one of 2008′s most hilarious and refreshing genre surprises.
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN
Tomas Alfredson’s weird, wonderful coming-of-age vampire flick felt like an immaculately made Swedish domestic drama — intelligent, the yearings of its adolescent boy and girl only barely expressed until bursts of violence knocked us out of that reverie. You really weren’t sure what you were watching, yet you were enraptured by the movie’s strange friendship and Alfredson’s brooding tone, the sudden supernatural flare-ups of vampiric bloodletting, dismemberments and defenestrations. In 2008, the gallery of bloody good vampire cinema found a new inductee. Read my full review here.
THE MATADOR
The poetry of cinema was transfigured into the poetry of the bullring in this excellent documentary about the rise of one of Spain’s premier bullfighters. Directors Stephen Higgins and Nina Gilden Seavey captured the rigors and glory of the ring, but this wasn’t a paean to animal cruelty and primitive bloodsport. The Matador was also a skillful portrait of a culture’s modern reckoning with an enduring yet morally problematic aspect of its ancient history. Read my full review here.
SHOT IN BOMBAY
No slumdog millionaires here, only bigtime Bollywood ones in this funny, instructive, fascinating behind-the-scenes portrait of the making of a Bollywood thriller. Director Liz Mermin gets into the trenches of Bollywood filmmaking, along with the legal troubles of one of its heavyweight stars dogging the production, making for illuminating interviews and lessons in resourceful filmmaking. Read my full review here.
LATE FRAGMENT
From Canada arrived a unique experiment in interactive cinema and New Media filmmaking. The directorial trio of Daryl Cloran, Anita Doron and Mathieu Guez managed to craft an engaging exercise in eliciting audience involvement (we used a remote control to guide the course of their web-like narrative at key points) without losing the essentially mesmerizing nature of the unfolding narrative — intertwining dark stories of murder, abuse and guilt, all beautifully acted and executed. Read my full review here.
TRANSIBBERIAN
Brad Anderson’s tribute to Hitchcock paid off handsomely in this far-flung thriller about an unwitting American couple caught up in drugs and murder while aboard the titular train barreling through Russia’s frozen wilderness. Woody Harrelson and Emily Mortimer gamely played the victims in Anderson’s underworld parable, but it was Ben Kingsley as a steely-eyed Russian narc (or so he claimed to be) who stole the show to make Transsiberian 2008′s noir to remember. Read my full review here.
THE DARK KNIGHT
The most intelligent, morally resonant and dramatically ambitious superhero film perhaps ever made (well, at least since Sam Raimi’s underrated Darkman from 1990). Heath Ledger deservedly got all the actorly attention (though Christian Bale did rock the cape, and Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman were a pleasure to watch as always) as The Joker in a towering performance that put Jack Nicholson’s lampoon in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman venture in its cartoonish place. It was sadly Ledger’s swan song, but, paired with his achingly beautiful turn in Brokeback Mountain, the actor etched his place in the pantheon of our very best contemporaries.
Brad Anderson (The Machinist) assays Hitchcock territory, and does a fine job in this riveting thriller about an American couple traveling across Russia on the titular express train and getting caught up in drugs, murder and the watchful eye of a suspicious detective. Having wrapped up a charity mission in China, the mid-western hayseed Roy (Woody Harrelson) and his wife Jessie (Emily Mortimer), a recovering drug addict, decide to book passage on the Transsiberian and take in the famed Russian hinterland.
They end up sharing their berth with another couple — a young American runaway, Abby (Kate Mara), and her Eurotrash boyfriend Carlos (Eduardo Noriega). With his easy smile and bedroom eyes, Carlos works his scruffy, roguish charms on Jessie, who’s taken with his aura of mystery and bad-boy mischief. He’s everything she left behind in her free-living drug days, and still pines for privately. While Roy is busy doting over train engines and rail gauges (he’s a train buff), Jessie shares an impulsive intimacy with Carlos that starts a chain of consequences that ends fatally for Carlos. That’s when Anderson and co-writer Will Conroy’s plot kicks into gear.
What was a holiday one minute turns into a nightmare of paranoia, guilt, and suspicion as Jessie now harbors the secret of what befell Carlos while the two were out in the desolate country. The suspense gets racheted to tantalizing levels when Roy and Jessie are approached by Grinko (Ben Kingsley) who claims to be a detective on the hunt for drug smugglers believed to be on board the Transsiberian. When Jessie discovers a load of Russian dolls that belonged to Carlos stashed in her luggage — dolls containing heroin — she realizes the mess she’s gotten herself into. What’s more, it dawns on Jessie and Roy that Grinko’s intentions are more ruthless than he’s letting on.
Anderson and Conroy do an excellent job of drawing out the tension between Jessie and Grinko while the oafish Roy becomes the unsuspecting barrier protecting Jessie from her potential inquisitor. Jessie can’t hold out forever, of course; soon enough, the two find themselves in Grinko’s clutches.
In neat and deft maneuvers, Anderson and Conroy use the violence and desperation of their characters to drive them forward and against each other like chess pieces. The wintry Russian desolation makes for a bleak and menacing game board, for sure, of which this script and cast make maximum utility. The weakest link here — and the one factor that could’ve easily derailed Transsiberian — is the nauseating Carlos. The mystery man’s grinning, conniving persona is an unwelcome irritant, a derivative of a thousand Eurotrash cliches, and his exchanges with Jessie, while sexually charged, are generally pathetic in their see-through insinuations. While Carlos is the instigator of Anderson and Conroy’s entire premise, his character amounts to tedium which, thankfully, ends with his departure, leaving room for Kingsley to show up and take command of the narrative.
Kingsley sinks his teeth into his role, he’s clearly having a blast, and we take delight in watching the seasoned actor playing the dubious Grinko. Mortimer too comes to life once the peril to her character becomes immediate, and Anderson’s handling of Jessie’s attempts not to lose her cool vis-a-vis Grinko and Roy and to save herself from a desperate scenario would make Hitchcock smirk with quiet pride. It was the Master’s favorite set-up after all: An innocent who finds the murderer’s weapon planted in his hands, and who must now do his damndest to keep authorities off this trail.
Transsiberian never quite worked up the media attention it deserved in the festival or theatrical circuit in 2008. But as Hitchcockian thrillers go, it’s one of the smarter and more absorbing ones made in recent years. And it gives the enterprising and versatile Kingsley one of his juiciest and most memorable roles in years.
Grade: B+
Directed by: Brad Anderson Written by: Brad Anderson, Will Conroy Cast: Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, Ben Kingsley, Kate Mara, Eduardo Noriega, Thomas Kretschmann Rated: R Runtime: 111 min.
