Reviews

Well, Blanchette is excellent at portraying a thoroughly despicable and arrogant character; I liked all the musical references, even the boring New Yorker interview. But the ending, stolen completely from Requiem for a Heavyweight would have jumped the shark for me, had that not already been done with the final conducting scene with the Berl. Phil, that itself seemed in the end just another variant of the All About Eve trope. Did they think we wouldn't have seen these films? Or were we supposed to be flattered at recognizing the abstruse references (you know, like 'You all got Visconti in your heads' or whatever it was--which is kinda bizarre because you see, that is a MOVIE, and professional musicians would be more likely to know PERFORMANCES ... get it? Because this too is a MOVIE, you see! Get it now? Pretty clever, huh?) I sort of would like to know who beat the crap out of her in another set piece (damn, is this one from the Sopranos?). My main problem was that despite its length, the central issues are merely alluded to with a wink rather than discussed: the seedy politics and economics of major symphonies; deNazification, rampant sexism and racism in the 'business', the fraud of blind competitions, J. Levine ... As if, well, we musical cognoscenti know all about THAT. (If the intended viewers already know everything about the central subject, then why make a movie about it? Leaving all us non-initiates in the dark?) I can't imagine a case where I would say a Haneke film treated this issues better, but "Le Pianiste" seems to me to do just that. (Not to take away from the 'look' of the film the color palettes, and all the great visual details, which I suppose represent something important that is not ever defined for us. (And is that final scene in the river supposed to remind us of Bridge on the River Kwai? Or is it Apocalypse Now?). Blessedly once the novelty of Blanchette's angry humorless character fades--and that takes over two hours (so good is she at it)-and once as a viewer you resign yourself to the fact that none of the teasing problems brought up will ever be resolved, it's pretty good.

I love Bunuel, but I'm not sure whether I'm more appalled by this film, or by the neutral reviews it's getting here. From what I recall from his autobiography, I assume he was just making something that would seem to fit the norms of American films on race, and didn't give it a lot of thought beyond that (if he mentioned this film directly, I apologize; I just can't remember). But my God! The preacher as moral center? You mean the one who gives a forced baptism to the girl? The main character--a bigotted, racist, lynch-happy, child-molester with ... what? ... a heart of gold? A moment of redemption? Have you all lost your minds? Someone who rapes a 13-year-old is not redeemed if he promises to marry her! No! Not even in film or fiction is that a tenable moral position. The only possible way to salvage this would be to claim that the entire thing is a critique of American cinematic values regarding race and those idiotic FatherKnowsBest figures embodied here in the preacher. Thus, sure, white guy tries to kill black guy, but that night they're sitting around telling war stories???? The happy waving to each other at the end??? I like Bunuel enough to attempt to believe that this was all a deliberately over-the-top parody of 1960-era movies. But I can't pull it off.

The Paris shots are fantastic (cf. Haneke's version of this, Seventh Continent, where the settings are as unsettling and disturbing as the characters). But perhaps I've grown weary of 19th c novels and their progeny showing the trials and tribulations of rich people. If such characters and their dated dinner parties appear in a Bunuel film, at least they are amusing. Here, we are asked to take them seriously (or perhaps more accurately to take our own critique of them and Alain's critique of them seriously). By contrast, mere ordinary humans (e.g., the waiter in the cafe, or the old servant dutifully bringing Alain cheese at dinner)--these people don't matter, nor can they of course share in the angst-ridden banality of Alain, in many ways a garden- variety, pretentious and boring drunk. I suppose this is an ancillary point of Malle? (the utter perplexity of the truck drivers who cannot understand this oaf, who seems rich, but doesn't work nor feels any gratitude? or the good Samaritan who pulls Alain from traffic, an act which only allows him to continue his narcissistic, self-indulgent suicide melodrama another 12 hours or so?) I wish I'd seen this forty years ago, when characters like this were so common in certain genres of film as to be nearly invisible.

The fact that some readers confidently state the presumed political "allegory" of this film (which I frankly can't see) while others criticize it as if it were realistic (what? seven adults confining a girl to a massage parlor against her will?) gives some idea of why it's both interesting and powerful. I was never entirely sure what genre I was in while watching this--comedy? surreal fantasy? social commentary? sit com? romance? absurdist play?--and maybe because of that I never worried about the implications it might have for any of these, nor did I steel myself against its emotional aspects (why bother? it's just a surreal play!). The main focus emerges from this haze of characters and comedic situations about half way through. I'm told that some details early on in the film (the 'girl- friend' and her pampered, insolent, fat, lazy kid) are comments on an increasingly common family phenomenon in China; I wouldn't know. But once the focus settles on the main group of characters, I could not shake the notion that they constitute an absolutely dead-on representation of American bourgeois family life (or perhaps just those I've had experience with!) where each member, with the best of intentions, deceives everyone else in order to protect them from ... what? economic distress? emotional distress? And where emotions and love can only be expressed in the most oblique and often futile ways.

Great performance, but there's something very myopic about this film--it's essentially a old- fashioned "whodunnit": the entire focus is on Capote, how he lies and how he manipulates Smith in order to arrive at "the truth" (i.e., the story of the murders). There is only the slightest suggestion in the film that Smith might be manipulating Capote (his paranoid remarks about Hickok), but those seem dismissed as irrelevant. Finally, after years, the Great Capote gets his man--Smith confesses, or gives his version of "what happened that night." It is obviously only a version, and a self-serving one--but the film presents this as The Truth (it's been forty years since I read In Cold Blood; I believe that is how Capote presented it in the book as well--I may be wrong here). But why would Capote need to know The Truth? Would he recognize it if he sat on it? Why should Perry Smith tell The Truth? Is what Perry Smith remembers The Truth? And the Truth for whom? All these questions could have been raised, and they're certainly familiar to even a Film101 student fresh from Roshomon. But not, apparently, to those who made the film, whose doting on Capote (and the great performance by Hoffman) kept them from dealing with any of these.

This is truly a dreadful movie. The Twilight Zone served up this sort of thing much more efficiently on a weekly basis at the same time, with production values that were hardly any worse, but infinitely more entertaining. Any of Serling's writers could have compressed this into 25 minutes with no loss whatsoever, and they could have shot it in an afternoon. Glynis Johns, for all she has to work with, could not possibly be less sexy, even by early 60s standards. The only redeeming feature is perhaps the historical interest of exposing how appallingly stupid psychiatric theory was at the time, and for many still is. But lots of other contemporary movies accomplish this in a much more interesting way -- say, David and Lisa, any movie with Anthony Perkins, even all those forgettable movies featuring the absurd psychiatrist with the vaguely cosmopolitan accent, and a perfectly trimmed lip mustache. It's a shame that they used the Caligari name, which is the only thing that keeps this alive.

This movie is effectively sentimental and manipulative, technically fine, but to me requires the same benefit-of-the-doubt that is given to a lot of movies in traditional genres: "this isn't an 'ordinary' boxing movie; it's a movie ABOUT boxing movies." In this way, all the usual clichés can be excused (as in "Unforgiven"--not a gratuitously violent movie, but a rumination on the genre itself)--the Morgan Freeman character, the gruff Eastwood character, even the trailer-park family and their Simon Legree Lawyer ('if you don't gimme the deed to yo' ranch, I'm gonna tie ya to a railroad ...'). Almost painful to view was the boxing career of H.S.--the obligatory fighting all odds, a rise to the top, culminating in tragedy, and sure enough--I felt like I was watching a bad horror movie and had to close my eyes as the hideous monster was about to appear (all of this very well done, of course; if you make the initial decision to see an Eastwood movie, you're rarely disappointed). The last third maybe breaks the mold; not many main-line movies pose the question of euthanasia so starkly (although I suppose not many movies show the main boxing character dressed as an Indian in a wrestling ring either); but the first two-thirds of the thing are absolutely predictable, and justifiable not as 'in the genre, but a tribute to the genre' (I don't think Requiem for a Heavyweight or Raging Bull requires this, and Im just not in the mood to talk about 'Yo, Adrian!').