Nosh 62: 'The Founder,' 'The Zookeeper's Wife'

By David Elliott

                                            

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Founder and The Zookeeper’s Wife

The Founder
America works hard, but hustles harder (when “we” elected hustle hog Donald Trump, that truth became history). In 1954 Ray Kroc was road-hustling milkshake mixers to diners and drive-ins, listening to Dale Carnegie inspiration records and, in his flat Midwestern voice, spieling fortune cookies (“increase supply, demand follows!”). Then he got a large order from distant San Bernardino, where the McDonald brothers (large, cheerful Mac and fussy control freak Dick) had opened a burger joint with clean, fast service and cheap, well-made food: 35 cents for a hamburger, fries and milkshake. Families welcomed McDonald’s into their California way of life, but it took a hustling salesman to turn it into an American icon.

According to The Founder, Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) has his Moses moment in San Berdoo, then his go-for-it smile becomes a golden arch over the nation (Dick designed the original, emblematic arches). Ray begins selling franchises, while the brothers keep quality control but never (on film) find a good lawyer. Ray pigs out on ambition, a real Super-sized Me, and a smart advisor prompts another epiphany: the real dough is not in wholesome burgers (two pickles each!) but control of the real estate below the outlets. Ray answers the old question “What profit a man if he should sell a billion burgers but lose his soul?” with “Great! Let’s sell another billion!” He suckers the brothers into finally selling out, and their very name is now his to brand on the world, even right near Red Square and the Vatican.

The movie greatly benefits from John Carroll Lynch as jolly Mac and Nick Offerman as original visionary Dick. Laura Dern is poorly used as Kroc’s first wife, homebody Ethel, but Linda Cardellini hustle-bustles as the sexy third wife, Joan, who rose to epic philanthropy. Above all, with a cold eye and fetching smile, Keaton gets his yummiest role since Birdman, sucking up the golden grease of success. If there is a dead rat of betrayal deep down in the fry oil, it doesn’t much bother Ray.

Director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side) and writer Robert Siegel (The Wrestler) have made a rather airbrushed movie, glowing with zippy nostalgia. The picture got hustled from the spotlight when the releasing company chose to open concurrently another film about a hustler, the inferior Gold. But The Founder, neatly boxed, is the real deal. If not the whole story, it’s a tasty one.

The Zookeeper’s Wife

The preview trailer leads with darling shots of Antonina Zabinski on a bike, followed by her prancing pal, a juvenile giraffe. The Zookeeper’s Wife gives us adorable animals right away, but then the date and place: Warsaw, Poland, summer of 1939. So we know it won’t go well for giraffes. Nor for Polish Jews, soon rammed into a hellish ghetto by the Nazis. It is only blocks away from the zoo run by lovely Antonina (Jessica Chastain) and her brave, stolid husband, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh).

What we’re not prepared for is seeing zoo critters shot for meat or sport by the Germans, the more exotic ones trucked away for “experiments.” Nor for Antonina, a sort of Polish Joan of Ark (Chastain’s accent is Slavic in a Casablanca way), comforting a Jewish girl just raped by soldiers, by offering as therapy pet her own beloved bunny. Nor for the weirdly staged scene of Antonina being virtually groped in public by a Nazi officer (Daniel Bruhl), while two huge buffalo mate behind them. Bruhl goes quickly from zoo lover to S.S. eugenics nut, hoping to revive an ancient breed of bison. He finally admits that “the war has turned” in January, 1945, as the Red Army encircles Warsaw (well, those buffalo were distracting).

The Zabinskis were real, not Disney. They lost most of their animals but savingly hid around 300 Jews, and deserve all the honors that came to them. But when director Niki Caro resorts to stock clichés while blithely equating ghetto Jews and zoo creatures, as if combining Shoah and We Bought a Zoo, we experience the squirm of unintended kitsch (even Mel Brooks steered clear of the Holocaust). As the raped girl, Shira Haas has a haunted face of “old” youth, capturing more of the nightmare than the entire rest of the cast.

SALAD (A List)

Twenty Ace Performances as Hustlers, Spielers, Biz-Dreamers:
Edward Arnold as Barney Glasgow (Come and Get It, 1936), Alec Guinness as Fagin (Oliver Twist, 1948), Orson Welles as Harry Lime (The Third Man, 1948), Vincent Price as James Reavis (The Baron of Arizona, 1950), Broderick Crawford as Augusto (Il Bidone, 1955), Eli Wallach as Sylvia Vaccaro (Baby Doll, 1955), Yul Brynner as Sergei (Anastasia, 1955), Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco (Sweet Smell of Success, 1957), Paul Newman as Ben Quick (The Long Hot Summer, 1958), Andy Griffith as Lonesome Rhodes (A Face in the Crowd, 1958), Burt Lancaster as Elmer (Elmer Gantry, 1960), Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock (The Producers, 1968), Bruce Dern as Jason Staebler (The King of Marvin Gardens, 1972), Richard Dreyfuss as Duddy (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1974), Jeff Bridges as Preston Tucker (Tucker: The Man and His Dream, 1988), John Turturro as Mac Vitelli (Mac, 1992), Richard Gere as Clifford Irving (The Hoax, 2006), Don Cheadle as Petey Greene (Talk to Me, 2007), Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodruff (Dallas Buyers Club, 2013) and Jennifer Lawrence as Joy (Joy, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Despite considerable progress on it, Citizen Welles chose to abandon Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his first RKO project (1940). And yet, it “influenced the subject of Citizen Kane, its setting and its form … swampy and fetid, Kane’s estate might be the malarial outpost over which Kurtz presides (in Conrad’s novel). Leland tells Kane, as if he were Kurtz, to sail away to a desert island and lord it over the monkeys.” (Quote from Peter Conrad’s book Orson Welles: The Stories of His Life).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Funny Face stretches its taffy plot across a gossamer frame of fantasy, and strikes modern taste as an ‘old’ musical of the color-vamp era. But for fans in 1957 it was less garish, less studio-rigged, less Broadway “bound” (both senses) than most big shows. They may be riveting, but we see the rivets in heavy efforts like Kiss Me Kate and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and the panting for Art in the famous Gene Kelly ballet sequences.” (From the Audrey Hepburn/Funny Face chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, yours from Amazon, Nook or Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

On a barge, Audrey Hepburn is joined by furry friends while making Funny Face (Paramount Pictures 1957; director Stanley Donen, cinematographer Ray June).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 61: 'Julieta,' 'Personal Shopper' & More

By David Elliott

                                             

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Julieta and Personal Shopper

Julieta
Pedro Almodóvar, directing his 21^st feature, is again riding a feminine carousel. Julieta has Julieta doubled. The very attractive, middle-aging woman of Madrid is played with subtle verve of nerves by Emma Suárez. In her written (and flashbacked) memories her younger self is played by Adriana Ugarte as a sensitive blond bombshell who loves the Greek classics. Ugarte is probably the Spanish master’s best wow since Penélope Cruz. And then there is Julieta’s daughter Antia, played as child and teen by several engaging girls. And the flinty housekeeper acted by Rossy de Palma, Pedro’s Gothic gargoyle of Spanish pride (no man of La Mancha can stand against her).

Once again, los hombres are harem accessories. Pedro, famously gay, displays the buff appeal of Daniel Grao as Xoan, the stud fisherman (hints of Ulysses) who fathered Antia. On the side Xoan pleasures Ava (Inma Cuesta), a strong, sexy sculptress of Greco-macho nudes. Gentlemanly Lorenzo (Dario Grandinetti) comforts the mature, often depressed Julieta. In el mundo de Pedro the males are on hand mainly to pay attention, cast some seed and pick up broken crockery. It’s the females, singly, in pairs, in triads, in generations, who cause and inhabit the Iberian weather of feelings. Soap opera? If so, closer to opera than soap.

Almodóvar compacted three short stories of Alice Munro, now Hispanicized (it was once planned in English for Meryl Streep). In this seamless narrative people still write letters and notes, and emotions find the flamenco cadence of Castilian speech. The axis, of course, is Julieta, who surrenders her teaching dream for motherhood. Her idyll is upended not only by Xoan but willful daughter Antia. No point in spelling this out, though “spoilers” mean little when a director makes each scene pregnant from the last, giving birth to the next. Hurt and guilt become Julieta’s new, Homeric sea, churned less by Catholicism than tides of desire and fidelity, though there is a holy trinity moment of young Julieta with her baby and her aging mother.

Buffs will relish the surrealism of a stag, running alongside a train, and doesn’t a suicidal passenger echo Luis Buñuel’s great actor Fernando Rey? In a Hitchcock overlay, the stars playing Julieta recall the two sides of Kim Novak in Vertigo, with Ugarte looking a lot like Novak’s “Madeleine.” Rich stuff, but less strategic than Almodóver’s fluency of moods and décor-in-depth (emphasis on red, blue and yellow). The crucial role of Antia could have used more development, but Julieta is Julieta. Having dreamed of ancient Greeks, she finds herself in a Spanish life suspended between tragedy and melodrama, consecrated to the compulsions of Pedro. In a word: Viva!

Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart made a smart jump away from the Twilight Saga movies by playing a personal assistant in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). It is less smart to go from the artistic to the arty, as Stewart and Assayas have done with Personal Shopper. The slender, elegant actress plays Maureen, the American scootering round Paris as “personal shopper” of clothing and jewelry for a celebrity fashion totem, a woman of almost Trumpean shallowness. Maureen is told to never wear the garments. Of course she does, covertly. On this flimsy hanger, Assayas suspends two vapid attempts at mystery.

The vaguely psychic Maureen sleuths the ghost of her twin brother, which leads to a spooky old house where (she notes) a phantom “vomits ectoplasm.” And Maureen is stalked by a man, often through creepy texting, which leads to a grisly murder (not hers). The pieces scarcely connect, unless you wish to be pious about auteurist intentions. Even when you thicken the gravy with Stewart half-nude (twice), a Victor Hugo séance, and Marlene Dietrich singing in Angst Deutsch, you’re still stuck with a meatloaf of murk. It took the mise-en-scène prize at Cannes, which means the elegant gravy can’t save the under-cooked meat.  

SALAD (A List)

The Ten Best Almodóver Movies (with stars and year):
Volver (con Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, 2006), All About My Mother (con Marisa Paredes, Cecilia Roth, Penélope Cruz, 1999), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (con Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, Rossy de Palma, 1988), Talk to Her (con Javier Cámara, Roserio Flores, 2002), Julieta (con Emma Suárez, Adriana Ugarte, Daniel Grao, 2016), Broken Embraces (con Penélope Cruz, Lluis Homar, Blanca Portillo, 2009), Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (con Victoria Abril, Antonio Banderas, 1990). Live Flesh (con Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Liberto Rabal, 1997), Law of Desire (con Carmen Maura, Antonio Banderas, 1987) and Kika (con Verónica Forqué, Peter Coyote, Victoria Abril, 1993).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles tried to diet his grand bulk in later years, but the gourmand in him was never silent. As when, lunching, he extolled the kiwi: “It’s the greatest fruit in the universe! But it’s ruined by all the French chefs who cut it up into thin slices. You cannot tell what it tastes like unless you eat it in bulk. Then it is marvelous, and it has the highest vitamin content of any fruit in the world.” (Orson Welles to Henry Jaglom, My Lunches With Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

While not a flop, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was not the big  1948 hit its later legend implied: “Women largely ruled the box office and Treasure lacked wide appeal. Males mostly took it as an odd, exotic Western (swell bandits, not enough horses and gunplay). Ballyhoo included theater managers staging ‘treasure hunts’ for tickets, with fake gold bars on display under armed guard. One puff shot showed Bogart talking into the ear of a burro. Fortunately, the film was spared its ‘love song’ by Dick Manning and Buddy Kaye: ‘For you are the treasure of Sierra Madre / And your love is the gold that I tenderly hold’.” (From the Humphrey Bogart / Treasure of the Sierra Madre chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, yours from Amazon, Nook or Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) faces another colorful crisis in Volver (El Deseo/ Sony Pictures Classics, 2006; director Pedro Almodóver, cinematographer Ester García).

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Nosh 60: 'Neruda' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Review of Neruda

Quite recently (see Nosh 49 below) Chile’s brilliant director Pablo Larraín made Jackie. He didn’t remove Jacqueline Kennedy from her fabled and tragic pedestal as a presidential widow. Instead, with Natalie Portman at her best, he put a living woman on  the pedestal, full of personal fury and anguished perplexity.

With more playfulness, and with a Latin flair for magical myth, Larraín revamps our sense of a great poet in Neruda. Back in 1994 Il Postino: The Postman starred Philippe Noiret as a wry, sage Neruda and Massimo Troisi as the simple Italian postman who falls in love with Neruda’s work. The endearing film sparked a big revival for Neruda’s love poems which, along with his radiant odes to basic and simple things, are the foundation of his popularity. But he was also a great political poet. True, as a devout Marxist he wrote some rhetorical rubbish, Stalinist boilerplate. But Neruda’s best political works, including most of the Canto General, have kept his name and verse sacred to idealists of the Left.

Larraín’s Neruda, contrived with writer Guillermo Calderón, is a pudgy peacock, a romantic egotist. It’s 1948, and Neruda is a leading Communist senator in Chile, The regime is falling into line with the new CIA’s Cold War thinking (the President is played by Alfredo Castro, wonderful as the insane criminal hooked on Saturday Night Fever in Larraín’s Tony Manero). Neruda goes into rather flamboyant hiding, then escapes over the mountains to Argentina. That really happened, but in Larraín’s take Neruda has a pursuing nemesis: the government’s fierce young agent Oscar.

He is played by Gael García Bernal, superb in Larraín’s political docu-drama No. Oscar is (or claims to be) the bastard son of a prostitute and a famous police chief. García Bernal makes his proven, zestful charisma neurotically potent, and seems to merge Inspector Clouseau with Jean-Louis Trintignant’s robotic Italian fascist in  The Conformist.  

A movie that salutes Neruda by opening with him urinating while denouncing his nearby, fellow senators as Yanqui stooges, and which has him fleeing from his lover’s most tender offer, to get drunk in a bordello, is not polishing a statue. Larraín has trifurcated Neruda: a brilliant troubadour of the dispossessed, a narcissist constructing his legend, and a sly, conspiratorial jester whose “act” thrills even Oscar. We begin to see Oscar as a bravura facet of Neruda’s grand, Whitman-wide imagination, as the guilty noir shadow leaking from Chile’s darkness, chasing Neruda’s flight to solar fame and glory.

The ending, in the high Andean snow, is as poetically vivid as Warren Beatty’s snowy exit in McCabe and Mrs. Miller. With splendid help from García Bernal and, as Neruda, Luis Ghecco (best known for comedy), and Delia del Carril as Neruda’s proud, artistic lover, and also Grieg and other composers, Larraín has fashioned a terrific movie. His vision of postwar Latin America (using ace imagery, urban and rural, by Sergio Armstrong) is irresistible. If you pay attention to credits, you may notice that the film’s “prop master” is Salvador Allende – the name of Neruda’s Marxist friend and president, martyred in 1973 by a CIA coup.

SALAD (A List)

A Dozen Dramatic Movies About Real Writers (star, subject, year): Oscar Wilde (Robert Morley as Wilde, 1960), The Belle of Amherst (Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson, 1976), Tales of Ordinary Madness (Ben Gazzara as Serking/Charles Bukowski, 1981), Dreamchild (Ian Holm as Lewis Carroll, 1985), My Left Foot (Daniel Day-Lewis as Christy Brown, 1989), An Angel at My Table (Kerry Fox as Janet Frame, 1990), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (Jennifer Jason-Leigh as Dorothy Parker, 1994), Before Night Falls (Javier Bardem as Reinaldo Arenas, 2000), Adaptation (Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman, 2002), Capote (Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote, 2005), Bright Star (Ben Whishaw as John Keats, 2008) and Trumbo (Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles is seldom thought of as an intimate entertainer, more like a master of the powerful effect. But his most popular success was in radio, where he “wanted to eliminate the ‘impersonal’ quality of most programs, which treated the listener like an eavesdropper. The radio, he recognized, was an intimate piece of living room furniture, and as a result the ‘invisible audience should never be considered collectively, but individually.’ This, incidentally, was an idea that FDR had understood better than any politician of his era.” (From James Naremore’s The Magic World of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

In a little country restaurant, in Alice Adams, Katharine Hepburn’s performance as Alice “pressures Pauline Kael’s remark that Hepburn ‘has always been too individualistic, too singular for common emotions.’ Here she is giving fairly common emotions an uncommonly stylish clarity. Words arrive emotionally liquid, tempo ebbs and flows, candor teases out truth. It’s a lesson in ‘good breeding’ beyond the social game.” (From the Katharine Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, from Amazon, Nook or Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Pernell Roberts (left) and Randolph Scott found a Western pinnacle in Ride Lonesome (Columbia/Ranown 1959; director Budd Boetticher, cinematographer Charles Lawton Jr.).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 59: 'The Red Turtle,' 'Land of Mine' & More

By David Elliott

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Red Turtle and Land of Mine

The Red Turtle
It opens with immense ocean waves, surging. You might lift your chin above the water, even though you’re in a dry theater seat. A bobbing head is seen – a drowning sailor, of course. He is swept to an island – one without people, of course. He must survive, of course. But dangerous tests of endurance, one involving a hidden pool and huge rocks, are so beautiful that it feels like Robinson Crusoe illustrated by Georgia O’Keefe in a Zen spell.   

The Red Turtle, almost wordless, seems to raft upon screen, driven by sea and sky and tropical vegetation. Its saturated washes of light and shadow are almost abstracted, and the sensuality has a primal grip. The sailor meets a grand turtle, much less a man Friday than a feminine Forever. Instead of the specific, amusing humanity of Tom Hanks in Cast Away, there is a purified aura of archetype, as if Adam the sailor is floating in the sea of Eve.

This is a Studio Ghibli production, yet not from Japan. Many French animators worked on  Michael Dudok de Wit's first feature. Hasao Miyazaki, Ghibli's famous master, saw animated shorts by the Dutchman and said if they ever needed a foreign director, it would be De Wit. His partner, the late Isao Takahata, went to Paris to produce. They result is a hybrid, like Lautrec's absorption of Japanese prints. The binding force is love of nature (plus a little cuteness: four perky sand crabs).
 

The Black Stallion loses a little magic when the boy and horse are rescued from the enchanting island (Mickey Rooney, Teri Garr and a race provide fine compensation). This story loses some of its primal purity by reaching for Jungian, magical-realist symbolism. But there is always the epic horizon, and the crimson shell of the sea beast has a similar curve of poetry. As a Euro-Ghibli vision, The Red Turtle makes Ninja turtles seem like very tame terrapins.      

Land of Mine

Using a feeble word-play title for a horrific story, Land of Mine is a film about captive German soldiers, forced to clear land mines from Danish beaches in 1945. If these were S.S. men and hardened brutes, we’d say: tough luck. But these 14 “Krauts” are scared boys drafted into the Wehrmacht at war’s end. When you see these adolescent children sifting the sands with pitiful tools and no protection, it is a harsh test of Danish morality, one from which even Soren Kierkegaard might have flinched.

Denmark’s WWII was almost a picnic next to Poland’s or Russia’s, but we can understand the cynical bitterness of Sgt. Rasmussen (Roland Meller), a Dane working for English officers even more hardened than himself. The boys try to man-up, though they know the mission has a steep slope of destruction. Rasmussen comes to see them not as Nazi guilt ciphers (they never express a political idea) but as individuals bound by fear. They deserve the food that he steals from military supplies, and his growing sympathy. Tagging along are Rasmussen’s dog and a neighboring little girl.

Land of Mine doesn’t ratchet fear quite like  Ten Seconds to Hell (1959), in which Jack Palance leads a POW team in defusing unexploded bombs (I sweated blood for that one). While director Martin Zandvliet isn’t much of a stylist, the boys facing terrible pressures are touchingly vulnerable. At film’s end we learn that of the two thousand war prisoners made to de-mine Denmark, many were juvenile. About half were killed or maimed in 1945, which Germans call Year Zero.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Good End-of-WWII Films (nation, year, director):
Rome Open City (Italy, 1945, Roberto Rossellini), The Best Years of Our Lives (US, 1946, William Wyler), Germany Year Zero (Italy-Germany, 1948, Rossellini), The Search (US-Germany, 1948, Fred Zinnemann), Decision Before Dawn (US-Germany, 1951, Anatole Litvak), The Last Ten Days (Germany, 1955, G.W. Pabst), The Burmese Harp (Japan-Burma, 1956, Kon Ichikawa), Ten Seconds to Hell (US, 1959, Robert Aldrich), The Bridge (Germany, 1959, Bernhard Wicki), The Truce (Italy, 1997, Francesco Rosi), The White Countess (Britain-China, 2005, James Ivory) and The Sun (Russia-Japan, 2005, Alexander Sokurov).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Citizen Welles disliked the “type” for which he was often cast: “Many of the big characters I’ve played are various forms of Faust, and I am against every form of Faust, because I believe it’s impossible for a man to be great without admitting that there’s something greater than himself, whether it’s the law, or God, or egotism … (but) in playing Faust, I want to be just and loyal to him, to give him the best of myself and the best arguments that I can find for him … our world is Faustian.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, in This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“While in this book we lose the rapid, sensual engulfment of actually viewing (the movies are all out on disc), we experience what happens more discerningly. No voice can ‘say it all’ about films, so I have recruited other lovers of these movies and I hope the quotations have a fugal effect (‘A fugue has need of all its voices’ – Aldous Huxley).” (From the Intro to my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo, dandy in The Maltese Falcon (Warner Bros. 1941; director John Huston, cinematographer Arthur Edeson).

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