By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Wind
River and Columbus
Wind River
With
his compact, rather beaten-up fist of a face, Jeremy Renner is exactly right
for Corey Lambert, his best role since breaking through in films with The Hurt Locker. Corey is a federal
tracker and hunter (wolves, big cats) on the raw slopes of the Wind River
Reservation in Montana. Looking for a mountain lion, he finds a murdered young
woman’s remains. She is the daughter of a proud but now broken Native American
(her fate echoes a tragedy in Corey’s own past). Gil Birmingham as the grieving
father, Martin, rises next to Renner. When did you last see a big Indian man
cry in a film? Martin is not Iron Eyes Cody, shedding a symbolic tear in a TV
commercial.
The
writer and director is Taylor Sheridan, who scripted Sicario and Hell or High
Water. In this movie so full of pain and winter, the only cop-show touch is
Corey guiding and helping a young FBI agent, though Elizabeth Olsen doesn’t flounder
into tenderfoot clichés as she absorbs his lessons (“This isn’t the land of
back-up, Jane. This is the land of you’re on your own”).We know there will be primal
violence, yet even the rape scene doesn’t unhinge the story’s intricate balance
of elements. Wind River, “inspired by
actual events,” is a sort of Western with snowmobiles (just one horse). It is also
a stark lancing of family tragedy and, without pushing, a view of Native
American life as a rustic depresson where exploited poverty easily tips into
drink, drugs and crime (the key villains are white).
Renner
is exactly the man needed for this duty. Without macho brag and strut, he has
the intuitive, manly presence that Randolph Scott and Robert Mitchum once had
in the high saddle. The film would make a fine partner with Track of the Cat, William Wellman’s
strange 1954 Western in which Mitchum hunted, and was hunted by, an almost mythic
cougar. Wind River delves into people,
astutely invading the inner wilds that so often bewilder them.
Columbus
Curious,
how modern architecture fits into movies: for futuristic menace (Metropolis) or exaltation (Things to Come), for vaulting ambition (The Fountainhead) or high-top luxury (North by Northwest), for morally suspect
status (La Notte), for satirical wit
(Playtime), for enigmatic display (Contempt). Famous structures resonate oppressively
in Blade Runner but frame hopes of
transformation in Gattaca. Also
powerful are splendid documentaries like Ken Burns’s Frank Lloyd Wright, Yeshiro Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí and My
Architect, Nathaniel Kahn’s brave tribute to his father Louis.
Which
brings a curiosity: Columbus, not
about the explorer – has there ever been a good movie about him? – but Columbus,
Indiana. The modest town (pop. 44,000) has a
constellation of “mid-century modern” edifices that place it on the aesthetic
pilgrimage map. Cinephile and video essayist Kogonada’s first feature, set in Columbus,
tells about the young architectural guide Casey, loyally bound to her recovering
(addiction) mom. And a visiting Korean translator, Jin, who feels alienated
from his stricken (comatose) father, an architectural scholar. Walking and
talking, they twine like tendrils as she shows him Columbus and they mull the
buildings. Notably masterworks by Finland’s Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero,
but also a covered bridge, an old inn, even an alley. And each other.
The
shifting perspectives of mood and challenge, of imposing buildings and embracing
sites, has the kind of circling, space-shaped drama you can explore in big Japanese
screen paintings. One-named Kogonada and his cinematographer, Elisha Christian,
lace angles and details and surprises without plot rigging. Excellent Haley Lu
Richardson’s searching growth as Casey is stimulated by the more worldly Jin
of John Cho, far from Harold and Kumar.
The film is an elegant drafting board on which all the lines connect (as in the
recent, architecturally smart Paterson).
The characters and the elegant art can lure you, like Columbus crossing an
inland sea both provincial and cosmopolitan.
SALAD (A List)
Ten Movies That Impressively Use Modern
Architecture
(with
director and year): North by Northwest
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), A Summer Place
(Delmer Daves, 1959), The Bellboy (Jerry Lewis, 1960), Contempt
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), I Am Cuba
(Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964), Playtime
(Jacques Tati, 1967), The Passenger
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1975), Gattaca
(Andrew Niccol, 1997), My Architect (Nathaniel
Kahn, 2003) and Visual Acoustics
(Eric Bricker, 2008).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles played only Claudius in Hamlet,
but on BBC TV in 1963 he “and Peter O’Toole discussed Hamlet. While O’Toole proposes a textually underfunded theory that
Gertrude is a lesbian, Welles propounds something more interesting. That the
principal fact about Hamlet is that he is a genius, a Mozartean prodigy of
thought and feeling out of step with his own world, (an idea) which cannot help
spilling thought and insight. It is a very Wellesian insight, a true one, and a
significant instruction for the whole play.” (From writer-director Dominic Dromgoole’s
new book Hamlet Globe to Globe).
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Alec
Guinness as the painter Jimson in The
Horse’s Mouth gives a wonderful art lesson to a philistine friend, staring
at a Jimson painting: “I’ll show you how to look at a picture … Don’t look at
it. Feel it with your eyes. First feel the shapes in the flat areas, like
patterns. Then feel it in the round. Feel all the smooth and sharp edges, the
lights and the shades, the cools and the warms. Now feel the chair, the bathtub
… the woman. Not any old tub or
woman, but the tub of tubs, the woman of
women.” (From the Alec Guinness/The
Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available on Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Sanctuary
ceiling of Eero Saarinen’s North Christian Church, seen in Columbus (Front Row, 2017; director Kogonada, cinematographer
Elisha Christian).
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