By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Mother!
and Neither Wolf Nor Dog
Mother!
The
movie opens with Jennifer Lawrence’s face on fire, like a Barbie-cue doll. We
guess that Mother! isn’t going to be
lots of fun. Darren Aronofsky also directed Black
Swan, which I loathed. The creepy ballet fantasy won Natalie Portman an
Oscar (beating Lawrence in her breakthrough, Winter’s Bone). But never mind Oscars, let’s talk concepts.
Aronofsky,
who also gave Mickey Rourke his glory revival with The Wrestler, is a kitsch dynamo. He confuses ding-dong concepts
with ideas, and silly shocks with emotions. He puts Lawrence to work as Mother,
even though she’s not yet a mom. She sure is working, rehabbing a big Victorian
house that must be the future Bates Hotel (“ho” as in horror). It isn’t so much
the blood in the floorboards, or the bizarre toad, or the icky thing in the
toilet that bothers Mother, it’s all the collateral mess. As her new “paradise”
goes to hell, she’s like a demented renovator on Love It or List It. Her home
obsession annoys her husband, a poetic genius now bereft of muse (he turns for
inspiration to a lustrous crystal). Impotence is a tough role for Javier
Bardem, who rams scenes with his great, Picasso bull’s head.
Ed
Harris plays a coy, weird visitor, dying from smoking, and Michelle Pfeiffer is
his wife, dying to steal scenes from Lawrence. The former Catwoman claws the
younger beauty with “You’re not going to be so young forever.” Family violence
somehow sparks Bardem into renewed virility, Lawrence gets pregnant, and the
script spawns a litter of bad ideas. We detect fragments of the Book of
Genesis, the mythic system of C.G. Jung, and about half the dumb papers written
for middle-school English classes.
Aronofsky’s
reliance on close shots by a dizzy camera builds to panic, then pandemonium.
Bardem, thrilled by his revived cojones
and a new poem, lets in a horde of crazed fans. They trash the home (this is
not a spoiler; the movie continually spoils itself). A riotous orgy escalates
to fire, terror, even symbolic cannibalism. Conceptually Mother! is all over the place, but nowhere. Maybe not since George
C. Scott gave the world The Savage Is
Loose has serious talent so ludicrously embarrassed itself.
Neither Wolf Nor Dog
The
“white rage” fueling Trumpism should take a respite from angry self-pity. One
way to gain perspective is to think hard about Native Americans. Start by
watching Steven Lewis Simpson’s cheaply made but finely observed Neither Wolf Nor Dog. Kent Nerburn
scripted from his 1996 novel, about a writer (yep, Nerburn) who is asked by a
tribal elder, Dan, to come to the Lakota Sioux’s Pine Ridge Reservation in
South Dakota. Dan offers memories and wisdom for Kent to write a book. Kent
faces testing travels on “the res,”
where stark landscapes are foregrounded by family love but also poverty,
alcoholism, and a chicken shack called Buster’s Last Stand.
The
leisurely pace builds pressure. Uneasy, self-doubting Kent begins to understand.
This road movie, mainly about tragic Indian history, has very intimate
tensions, especially when Kent deals with his Lakota driver, old Dan’s bluntly
angry friend Grover (Richard Ray Whitman, with a touch of Jack Palance). Not
even Brando, famously a friend of Native Americans, could have kept Kent from
seeming rather like a test tube in which latent white guilt is shaken into
honest, emotional shame. But actor Christopher Sweeney is very credible in
absorbing the lessons, including a haunted visit to the cemetery of the 1890
Wounded Knee massacre.
The
film’s special treasure and enabler of insight is David Bald Eagle as Dan. If
you could overlap Chief Dan George in Little
Big Man, Russell Means in Last of the
Mohicans and Sam Jaffe’s High Lama in Lost
Horizon, you’d come near this small, round monument to endurance. His eyes
and voice express the pained heart of a conquered people whose pride will never
surrender. No tom-tom hokum, no rhetoric, just straight news. Bald Eagle saw
the film before dying at 97 this summer, and was rightly pleased.
SALAD (A List)
Twelve Horror-Fright Films of Lasting
Quality, in order of arrival:
Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), Vampyr
(Dreyer, 1932), Island of Lost Souls
(Kenton, 1932), Cat People (Tourneur,
1942), Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Siegel, 1956), Eyes Without a Face
(Franju, 1960), Village of the Damned
(Rilla, 1960), The Innocents
(Clayton, 1961), Rosemary’s Baby
(Polanski, 1968), The Shining
(Kubrick, 1980), Cronos (Del Toro,
1993) and In My Skin (De Van, 2002).
Bonus No. 13: Phil Kaufman’s fine 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Even
Big O sometimes faltered: “Orson Welles described a time he was filming Touch of Evil and felt he was flailing
as both actor and director. When the camera was on he kept flubbing his lines.
His co-star Akim Tamiroff was in the scene, just off camera. When Orson yelled
‘Cut’ on his own scene, Tamiroff came over to him and whispered, ‘You’re the man.’ That’s all it took. Welles said he never
looked back from that moment. The praise clinched it. This is how he put it:
‘You have to make the actor believe he is better than he is. That is the job.
More than confidence, give him arrogance.”
(From Jeffrey Tambor’s new memoir Are You
Anybody?)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Perhaps
Akim Tamiroff’s finest work for Welles was as Bloch, the sad, stooging client
of the advocate Hastler (Welles) in The
Trial, a Kafka tour-de-force (and farce): “Bloch squirms, bug-on-pin.
Hastler confides mentioning his case to a judge, but ‘in these matters there
are so many conflicting opinions that the confusion is impenetrable.’ His tone is almost deadly, and poor Bloch falls to
his knees. Joseph K, appalled, tries to lift him as Hastler demands ‘Who is
your advocate?’ Bloch squeals ‘You, you!’
and crawls over the huge bed to kiss his monstrous master’s hands. Bloch’s rear
rises, as if mooning his own abasement.” (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies,
from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a
still, it’s a distillation.
Grandi
(Akim Tamiroff) attempts to steer Quinlan (Orson Welles) in Touch of Evil (Universal, 1958; director
Orson Welles, cinematographer Russell Metty).
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