Friday, October 6, 2017

Nosh 82: 'Brad's Status,' 'Polina' & More

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



APPETIZER: Reviews of Brad’s Status and Polina
Brad’s Status
Ben Stiller’s got the whole world of Brad in his hands, as well as Brad’s Status. His Sacramento life is quite nice: good job serving not-for-profit enterprises; a lovingly supportive wife, Melanie (Jenna Fischer); a late-teen son, Troy (Austin Abrams), flying  with dad to apply at Harvard and other posh Eastern schools. This lad is so cool and thoughtful, such a budding mensch, I’d say he should drop his musical dream and become a diplomat.

The movie, largely narrated and thought-spoken by Stiller, is mainly about the algae bloom of neurotic anxiety in Brad’s head. The trip reminds him of his college days, when his future beckoned like God’s red carpet. Now Brad not only envies his blithe, sturdy son, he suffers midlife jealousy of old buddies, alpha-males in the fast lane. The movie, written and directed by Mike White (script shaper of Chuck & Buck and School of Rock), has cartoonish fun with these over-attainers. One (White) is in Hollywood gay, party bliss mode. Another (Luke Wilson) is piling loot as a shady investor. Another (Jemaine Clement) lives a Hawaiian beach dream with micro-bikini sexpots. The chief piece of work is Craig (Michael Sheen), a celebrated White House intimate who preens in a restaurant like Achilles admiring himself in a battle shield.

Most of the best humor, and seriousness, comes from Stiller. He again puts the accent in “comic actor” on “actor.” He’s as nakedly exposed as a Woody Allen noodle, yet with real insides. Even his near choke-up, listening to Dvorak’s Humoresque, has validity. True, the movie’s “issues” are a little la-di-da in this stormy, Harvey-Irma-Maria time. And at moments the film seems like a weird double promo for Harvard and Pringles. It’s a small work, rather glib, but the father-son combination unpacks some credible ideas and feelings, all finely performed. 



Polina
Polina in Polina is not Polish but Russian. Part of the film’s lure is the musical flow of Russian speech, sprinkled with French. The effect is fairly Tolstoyan, and there is a touch of Tolstoy’s Natasha in Polina at 8, played by delicate Veronika Zhovnytska. Her doting dad takes her to the snowy woods to hunt rabbits, and the fawn-like girl sees a proud elk, rivaling the majestic Scottish stag in The Queen. Alas, dad could be hunted himself, since he’s a minor figure in one of the criminal operations of the post-Soviet era.

Polina’s passion is ballet (hence the French). Her dance teacher into adolescence (Alexei Guskov) sternly shapes her to become a ballerina at the great Bolshoi in Moscow. We expect the film to exalt the continuance of that old, imperial heritage. But not long after pencil-thin Polina is taken over by teen sylph Anastasia Shevtsova, she pirouettes towards the West. Lured to lusty Provence by a lofty dance hunk (Niels Schneider), Polina faces the challenge not only of debut sex (softly gauzed by hanging tutus) but a different dance culture. For a while, having left the Bolshoi academy’s barre, she is doing bar work (yep, serving beer) in Brussels. Soon, a new partner stirs new moves. 

Lovingly detailed, dance-driven and mood-spun (by director Valerie Müller and choreo-director Angelin Preljocaj), the film charms. Despite one clear handicap. Although she’s a camera vision worthy of Degas, Shevtsova and her male partners dance better than they act. When Juliette Binoche turns up as a modern dance mentor, passionately engaged, the film matures. Like most dance movies, Polina is exciting in motion but otherwise a touch static. Some clichés land en pointe, but Franco-Russian graces still cast a Tolstoyan spell.
 
SALAD (A List)
Twelve Strong Movies About Dance and Dancers:
Shall We Dance (Sandrich-Astaire, 1937), The Red Shoes (Powell, 1948), Invitation to the Dance (Kelly, 1956), Black Orpheus (Camus, 1959), Saturday Night Fever (Badham, 1977), Dirty Dancing (Ardolino, 1987), Shall We Dance (Suo, 1997), Billy Elliot (Daldry, 2000), Mad Hot Ballroom (Agrelo, 2005), La Danse (Wiseman, 2009), Pina (Wenders-Baush, 2011) and The Fits (Holmer, 2015).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson Welles, an inspiration even for Ed Wood Jr. (see Tim Burton’s Ed Wood), made art even at humble Republic Pictures, with Macbeth (1947). Having prepped with a stage production in Salt Lake City, Utah, he filmed at the studio, sometimes using horse-opera sets dressed up as dark, dank, medieval Scotland. They included “the salt mine that the cowboys always used to get lost in. That became the great hall of the castle. Our costumes, lamentably, were rented from Western Costume, except for Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth … mine looked like the Statue of Liberty, but there was no dough for another, so I was stuck with it.” (Welles, a bit  painfully amused, to Peter Bogdanovich in This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Robert Altman filmed The Long Goodbye precisely because he wished to update Raymond Chandler’s tired, baggy novel to 1972, and use Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe: “Source piety never had a chance, and those who feel that Altman sabotaged Chandler should ponder the novelist’s statement to his agent: ‘I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I cared about the people, about the strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tried to be honest looks in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.’ Gould, working with Altman, gave that a spin and a bounce like no other actor.” (From the Elliott Gould/The Long Goodbye chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.



Angora-sweatered Ed (Johnny Depp) strikes a rather Wellesian note in Ed Wood (Touchstone 1994; director Tim Burton).

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