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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