Nosh 89: 'Wonderstruck,' 'Loving Vincent' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Wonderstruck and Loving Vincent

Wonderstruck

I always wanted to see the vast scale model of New York City created for the 1964 world’s fair, now at the Queens Museum and still periodically rehabbed (though the WTC towers remain intact). Now I feel I’ve been there, thanks to Todd Haynes’s cornucopian Wonderstruck. His remarkably complex version (and vision) of a children’s story book concerns two pre-teen kids: deaf mute Rose (subtle, demure Millicent Simmonds), who sets off alone from Hoboken in the 20s to find her gone mother in the huge city; and Ben (expressive Oakes Fegley), a fatherless child in the 1970s, made deaf by lightning (yes, it’s that sort of movie).

With its longing for lost parents, this is like Oliver Twist speeding on a twisty double track that converges at the American Museum of Natural History (and for Ben, also the Queens Museum). Rose’s runaway quest is shot in 1920s duotone, the skyline evoking old Goldiggers sets and Murnau’s great Sunrise. She adores a silent-film queen (Julianne Moore, striking fine retro poses) and, being deaf, absorbs silent movies with special devotion. The newly afflicted Ben flees into a color-popping 70s Manhattan, including David Bowie music and a teemingly funky 42^nd St. Their twin adventures, increasingly braided, are homages to history, bookstores, museums, dioramas, New York and (most soulful) the mental topography of the deaf.

Haynes’s imaginative fluency, backed by editor Alfonso Goncalves and cinematographer Ed Lachman, doubles down on the stylistic, conceptual daring that made his Far From Heaven, I’m Not There, Velvet Goldmine and Carol seductive. He makes the great natural history museum a fountainhead of fantasy well beyond its smart, comical use in the Night at the Museum series. Haynes got Brian Selznick to adapt his novel (another Selznick book ignited a fresh creative burst from Martin Scorsese in Hugo).

But here’s the rub, an itchy one. Scorsese went baroque in a fairly straight, showman’s way. Haynes has so many literary curlicues going, bending on two time frames, that we often want to shout (as Ben does) “What’s going on?!” The treatment of deafness, with pauses for writing things down, tends to gum the narrative pulse. We feel our heads spilling over, with almost too many questions. Wonderstruck is as lovably poetic as Dreamchild, as mad for New York as The Cruise, as high on fruitful wonder as Hugo, but it’s also a brain teaser that turns a little chalky with obscure, talky connections. Still, it’s cherishable chalk.  

Loving Vincent

As man and artist, Vincent Van Gogh was seen (to the degree he was seen) as unnervingly odd. That began changing a few years after his death by gunshot wound in 1890. Today Vincent is modern art’s solar god, a genius who stamps culture, including refrigerator magnets and coffee mugs. Numerous movies have been made about him, and of those surely Loving Vincent is the most, well, odd. He was  a sick man (suspects: porphyria, bipolarity, sunstroke, syphilis) and now I feel rather schizo about this new tribute to a great artist.

About 150 animation artists painted 65,000 cells, transforming  famous Van Gogh pictures into activated images (a few are simple backdrops, and memory flashbacks are rendered black-and-white). Rain falls as dripping pigment, Vincentian trees bend in the wind, immortal portraits come to talking life, the famed starry sky rolls voluptuously, actors (including Saoirse Ronan and Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson) provide facial templates and voices. The color-blazing effect engrosses, yet with a strain of redundancy. The innate magic of Van Gogh’s paintings is that, although flat and framed, they still create a teeming life that invades our imagination with his throbbing, passionately stylized world.

Seeking plot and suspense, Loving Vincent begins after his death, then tries to sleuth how and why he died. The postman Roulin’s son Armand (Douglas Booth) rushes around questioning people who knew him (very few knew that he was great). This becomes a kind of Victorian “penny dreadful” of teasing suspects, furtive tangents and fevered speculations. The tragedy of Vincent dying at 37, after a nine-year storm of painting, turns into a morbid rural melodrama. Directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman and their largely Polish team achieve visual marvels, yet their framework is a whodunit soaper. If you want the story truly performed, turn to Vincent (Kirk Douglas) and brother Theo (James Donald) and Gauguin (Anthony Quinn) in Lust for Life, and to Vincent (Tim Roth) and Theo (Paul Rhys) in Vincent & Theo.          

SALAD (A List)

A Dozen Major Movies About Real Modern Painters:

Lust for Life (Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh), La Mystere Picasso (Pablo as himself), Moulin Rouge (Jose Ferrer as Toulouse-Lautrec), Wolf at the Door (Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin), Vincent & Theo (Tim Roth as Van Gogh), Pollock (Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock), Georgia O’Keefe (Joan Allen as O’Keefe), Frida (Salma Hayak as Frida Kahlo), Edvard Munch (Geir Westby as Munch), Lovers of Montparnasse (Gérard Phillipe as Amedeo Modigliani), Love is the Devil (Derek Jacobi as Francis Bacon) and Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy as himself).    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles was certainly the hero of his life, but didn’t care to play heroic roles: “The character of suave philosopher-criminal Harry Lime (The Third Man) suited him like a Savile Row suit. In a 50-year acting career, he never played a hero. Rather, his tastes ran to men as flawed as they were flamboyant – the murderous Renaiassance grandee Cesare Borgia in Prince of Foxes, obsessed and suicidal Ahab in his stage version of Moby-Dick, a roistering but finally pathetic Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight and, of course, citizen Charles Foster Kane, so desperate for love that he exhausts and alienates everyone who might provide it.” (From John Baxter’s introduction to the novel of Welles’s Mr. Arkadin).

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The men of Treasure of the Sierra Madre “are not heroes. They are sub-social, rather comically so when Howard speaks of retiring on a modest haul of gold and Fred snorts, ‘Well sure, you’re old. I’m young. I need dough and plenty of it.” Bogart perfected boorishness. When interloper Cody takes some water, Fred calls him a thief. To Cody’s ‘I thought I was among civilized men’ he grunts, ‘Who’s not civilized?’ – and decks him.” (From the Bogart/Treasure of the Sierra Madre 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.

Slim Pickens faces his stunning end in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (MGM, 1973; director Sam Peckinpah, cinematographer John Coquillon).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 88: 'The Florida Project,' 'Murder on the Orient Express'

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

Note: the next Nosh, no. 89, will arrive Dec. 1.

APPETIZER: Reviews of The Florida Project and Murder on the Orient Express

The Florida Project
April 30, 1969: a Disney press conference at the Ramada Inn off Highway 50 in Ocoee, Fla. – and I was there. But even as a very green “cub” reporter (for the Chicago Daily News), I was not very impressed by the scale model for the coming Walt Disney World, nor the flat speech given by nice, dull Roy O. Disney, Walt’s elder brother and junior partner. Roy built Walt’s final dream, not achieving the total Vision Thing but making the company billions (and making sleepy Orlando boom, if not bloom).

I never went back, yet a fine sequel has come: The Florida Project. Sean Baker’s movie, bursting with enough Floridean light and color to make the sun wear shades, was filmed in (don’t snicker) Kissimmee, 26 miles from Ocoee and 12 miles from Orlando. The film’s big motel, the Magic Castle, is supposedly very close to Disney World, and near Seven Dwarfs Lane, the huge-domed Orange World, the Twistee Treat and rotting, abandoned motels and condos. The Castle’s manager, Bobby (Willem Dafoe), has painted it candy purple and slaves to keep it civilized, despite cheap fixtures, bedbugs and many “guests” who are welfare tenants and remnants like Gloria (Sandy Kane), an old showgirl who sunbaths topless at the pool.

Dafoe buzzes with alert, fretful attention and almost saintly forbearance (his Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ was an excellent rehearsal). The film’s dramatic tripod rests on Bobby’s anxious concern about single mom Halley (Bria Vinaite) and her child Moonee. Halley, with a flashing smile and the vinegar sass of an amateurish whore, is both a playful chum-mom and a trash pile of immaturity. Her crude talk and breezy attitude are imitated by smart little Moonee. As Moonee, Brooklyn Prince is a funny, vulnerable, snarky but innocent update on Tatum O’Neal in Paper Moon. When she zips a zing like (at a buffet) “This is the life, better than a cruise,” a Tinkerbell rings: a little star is born.

Director, editor, writer Baker (with co-writer Chris Bergoch) also made 2015’s comedy Tangerine, about transsexual hookers in West Hollywood. Using that tripod of characters, Baker achieves a triple vision: the gaudy Florida of kitsch vulgarity, as seen by motel children living half-wild; a convulsed world of fearful, hard-luck adults, where a simple man like Bobby towers morally; and nearby Disney World, a fantasy of safe (and expensive) family fun. He combines the loose-jointed ensemble fluency of Robert Altman and the pop-eyed visual flair of Wes Anderson. In the closing 20 minutes all the strings converge, bringing one of the great finish shots in modern film. Like every director of hardy appetite, Baker captures a world by creating it. The parts can seem ragged, yet the living whole feels fiercely true. 

Murder on the Orient Express

It has been promoted like a last call for old thrills, mostly for the over-50s who might remember past versions, but Murder on the Orient Express overcame my resistance. The latest is a plush, credible entertainment, or as credible as the old Agatha Christie plot will allow. Deluxe suspects twist and tremble in a vortex of clues, though the only corpse is a gangster sharpie. It’s unlikely that the 1974 version with Albert Finney will ever be matched for pure star power on a posh train. But this new one is on the top side of a tradition that was dying when that picture was made: the star-spangled contraptions, crammed with major faces doing minor acting (in the desperate studio era of The VIPs, The Yellow Rolls Royce, The Longest Day, How the West Was Won, etc.).

Kenneth Branagh directed, smoothly polishing suspense rails as the Orient Express (Istanbul to Calais) rolls only to rural, 1930s Yugoslavia. The swank train is stranded by a wintry avalanche, leaving Belgian ultra-sleuth Hercule Poirot (Branagh) with a surfeit of suspects. To follow every deductive tangent would be silly, but tension mounts to a striking crisis of judgment, guilt, revenge and melodrama. Along with all the luxe (glossy woodwork, Deco glass, couture, champagne, Cole Porter), we get a   tricky overhaul of the Lindbergh kidnap tragedy (1932-36). Performances are deft: Johnny Depp, Derek Jacobi, Willem Dafoe, Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr., though stylish Judi Dench, Penélope Cruz, Daisy Ridley and Michelle Pfeiffer are a bit under-served (Pfeiffer, using her age well, has a good crescendo).

Swift, elegant, not too festooned with CGI display, this diversion  has the sophisticated flair of Branagh, surely the wittiest Poirot since Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile (1978). The dapper affectations, the éclat of precise innuendo, the accent pitched well above Inspector Clouseau, make his commanding performance the binding element. If we must filch old gems from the past, Branagh is a fine jeweler. He doesn’t cut the stones as if they were only coals to feed the furnace of plot.

SALAD (A List)

Twelve Strong Movies Set in Florida:

The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), Key Largo (John Huston, 1948), Distant Drums (Raoul Walsh, 1951), The Strange One (Jack Garfein, 1957), Wind Across the Everglades (Nicholas Ray, 1958), Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan,1981), Cross Creek (Martin Ritt, 1983), 92 in the Shade (Thomas McGuane, 1992), Ruby in Paradise (Victor Nuñez, 1993), Rosewood (John Singleton, 1997) and Ulee’s Gold (Victor Nuñez, 1997). 

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson was not fond of the Method, or intellectual acting, or even some classical effects of his old friend and early stage mentor Micheál Mac Liammoír, playing Iago (very well) in the 1952 Othello: “There was a moment near the end of a scene that has remained a standing joke between Micheál and myself for years. He had to pick up Othello’s cloak and go. And he picked it up, and looked very meaningful and all that sort of stuff, and finally I said to him, ‘Micheál, pick up the cloak and go!’ And that’s become a sort of basic thing I use when an actor wants to enrich his performance, I say, ‘Pick up the cloak and go!” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles. The beautifully restored Othello recently came out as a Criterion double disc.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Katherine Hepburn’s subtle brilliance in the small restaurant scene in Alice Adams, with Fred MacMurray’s Arthur, “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 open truth. It’s a lesson in ‘good breeding’ beyond the social game. She even chides Arthur’s dull, ‘laconic eloquence’ by warning about loose talk.” (From the Hepburn/Alice Adams chapter in my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Cigar aloft, Orson Welles armors up to be Othello, as his Desdemona (Suzanne Cloutier) watches (Mercury/United Artists, 1952; director Orson Welles).

For previous Noshes, scroll below. 

Nosh 87: 'LBJ' (Lyndon Johnson), 'Take Every Wave' (Laird Hamilton)

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of LBJ and Take Every Wave

LBJ
“All the Way with LBJ.” Theaters that show double-bills – how many are left? – can now echo the 1964 campaign slogan with a fine pairing: All the Way (Bryan Cranston as Lyndon B. Johnson, 2016) with LBJ (Woody Harrelson, 2017). Granted, neither grapples with his big, ruinous mistake: Vietnam. But each is a powerful lesson in the charisma of political power incarnated. Of the two I’d vote, by a narrow margin, for Harrelson’s. Rob Reiner, surely no LBJ fan when he was the “meathead” son on All in the Family, directed this Johnson tribute to embrace him without fawning. The details, richly packed, provide a discerning view of the 36^th president (1963-69) as, in high prime, a brave and very impressive figure.

Cranston’s excellent performance came from a stage play, Harrelson’s by way of Joey Hartstone’s script. Over half of the picture uses flashbacks from Nov. 22, 1963, when Vice President Johnson, believing his political future was over, was vaulted into power by the killing of President John F. Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan, credible). That it happened in LBJ’s Texas tossed a deeper shadow on Johnson, furthering the bitterness of Robert Kennedy (febrile Michael Stahl-David). The venom of the relationship came mostly from Bobby. Johnson also had to deal with a nation in shock, and JFK’s legacy left unfinished. The movie focuses on how Johnson turned away from his Southern roots and the bond with his Dixie mentor, Sen. Richard Russell (excellent Richard Jenkins), by reviving the ideals of his New Deal youth and his heartfelt concern for American blacks (the neat peg to personalize that is his esteem for his cook, a black woman).

Johnson championed Kennedy’s civil rights bill with a canny, ruthless urgency that JFK never summoned, using the fallen leader as the key to force overdue change. LBJ climaxes with his first speech to Congress as president, one of the greatest in our history. By then we have gobbled the feast of his willful drive, foxy wiles, pushy charm and vulgar bravura (to hear him call Sen. Strom Thurmond “an asshole and a moron” is rude poetry).Woody Harrelson doesn’t have the full Johnson height, and is a little boxy in the jaw, but he has nailed the Johnsonian juggernaut humanly. Even John Wayne, who hated Lyndon, might have saluted.

LBJ is not a work of art like Pablo Larrain’s Jackie, about Mrs. Kennedy in trauma, and yet it gets nearly all the essentials right. Old footage and new join well, and expert acting includes Jennifer Jason Leigh’s nurturing, twang-true Lady Bird Johnson. Given the current manure pile in the White House, you can come away from this film believing that Johnson was heaven-sent (until Vietnam). For the total saga, the full Texan typhoon, go to Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography.

Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton

Many years in San Diego never led me to surfing. I’ve only seen Laird Hamilton in movies which have a Big Kahuna whiff of “Surf’s up!” But once you fathom the immense range and danger of his aquatic empire, you realize that Hamilton is one of the greatest modern athletes, repeatedly putting body, health and life on a liquid line. “Awesome” has become an exhausted word, but it fits him like a wet suit. At 53 he has conquered just about any wave he chose to ride (and even board-paddled across the English Channel with a pal).

Little Laird’s mom, soon single, moved the tot to Hawaii, where waves fill the horizon and where his blond bod became propulsively hydraulic. Rory Kennedy, director of Take Every Wave (and also the fine Last Days in Vietnam), is not an icon polisher. He reveals that Hamilton was a bratty white rebel fighting native Hawaiian boys, chose a surfing step-dad whose “tough love” bordered on abusive, hated school but found in the Pacific a turbulent university of risk and reward. Riding giants of crushing power, he became the loner-leader of other surf gods. Distaste for authority and judgment made him disdain contest surfing, and quickly ended his dude posing for photographer Bruce Weber, also starring in cornball beach movies.

This has not won universal affection from other wave masters, some resenting Hamilton’s willfulness and celebrity. There are acute testimonies, but inevitably the film is about Laird in action, including his breakthroughs in tow-surfing, sailboarding and foil boards, and his topping, gutsy gambles off Hawaii and Tahiti. On land he remains the brash jock, hard-muscling past age and injuries (down moods nearly lost his beautiful wife Gabby, who is like an Aphrodite clone of Laird). At sea he is the master, the kin and king of any wave that curls in his direction. 

   
SALAD (A List)
Worthy Movies About U.S. Presidents:
The Crossing, 2000 (Jeff Daniels as George Washington); The President’s Lady, 1953 (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson); Young Mr. Lincoln, 1939 (Henry Fonda as Abe); Abe Lincoln in Illinois, 1940 (Raymond Massey as Abe); Lincoln, 2012 (Daniel Day-Lewis as Abe); Give ‘Em Hell, Harry!, 1975 (James Whitmore as Harry Truman); Truman, 1995 (Gary Sinise as Harry); 13 Days, 2001 (Bruce Greenwood as John F. Kennedy); All the Way, 2016 (Bryan Cranston as Lyndon Johnson); LBJ, 2017 (Woody Harrelson as Johnson); Secret Honor, 1984 (Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon); Frost/Nixon, 2008 (Frank Langella as Nixon) and Southside With You, 2016 (Parker Sawyers as young Barack Obama). .  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of the many superb shots in Citizen Kane is a deep-focal view past prone, suicidal Susan to Kane bursting into her room, yet Welles later found it hard to watch: “It was a very dark scene until the door opens and I come in – and then you see this bracelet I had on by accident, because I had a girlfriend who made me wear it. Every time I think of that scene, I think of my reaching down and you see this awful love charm – nothing at all to do with Kane.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich in the book This Is Orson Welles. It’s hard to imagine that anyone made him wear a charm bracelet, until you realize that the girlfriend was almost certainly his luscious Latina love, Dolores Del Rio.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

My “declaration of principles” (and method): “My text wears no academic robes of canons, semiotics, formalist analysis, etc. Every writer has a temperament of taste, ‘each work entrusts the writer with the form it seeks’ (Borges), and newspaper ink lubricates my prose. Taste is important, but if you are constantly polishing marble in your personal Pantheon, you become a frieze. I agree with Ross Macdonald that ‘popular culture is not and need not be at odds with high culture, any more than the rhythms of walking are at odds with the dance.” (From the Introduction to my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Abe (Henry Fonda) take his leisure in Young Mr. Lincoln (20th Century Fox, 1939; director John Ford).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 86: 'Lucky,' 'Mark Felt' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Lucky and Mark Felt 

Lucky

Harry Dean Stanton’s acting apex was Paris, Texas (1984), his lonesome Travis first seen solo, walking the baked Texas desert. As the title figure in Lucky, Stanton walks alone near a desert town in California, not far from an escaped pet tortoise. Lucky is 90. The shelled critter, though probably older, will never attain Harry Dean’s cultic aura.

Lucky is a farewell valentine that pivots on Stanton, his moves and moods, his scarecrow bod and haggard face. Bits of Stanton history crop up: never married, maybe had a child or two, Kentucky roots, Navy service WWII, love of singing (no mention of acting). Lucky awakens each morning, drinks milk, exercises a little, then opens his daily pack of smokes. His doctor (Ed Begley Jr.) marvels, given that Lucky lives mainly on cigarettes, coffee and Bloody Marys. He is a stone-cool totem of local color, his chief competition being Howard (David Lynch, often Stanton’s director), mournful owner of the departed tortoise called President Roosevelt.

Lucky is a cranky atheist, but Stanton’s own, existential Buddhism seeps in. There is sober nobility in his Zen yen to look death in the eye, with both fear and resolve, an echo of Yeats’s wish to exit “proud, open-eyed and laughing to the tomb.” Lucky’s main regret: shooting a mockingbird in boyhood (young Stanton could have been a wonderful Boo Radley). At a Latino birthday fiesta, Lucky croak-sings “Volver, Volver,” as piercingly genuine a moment as the old man’s final song on a swing in Kurosawa’s Ikiru. Another epiphany has Lucky meeting a fellow veteran (Tom Skerritt) at a coffeehouse, and hearing his war tale. This painful reverie of memory equals a similar scene with Richard Farnsworth and Wiley Harker in Lynch’s The Straight Story.

Actor John Carroll Lynch (Marge’s husband in Fargo, recently swell in The Founder) directed with acerbic love, not corn. Fine supports are sharp-eyed photographer Tim Suhrstedt and actors Jame Darren, Beth Grant, Ron Livingston and Barry Shabaka Henley. At its best the movie is like Steve Buscemi’s Trees Lounge with added mysterioso vibes from David Lynch or Werner Hezog. It is HDS’s memorial and a lovely exit: wistful, wise, funny, smart but heartfelt. To hear Lucky growl “there goes your fuckin’ Buick” is a deeply Stantonian reward. Harry Dean died at 91 of natural causes on Sept. 15, having been a natural actor for over 60 years. (My earlier tribute is in Nosh 80, below; a richer one is the Paris, Texas chapter in my book.)

Mark Felt

Mark Felt is like a Watergate buff’s picnic basket, full of snakes. Around it coils now, inevitably, Trump’s toxic python. Richard Nixon was a destructive neurotic, yet his “high crimes and misdemeanors” may be surpassed by the “clear and present danger” of our current presidential creep. In this context, Mark Felt is a pertinent reminder from the past.

Felt was the suave keeper of dark, dark secrets for J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI. He gained murky fame as Deep Throat, his hidden clues  prodding the Washington Post’s exposure of Nixon’s fiasco. Hoover died weeks before the Watergate burglary, and Felt was bitter about not getting his job (the Nixonites never trusted him to preserve their own jars of slime). Those of us who lived through the 1972-74 saga can now feel a weird rush of names and memories. For those who don’t: good luck.

Peter Landesman directed and wrote (from Felt’s books), using radiant D.C. structures, shadowy confrontations, and glimmers of All the President’s Men. The new star in the old cave of corruption is Liam Neeson as Felt. With elegant hair, eagle profile and the lofty posture of a statue, he might be Eliot Ness’s dream of Lincoln. Felt is also a control maniac and fierce smoker who feels crucified by betraying his Bureau norms (for a greater good). Long  Hoovering for J. Edgar has left his spirit clogged by too many shredded files.

Diane Lane struggles to portray Audrey Felt, depressed that Mark is really married to the Bureau. A side-story about their radical daughter leads to a “hippie love commune,” very odd in context. But the pacing is swift, the clips fine. Good actors include Ed Miller, Josh Lucas, Bruce Greenwood, Eddie Marsan, Tom Sizemore and (excellent as Nixon squirm tool L. Patrick Gray) Martin Csokas. Above all, Felt rescues Neeson from revenge movies that were making him a retro collage of Charles Bronson and Charlton Heston. If he had the voice of Hal Halbrook, the classic Deep Throat of All the President’s Men, he’d be the perfect Felt.                  

SALAD (A List)

Worthy Watergate/Nixon Movies, with star and date:

All the President’s Men (Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, 1976), Will: G. Gordon Liddy (Robert Conrad, 1982), Secret Honor (Philip Baker Hall, 1985), The Final Days (Lane Smith, 1989), Nixon (Anthony Hopkins, 1995), Dick (Dan Hedaya, 1999), Frost/Nixon (Frank Langella, Michael Sheen, 2008), Our Nixon (Richard Nixon, 2013), Mark Felt (Liam Neeson, 2017). There also potent Nixonian vibes in The Conversation (Gene Hackman, 1974).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

One of film’s great, important screenings occurred at RKO on Feb. 14, 1941. For the newly minted but controversial Citizen Kane, studio chief George Schaefer “wanted a tough audience, film artisans whose reputations were towering … Directors King Vidor, William Dieterle, Robert Stevenson and Garson Kanin came, along with Howard Hawks. Distinguished agent Leland Hayward sat in, Cedric Hardwicke was an honored guest … everyone there knew why he had been invited. In some ways, not only the fate of one picture was at stake that night, it was easy to believe that Hollywood’s future could have been hovering in a sort of existential balance.” It went very Welles. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.) 

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Bennett Miller, no pedant but alive to all nuances, shows Tim on top a Brooklyn roof. He gazes into milky Manhattan light, and suddenly my mind blushes pensively: Speed Levitch’s chiseled features, curly hair, acne scars and aura of expectancy bring back Jeffrey Jacobs, my Chicago pal, usher, waiter, wit, gone unacceptably soon when his cruise ended in 1990. Movies can be astonishingly personal.” (From the Timothy Levitch/The Cruise chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available at Amazon, Nook and Kindle).

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Kanji (Takashi Shimura) faces a graceful end in Ikiru (Toho, 1952; director Akira Kurosawa, cinematographer Asakazu Nakai).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.