Thursday, November 2, 2017

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).



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