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.
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