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 42nd 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).
No comments:
Post a Comment