Wednesday, November 29, 2017

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 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).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

No comments:

Post a Comment