By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of The
15:17 to Paris and I, Tonya.
The 15:17 to Paris
In
life, the ratio of banality (our daily ration) to heroism (our rare hero) is
very high. Clint Eastwood respects that, in his padded but moving The 15:17 to Paris (that’s 3:17 p.m). It
is about the Aug. 21, 2015 episode on a French train terrorized by a fanatic,
Ayoub El Khazzani (acted by Ray Corasani as a generic, nut-eyed maniac). Three
young Americans with military training (skin-headed Spencer Stone was an active
USAF staff sergeant), further bound by boyhood friendship in Sacramento, rose
to the occasion by disarming the gun-wielding villain and rescuing a severely
injured civilian. It’s all over in about ten well-staged minutes, with two bits
of curious foreshadowing: Stone had felt that life was “catapulting” him to a
special event, and one guy’s mother talked of hearing God’s vague promise.
Eastwood
probably felt he had to include such stuff, as part of the cinema verité approach defined by casting Stone, Alek Skaulatos and
Anthony Sadler as themselves. Hired actors, including kids and teens cast as
the heroes in youth, plus their moms and various other figures, are TV
standard-issue, but that eases the burden on the amateur stars (playing yourself is no
ticket to Brando). They are likeable, all-American dudes who say “man” a lot, enjoy
beer and wine, pizza and smiling women. Only Stone, a sort of apprentice Woody
Harrelson, has much camera charisma. Their shared, zip-zap tour of Europe might
as well be luggage labels, with Venice a rush of selfie shots, Rome overlaid by
a kitsch version of “Volare,” and a little wit in Berlin – the perky guide who
shows them the marker for Hitler’s bunker strides away chirping “Springtime for
Hitler.”
There
are brief flashes of coming mayhem, which arrives with credible power and compensates
for flat stretches, like two of the pals being taken out of public school (after
a teacher presses meds as a quick-fix
for ADD problems) and put in a Christian school. However factual, some elements
have an implied agenda (only Christians and the military can shape “real” men).
Eastwood, who gave one of the dumbest speeches ever at a Republican convention
(which is really saying something), saves the heart-grab for last: the classy ceremony
where President Francois Hollande of France gives the three Americans the
Legion of Honor. It’s like a splendid echo of 1944 and ’45, when most of the French
were thrilled to see Americans. And a deft rebuke to the current, lousy phase,
with France so high on Trump’s f-you list.
I, Tonya
A sharp,
speeding skate blade cuts into ice less than an inch deep. I, Tonya cuts about that deeply into its subject (admittedly, a
shallow one). It shows Tonya Harding, whose 1990s skating career was ruined by
scandal, as a gifted but miserable athlete lost among losers. The film stacks
its social analysis like igloo blocks. Tonya, from a scratch-patch section of Portland,
Oregon, is her mother’s “fifth child, by husband No. 4.” Her Vegas-babe skating
offends judges who have a damsel princess ideal of what makes a champion. Tonya
likes working on motors, flaunts epaulettes of rebellion, and rocks on the ice
to ZZ Top (after a more delicate girl swans to Vivaldi). Adored by some,
reviled by others as white trash, Tonya is queen of the dangerous triple axel jump.
Flashback
to childhood: dorky dad shoots rabbits for meat, giving tiny Tonya the fur for
costumes. He soon exits, leaving the adorable doll with mom, played by Allison
Janney as a chain-smoking witch of control mania. Made-up homelier than worn
linoleum, with a cold laser stare and a nail-gun voice that could make a drill
instructor weep for mercy, Janney brings deadpan precision to her snarky f-bombs. She is up for an Oscar.
So is Margo Robbie as pretty, rage-packed Tonya, who falls into the sexy but
then abusive arms of a preening dodo, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan). Mom’s disgust
achieves Zen clarity: “You fuck dumb,
you don’t marry dumb.” Jeff comes with
a fat bonus: conspiracy addict Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser), a slob Rupert Pupkin
with G. Gordon Liddy aspirations. Shawn’s insight on undercover work is one
that John Le Carré never considered: “Remember, if your mind is a blank, nobody
can pick up your vibes.”
Nudged
along by Jeff, Shawn and a cohort contrived the insane ambush of Tonya’s rival,
picture-perfect skater Nancy Kerrigan, given a wicked leg blow before the 1994 Winter
Olympics. Director Craig Gillespie and writer Steven Rogers reach for
elliptical irony, raising but also smudging how much Tonya knew. The story melts
into the media slush of an Geraldo Rivera “investigation.” Some confiding close-ups
appear in reduced frames, surrounded by black, evidently a gift to fans of square
peepholes. I, Tonya has no evolving “I”
or “we,” just a floating crap game of pathetic people making bad choices
without imagination. Inside this cranked-up wallow, a new Capades show
struggles to be born: Duh on Ice.
SALAD (A List)
Movies with Outstanding Train
Sequences:
The General (Buster Keaton, 1926), Twentieth Century (Howard Hawks, 1934), The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock. 1938), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952), Daybreak Express (D.A. Pennebaker, 1958), North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959), Flame Over India (J. Lee Thompson, 1959), High and Low (Akira Kurosawa, 1963), The Train (John Frankenheimer, 1964), The Incident (Larry Peerce, 1967), The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1968), Emperor of the North (Robert Aldrich, 1973), Murder on the Orient Express (Sidney Lumet, 1974), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
(Joseph Sargent, 1974), The Darjeeling
Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007) and Lion
(Garth Davis, 2016).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Orson
expostulated on why he preferred Jack Lemmon’s TV performance, as flop comedian
Archie Rice in The Entertainer, to
Laurence Olivier’s more acclaimed stage original: “Larry can’t bear to fail,
even if he’s supposed to fail. So when he played the comic onstage, he played
for real laughs from the audience, instead of giving a feeling that he was in a
half-empty theater where nobody was laughing … Success to Larry demanded being an effective comedian,
even though it made no sense!” (Welles to Henry Jaglom, and Lemmon, in Jaglom’s
My Lunches With Orson. To be fair,
Olivier got a little more flop sweat into Tony Richardson’s movie of the play.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Many
intro “scrolls” for movies are trite filler, but if more people, including
critics, had seriously absorbed the one for Steven Shainberg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
in 2006, they wouldn’t have fallen into dull, literal rejection of his poetic
film: “This is a film about Diane Arbus, but it is not a historical biography. Arbus,
who lived from 1923 to 1971, is considered by many to be one of the greatest
artists of the 20th century … What you are about to see is a tribute
to Diane: a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond
reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her
extraordinary path.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Johnny
(Buster Keaton) is cinema’s definitive train man, in The General (1926; director Buster Keaton, with Clyde Bruckman;
cameramen Bert Haines, Dev Jennings).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
No comments:
Post a Comment