Nosh 110: 'RBG,' 'Revenge' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of RBG and Revenge

RBG

In 1993 Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg of New York (“Brooklyn,” she would surely interject) to become the 107^th Supreme Court justice. Her only female predecessor was Sandra Day O’Conner, a conservative, but soon they bonded on choosing feminine robe collars.  After O’Conner left in 2006, Ginsburg was fairly soon joined by Obama choices Sonia Sotamayor and Elena Kagan. Ginsburg’s fame, with this opera lover branded “the Notorious RBG” by fans, has eclipsed them all. Her celebrity made Supreme log stump Clarence Thomas sneer at “mythmaking around the Court” (gee, Clarence, were you napping during the history lessons on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall?).

RBG, a tribute documentary made by Julie Cohen and Betsy Wood, is both a feminist mash note and a judicious info-profile. That tension gives it extra crackle, because the soberly reserved, deliberate Ginsburg, always the most serious girl in class, is a strange sort of star. Tiny, reserved, glinting only the most demure of sly twinkles, she’s like Dr. Ruth Westheimer as re-made by Prof. Kingsfield of The Paper Chase. She welcomes her celebrity as a liberal icon at 85, doing push-ups as if training for the Judicial Senior Olympics, wearing cute outfits, dazzling both students and online groupies. More importantly, she is a pillar of progressive constitutionalism and tightly reasoned opinions.

The film carries weight, less from the celebs (Bill Clinton, Gloria Steinem, public radio’s Nina Totenberg) than two substances: Ruth’s family, above all her loving, funny, deeply feminist husband Martin, a tax attorney (she helped him through his early cancer while raising a toddler and mastering both Harvard and Columbia), and 2. Ruth’s important cases, especially her landmark advocacies for women’s rights even before joining the Supremes. The shadow of pathos is that an increasingly conservative Court has often put RBG in dissent, if never on the defensive (she wrote the most piercing response to 2000’s Bush vs. Gore decision).The little beacon still casts a big beam. Many liberals, religious or not, pray that she will outlive the tenure of Donald Trump. 

Revenge

Time for a non-RBG take on modern feminism. In Revenge, Matilda Lutz is Jen, bikini bonanza at a swank desert home. She’s there with preening stud-stack Richard (buff, soon bare-buff Kevin Janssens, a down-market Viggo Mortensen). Lutz’s acting overture is fellatio, which stirs the rutting urge of this boulder man. He came to hunt desert game, but soon the quarry is Jen, the Lolita Bardot shocked when one of Dick’s Euro-trash buddies rapes her (she had labeled him “not my type”). On finding out, Dick drops the scented veil of gallant romancing with “You whore,” socks her, and pushes her off a cliff.

Vengeance ripens. Impaled on a gaunt tree limb, left to die, Jen recalls “I Am Woman” or maybe the Girl Scout Manual from planet Kyrpton, and liberates herself (hanging upside down) by setting the tree on fire. A hunk of torn limb is still in her tummy, but soon she extracts that with a big knife and that ole Aztec pain remedy, peyote (she sees iguanas, hears Mozart plus freaky voices). French auteur Coralie Fargeat filmed in Morocco, achieving the amber haze of a radioactive Vogue shoot on Mars. Fargeat’s blood motif spouts nuances: a soldier ant dying in Jen’s blood, a Euro-creep’s nose exploding like a miniature Tet Offensive, and a death ballet that re-styles the elegant house with currents of blood, like performance art seeking a crimson memorial.

 

Revenge brings back, for some of us cursed by rude memory, a faux-golden age of stylized pretension. The era of Jean-Jacques Beneix’s Diva, James William Guercio’s Electra Glide in Blue, Lilliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, Ken Russell’s The Devils. Candid nudity and vividly faked violence can’t save the pseudo-Tarantino Fargeat from seeming just another slummer in the sado-porn pit. Her climaxing use of a cheesy American TV commercial is a bid for earnest Sorbonne attention (truffle those tropes!), or maybe the $3 matinee crowd at the Sheboygan Octoplex. She should have studied Tony Garnett’s Deep in the Heart, the angry-woman pulp movie (1983) with Karen Young packin’ heat in Texas. Young even packed some acting.      

SALAD:  A List

Twelve Outstanding Judge Performances

Will Rogers as William Priest, Judge Priest (1934); H.B. Warner as Judge May, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936); Walter Brennan as Judge Roy Bean, The Westerner (1940); Gene Lockhart as Henry X. Harper, Miracle on 34^th St. (1947); John McIntire as Judge/Sheriff Gannon, The Far Country (1954), Joseph Welch as Judge Weaver, Anatomy of a Murder (1959); Frank Thring as Pontius Pilate, Ben-Hur (1959); Spencer Tracy as Dan Hayward, Judgment at Nuremberg (1961); Paul Scofield as Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons (1966); Paul Fix as Judge Taylor, To Kill a Mockingbird (1963); Fred Gwynne as Chamberlain Haller, My Cousin Vinny (1992); Robert Duvall as Robert Palmer, The Judge (2014).

    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

No movie is more a patch job of poetry than Orson Welles’s postwar Othello. The making took four years, “during which Orson was contracted for, acted in, and dubbed The Third Man. Almost like medieval players traveling town to town, the troupe would gather when and wherever he needed them (for) a study in pure improvisation – on the installment plan. As a vagabond, Orson lived and filmed off the land, so to speak, employing the wares of local craftsmen if at all possible. ‘There was no way for the jigsaw puzzle to be put together except in my mind,’ he said.” And yet the result is a sinuous, seductive vision of the play. (From Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The main critical complaint (Roger Ebert led the pack) about Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye in 1973 was that it distorted Raymond Chandler’s already uneven novel. Such “source piety never had a chance, and those who feel that Altman sabotaged Chandler should ponder his statement to his agent: ‘I didn’t care whether the mystery was fairly obvious, but I care about the people, about the strange corrupt world we live in, and how any man who tried to be honest looked in the end either sentimental or plain foolish.’ Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe gave that a spin and a bounce like no other actor.” (From the Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of my 2016 book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Pontius Pilate (Frank Thring) starts the chariot race in Ben-Hur (MGM, 1959; director William Wyler, cinematographer Robert L. Surtees).

For previous Noshes, scroll  below.

Nosh 109: 'Lean on Pete,' 'The Rider' & More

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Lean on Pete and The Rider

Two movies, two horses, two young males…..

Lean on Pete

Sometimes an actor is the movie. Like Charlie Plummer in Lean on Pete. Plummer, who turns 19 this month, plays Charley Thompson, 15. He was another Thompson on TV’s Boardwalk Empire, and movingly played the kidnapped Getty grandson in All the Money in the World (he’s evidently unrelated to famous Christopher, who was the miserly grandfather). As Charley, Plummer achieves perhaps the finest male adolescent acting since Tye Sheridan as Ellis in 2015’s Mud.

Charley is a stripling solo child whose life is being stripped to the bone. His mother fled early. Father (Travis Finnel) is a jolly drunk with angry impulses. New to a rough part of Portland (Oregon), the lad is friendless but finds an old race track. His face elates when horses whip past him. Charley becomes stable boy to Del (Boardwalk Empire’s Steve Buscemi), a trainer, owner and gambler. Del, pawn in the sport of kings, enters in Buscemi style with a whip-crack of profanity. Cynical (“I used to like horses, too, you know”), Del expects his Quarter horses to win stakes or go “to Mexico” (death). But he decently finds work for Charley, feeds the rake-lean teen’s robust appetite, intros him to  jockey Bonnie (Chloe Sevigny). A kind but tough survivor, she warns him against bonding with the equines. Lonely, soon orphaned, Charley bonds to Pete, a gentle stallion.

British director Andrew Haigh, adapting Willy Vlautin’s acclaimed novel, has not made a Disney boy-and-horse saga (don’t take the kids). There is hard road and harsh time as, horse in hand, Charley searches for a distant aunt. Steve Zahn is memorably miserable as a booze wreck, the story’s authentic grain reminded me of Sam Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner, and the western landscape vision is acute. But the movie belongs to Plummer. His hungry wistfulness has a faint drag line in his voice, which makes shyness yearningly expressive. He is an unforgettable identity seeker. Among good movies about troubled boy-men finding the first leverage on maturity (Boys Town, The Yearling, The 400 Blows, East of Eden, Aparajito, Kes, The Last Picture Show, Fresh, Zebrahead, King of the Hill, Hope and Glory, The Kid With a Bike, Mud, Lion, Call Me by Your Name), Lean on Pete finds its place, topped  by Charlie Plummer.

The Rider      

“Any real horse lover will tell you, they’d rather be a friend with most horses than most people.” So the great Westerns director and horseman Budd Boetticher told me, in the 1990s. Brady Blackburn might agree. In The Rider his best friends are horses and rodeo cowboys, the latter worried after rising star Brady falls off his rodeo bronco, a hoof crunching his head. Now he’s got a mean scar above a metal skull plate, iffy reflexes and a hand that can suddenly tighten like a vise. He’s told to stay away from rodeo riding, bucking horses and the raw-nerved life he loved – or hang his spurs in heaven.

Director Chloé Zhao has made a life-true tribute to Dakota cowboys, their bodies and gear, their young machismo and sheepish courtesy, their craze for tough animals, adrenaline and danger. It’s halfway to documentary. Brady Jantreau, who had this terrible injury, plays Brady Blackburn, and other Jantreaus incarnate various Blackburns. One is autistic sister Lilly, who acts the loving junior sibling with such sparky authenticity she becomes the film’s mascot, like young Sam Bottoms in The Last Picture Show (with her frontier spunk, she’s funnier). Lane Scott, a buckaroo pal terribly damaged, plays himself. Hospital visits show Brady’s devotion, and signal the possible fate that could also afflict him. His brief tears were, to me, more moving than all of Brokeback Mountain.   

It’s less the sport than the animals that enthrall Brady. The scenes of him taming and training a risky horse would surely win the approval of horse “whisperer” Buck Brannaman (see Buck). The ending is very satisfying, not just an easy rouser. Yes, Brady Jantreau is basically performing himself, but Zhao (also scripting) directed him with the calm, gentle insight that Brady brings to his animals. In settings of rustic beauty and terse but probing honesty, her film rides its range with cowboy instincts.

SALAD:  A List

Movies Featuring Boys With Horses:

The Black Stallion, Casey’s Shadow, The Horse Boy, Lean on Pete, The Man From Snowy River, The Red Pony, The Rider, Running Free, The Water Horse, White Mane.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Much of the fun in Citizen Kane, before its return to the dark tonality of its opening, comes from the jolly complicity of newcomers, pulling off an inside game of insurgent creativity: “Most were just happy to be there. Is it any wonder that the script had scenes that might be mirror images of Welles and his people taking over RKO as Kane and his fellows invaded newspapers? Of course (writer Herman) Mankiewicz could not have predicted that. But Welles must have felt the resemblance, and gone with it, thrilled in the discovery of self.” (Quote from David Thomson’s Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Pertinent to Orson Welles’s The Trial, “Kafka made the letter K a modern culture node, although his diary declared the letter ‘offensive, almost nauseating.’ To scholar James Naremore, the letter is ‘part of Welles’s signature – from Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) to Kane (Citizen Kane) to Kellar (The Stranger) he was enamored of Kafka’s initial K.’ And it defines my personal, Wellesian K-trio: Kane, Arkadin (Mr. Arkadin), Joseph K (The Trial). Let not call it KKK." (From the Anthony Perkins/The Trial chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Kelly Reno rides his wonderful horse on the beach in The Black Stallion (United Artists, 1979; director Carroll Ballard; cinematographer Caleb Deschanel).

For previous Noshes, scroll  below.

Nosh 108: 'Final Portrait,' 'You Were Never Really Here'

By David Elliott

                                                  

Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh each Friday.

APPETIZER: Reviews of Final Portrait and You Were Never Really Here

Final Portrait

The best photo of Alberto Giacometti is probably not Richard Avedon’s elegantly frontal image but Cartier-Bresson’s dynamic shot of the Swiss-Italian (yet very Parisian) artist in blurred motion, carrying a small statue in parallel stride with his tall sculpture of a walking man. Though rich in dramatic silences and posed stillness, Stanley Tucci’s Final Portrait is closer to Cartier-Bresson than Avedon. Geoffrey Rush, a Giacometti look-alike with his seamed face and mop of curly hair, plays the sculptor-painter. In 1964 he paints, in fits and starts, a new subject: handsome, worldly American writer James Lord (the source is Lord’s book A Giacometti Portrait).

This was two years after the Venice Biennale lifted Giacometti to world fame (which had been limited partly because many early pieces were no taller than the packs of his beloved cigarettes) and two years before Alberto’s death. He had entered the pantheon, but in the film he wears no laurels. Rush depicts him as a miner’s mule of art, a gnarly obsessive caught between rapid choice and festering doubt. He frets and sweats every daub, often exploding “Aw fuuuck!” Lord sheds some poise as sittings stretch out over weeks, yet feels a growing obligation, affection and fascination. The messy studio, littered with unfinished works, is like a gray Parisian sky pulled down on canvas, spattered with rain, paint, clay, cigarette ash and the money Giacometti keeps in sacks, like trash.

A tension threading through this intimate sketchbook film is that aesthete Lord (Armie Hammer), whose suit is like a snug, refined closet, is gay (one of his books was My Queer War). Old Giaco is a jacko for women: loyal but often disgruntled wife Annette (Sylvie Testud, showing a truly Giacometti body), and the sparky whore Caroline. In a funny scene the artist negotiates with pimps awed by his stack of cash. As Caroline, Clémence Poésy is a zephyr of playful sauciness. Giving Alberto a ride round Paris in her hot-red car, she incarnates the French New Wave. More crucial is the adroit detailing and steady gaze that director and writer Tucci also showed in his wonderful restaurant movie Big Night. His comrade from that, Tony Shalhoub, plays Alberto’s wry, stoical brother. As dealer Pierre Matisse, James Faulkner startles – he looks like a suave Parisian clone of Trump’s stern babysitter, Gen. John Kelly.

The movie is impeccably infused into Giacometti’s world and time, where his odd, tense, skeletal work united classical form and modern anxiety. He is a troubled man (talk of suicide, dark memories of violent fantasies). For some viewers that may intersect with a topical tarnish: accusations of “inappropriate touching” during a stage production last year, which Rush has denied. Giacometti joins Rush’s portfolio of outstanding performances, and Final Portrait joins the exciting explorations of art’s mystery like Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, La Belle Noiseuse, Wolf at the Door, Pollock, Mr. Turner and (my fave) The Horse’s Mouth.

You Were Never Really Here

Hardly a shot in You Were Never Really Here couldn’t be pulled from its streaming, superbly lighted images to make a stunning still.  But just as you think that Joe putting an ice pack on his wounded shoulder has a pearly veneer of Vermeer, you notice a massive welt of scar, closer to Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is an enforcer and avenger, very quiet, secretive and ruthless. Told by a client, “I want you to hurt them,” he buys a hammer. Joe is a serial trauma, festering. Paid to rescue a sweet, pubertal girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) abducted for an important man’s sex needs, Joe is less an action figure than a whirlpool of memories, dreams, fears, hauntings, furies.

While showing almost no sex, and much less violence than its grim results, the film resonates a hellish city through Joe’s psyche. Call it Proust pulp: broken childhood, war trauma, crime time, flirtations with suicide via plastic bags, pain alleviated only by solemn tenderness for the girl and his fading mother. Photographed superbly by Thomas Townend, directed by Scotland’s Lynne Ramsay (who did the similarly intimate Morvern Callar), this vision of crypto-erotic despair has a whispery, head-case subtlety that keeps it above mayhem porn. The obvious ghost is Taxi Driver, yet with other nocturnal vapors: Trade, Night of the Hunter, Blast of Silence, Tony Manero, Joe, Bad Lieutenant, Klute, Mulholland Drive, Hardcore, Point Blank, Mother and Son.

The binding force is brave actor Phoenix, bulked up and bearded, his lasering gaze both anguished and dangerous. He’s an underground man, a Rasputin Bickle of grief and guilt, a dark hole radiating a light of decency as he saves the girl. There is a weird, morbidly wistful scene on a kitchen floor that you won’t forget. This whole half-mad, well-made movie you won’t forget.         

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

As it became clear that a 1938 radio broadcast would run almost 20 gaping minutes short, Orson Welles had John Houseman run to the network’s library for books they had discussed adapting for the next season. As the program wound down, Houseman handed the books “over to Orson one by one. ‘Without turning a hair, as his own master of ceremonies,’ remembered Houseman, ‘he used the remaining time to thank his audience,’ and then, after reciting the funeral oration from Julius Caesar, turned to bookmarked pages in Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, The Hound of the Baskervilles, reading the excerpts ‘with deep feeling and great variety,’ until the hour was up.” Anyone care to compare that improv with today’s radio? (Quotes from Patrick McGilligan’s Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

For the brilliantly spatial Paris, Texas, director Wim Wenders “stopped composing shots with drawings, claiming the free space of the open road as his Autobahn for large issues and private dislocations, coming ‘to a crossroads where you have to make decisions. Mostly I think a film starts when two different ideas or images cross each other … that intersection is the beginning.” From the Harry Dean Stanton/Paris, Texas chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

A great movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

Iris (Jodie Foster) falls under the special gaze of Travis (Robert De Niro) in Taxi Driver (Columbia Pictures, 1976; director Martin Scorsese, cinematographer Michael Chapman).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.