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).

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