Nosh 128: 'First Man.' 'Colette' & More

David Elliott

    

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

NOTE: I was a little glib in my treatment of Michael Moore's glib comparison of Hitler and Trump in my Sept. 28 review of Fahrenheit 11/9. For an in-depth comparison, read Christopher R. Browning's essay "The Suffocation of Democracy" in the Oct. 25 issue of the New York Review of Books.

APPETIZER: Reviews of First Man and Colette. 

First Man

The human factor barely factors in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its most famous voice is a computer. In First Man, which builds to the July 20, 1969 lunar landing (15 months after 2001’s premiere), much of the talk is techie but the movie is consistently human. The best element of this work from director Damien Chazelle (La La Land, Whiplash), scripted by Josh Singer from James R. Hansen’s book, is its thoughtful balance. The space training and brave piloting of the first moon-walker,  Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling), interlace with family scenes. Much of the emotive vitality comes from Neil’s wife Janet, played by the slight but substantial, and moving, Claire Foy.

A whole lotta shakin’ is goin’ on, in a lot of rough rides, starting with Armstrong steering the supersonic X-15 plane 120,000 feet (23 miles) down, from the rim of our atmosphere to the flat Mojave Desert. Mission accomplished, he returns to find that his little daughter will soon die of a brain tumor. A shadow of grieving memory follows the methodical, introspective, slightly boring Armstrong. The story is dense with slide-rule guys, men with white shirts, level hair, slim-Jim ties and cool control (the sparky contrast astronaut is Corey Stoll’s “Buzz” Aldrin). As Neil rises to become top space cadet for the Apollo 11 voyage, Janet inhabits the uniform-like demeanor of the good military wife, often kept in the dark yet holding the family (two surviving sons) together. Once June Allyson did this type well. Foy, going beyond type, is better.

Images often echo the Kodachrome snaps and home-movie shots of the time, with JFK grainy on TV and ‘60s racial anxiety venting in Gil Scott Heron’s funny, biting song “Whitey on the Moon” (NASA had a heavy lean to crew-cut Caucasians). Gosling welds his low-key charisma into Neil’s progress, all the way to the wild gray (lunar) yonder. It’s 239,000 miles of dangerous travel (and back) to grab what looks like a sampling of cement dust, yet this is no rocket-nerd manual. Kubrick’s 2001 remains a visionary poem (ambitious, pretentious, gorgeous), but it doesn’t have Janet quietly telling her younger son, “Your dad’s going to the moon.” Pause, then the boy answers, “OK. Can I go outside?”      

Colette

Might as well call it Keira! England’s fair Ms. Knightley is in almost every scene, in wow outfits, in bravura hair-dos. She smokes, drinks, mimes, trans-dresses, seduces women (and men), even flashes some breast. And if you imagine this is a deep portrait of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954), still perhaps France’s most beloved woman novelist, then I’d love to show you a “razor-sharp documentary” on the guillotine as “pioneer of the close-cut shave.”

Abandon all hope that the movie will replicate Colette’s impeccable, nuance-scented prose, and you can relax into some fun. Director Wash Westmoreland did the gay-themed The Fluffer, Totally Gay! and the vanishing species film Gay Republicans. His Colette has the oo-la-la oomph of a gay carnival ripping off Victorian corsets, as “Gabri” advances from nature-loving, rustic girlhood to writing her first novels about the provincial and then Parisian lass Claudine. Her pen flows like wine, but her lordly sommelier is first husband Henry. Known high and low as Willy, he is publisher, wit, party dynamo. Alas, Willy never guzzles brandy with Toulouse-Lautrec, but he does pose as faux “author” of Gabri’s scandalously successful Claudine.

The risky arrangement educates Gabri, who will finally proclaim “I am Claudine!” without quite becoming Colette. She remains so very Keira, so English, so cute when scrunching her nose or flashing bold smiles. After she ditches Willy and his wild, wastrel ways, the story loses its stimulating polarity. It is admirable to film a feminist empowerment picture, less so when your male piggy (brash, funny, even poignant) is a more layered life package than your heroine. Dominic West’s supple, often dominant performance means that Colette basically swallows the champagne cork of its payoff: after Willy, Colette claimed immortality by writing her best works. Much later, as the old but still keen-eyed author of Gigi, she noticed and helped lift to fame Audrey Hepburn.  

   

SALAD (A List)

Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Creeps

Peter Lorre as Abbott (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934), Mary Clare as the Baroness (The Lady Vanishes, 1938), Judith Anderson as Mr. Danvers (Rebecca, 1940), Joseph Cotten as Uncle Charlie (Shadow of a Doubt, 1943), Walter Slezak as Willy (Lifeboat, 1944), Leopoldine Konstantin as Mme. Sebastian (Notorious, 1946), Robert Walker as Bruno Antony (Strangers on a Train, 1951), Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald (Rear Window,1954), Anthony Dawson as Charles Swann (Dial M for Murder, 1954), Reggie Nalder as Rien (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956), Martin Landau as Leonard (North by Northwest, 1959), Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates (Psycho, 1960), Wolfgang Kieling as Gromek (Torn Curtain, 1966) and Barry Foster as Robert Rusk (Frenzy, 1972).  His suavest villains? Ray Milland as Tony Wendice (Dial M for Murder) and James Mason as Philip Van Damm (North by Northwest).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

The Latin American wartime solidarity project It’s All True, initially sparked by Nelson Rockefeller, was Orson Welles’s downfall in the studio system: “On Nov. 30, 1942, with several producers and potential backers in attendance, (new RKO  head Charles) Koerner held a screening of selections from 23 reels, supplemented with such Brazilian hit songs as ‘Amelia’ sung by Chucho Martinez. There were no takers. Welles sat uncomfortably tight.” Weeks later, fired by RKO, Orson told his Mercury colleagues “we’re just turning a Koerner.” But so ended his high time of upscale Hollywood filming, and so began the years of maverick wandering, with pinched budgets and zero help from Nelson Rockefeller. (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Having once aspired to being an artist, my favorite film treatment of one is 1959’s The Horse’s Mouth, which is “never psycho-biographic and only flirts with the possibility of genius. The visual style has some over-lighting (was it felt that deeper chiaroscuro would dampen the comedy bits?). The shifts from comical to serious can seem at times metronomic, yet Alec Guinness pulls it all together. At first he seems dashed on screen like the opening brush strokes (with the titles). But then he presses through the surface impasto to find the rich, complicated interior. The result is much more than a jolly good time.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth 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.

Even a swank outfit can't keep Reggie Nalder from being a total creep in The Man Who Knew Too Much (Paramount Pictures, 1956; director Alfred Hitchcock, cinematographer Robert Burks).
 

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