Nosh 135: 'At Eternity's Gate,' 'The Favourite' & More

David Elliott

    

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

Note: Nosh 136 will appear on Friday, Jan. 4. Holiday cheers!

             

APPETIZER: Reviews of At Eternity’s Gate and The Favourite

At Eternity’s Gate

In an oddly spectacular career, Willem Dafoe was film’s best Jesus (in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ), and a startling Satan (in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist). His earnest humanity as motel manager Bobby, in Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, was so far from his demonic Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate treats, as the title suggests, Vincent Van Gogh (Dafoe) as modern art’s most heroic, sacrificial genius. In an asylum discussion with a worried priest (Mads Mikkelsen), ex-preacher Vincent offers his rough-hewn gospel of pantheist art: “To me God is nature, and nature is beauty.” That testament will, for many in our fractious world, suffice.

The story concerns Vincent’s last years, so productive even as his mind fell apart. Schnabel, a painter whose thick impasto rivals Vincent’s, piles on his reverence a bit thickly, using some lens distortion to underscore emotions, but also makes some classy choices (like avoiding the melodrama of the famous ear-slashing by exploring the pathos of motivation). He doesn’t over-sell the famous landscapes and sites in Arles, France, where the Dutchman found painterly heaven and social hell, abandoned even by Paul Gauguin. Schnabel lets the pictures, and Dafoe’s life-mapped face and sincere voice, deliver the goods. Rather pointless is the rant of a mad inmate at the St. Remy asylum (for that to work, we’d need Goya behind the camera).

For me, every artist film echoes the painterly trio of my late childhood: Vincente Minnelli’s Lust for Life (with Kirk Douglas’s Vincent, very brave work for a macho star), John Huston’s Moulin Rouge (José Ferrer as sardonic Toulouse-Lautrec) and Ronald Neame’s The Horse’s Mouth (Alec Guinness amazing as painter-rascal Gulley Jimson). But Dafoe and Schnabel (Before Night Falls, Basquiat) do one thing better than those. They provide a persistent, fascinating sense of Vincent’s work, a driven process of exploration and redemption (removing old boots, and revealing toe-less socks, he then paints the boots). Van Gogh, a late bloomer in art, explosively extruded himself onto canvas. His passionate, vulnerable hunger for truth empowers this movie, which may have too many words but often has good ones (mostly from Vincent’s letters).

Valuable are Oscar Isaac as Gauguin (if not with Anthony Quinn’s fierce virility in Lust for Life) and Rupert Friend as Vincent’s ever-loving brother, Theo. Dafoe’s open, earthy visage expresses the angels of Vincent’s artistic mission, and the demons of his tormented mind. Once more the actor carries a big cross, to another kind of immortality.

The Favourite

On the IMDB info site, the “Plot Keywords” for The Favourite are lesbian, lesbian sex, lesbian kiss, female nudity and gay interest. None of that keeps Yorgos Lanthimos’s lavish history dramedy from seeming rather pointless. I did feel the pathos of England’s Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) loving her royal rabbits, her compensation  for having lost 17 children. The bunny queen is herself a sad child, a food pig and a raging ninny, hobbled by gout. The last Stuart monarch (1702-1714) had Britain’s greatest general, John Churchill, who became the first Duke of Marlborough after crushing the French, but he is barely seen, like the vapor of a Marlboro man.

Instead, plenty of big tapestries, bird shooting, ludicrous dancing, beatings, the pelting of a fat, nude man with oranges, and all those lesbian yummies. Rachel Weisz is Sarah, bossy royal favorite (oops, favourite) or, in today’s gracious argot, stone-cold power bitch. Her upstart rival is kitchen maid turned Machiavellian sex kitten Abigail (Emma Stone). Both please Anne in hidden, lustful ways, while men peacock around under vast wigs of curled hair. The split music score (18^th century palace baroque, plus modern “ironic” percussion) is matched by dialog like “Anyway, think on it. No pressure” (first part dimly Old England, second part definitely not). Fisheye lenses puff the big rooms and gaudy, ponderous rituals. Far too lacking is the jolly fun of Tom Jones (1963), although Tom’s fun hardly deserved four Oscars.    

SALAD (A List)

Remarkable Films About Famous Painters
In order of arrival, with their star:

Rembrandt (1936, Charles Laughton as Rembrandt van Rijn), Moulin Rouge (1953, José Ferrer as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec), La Mystere Picasso (1956, Pablo Picasso as himself), Lust for Life (1956, Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh), Andrei Rublev (1966, Anatoli Solonitsyn as Rublev), Edvard Munch (1974, Geir Westby as Munch), Oviri: Wolf at the Door (1986, Donald Sutherland as Paul Gauguin), Vincent & Theo (1990, Tim Roth as Vincent van Gogh), Basquiat (1996, Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel Basquiat), Goya in Bordeaux (1999, Francisco Rabal as Francisco Goya), Pollock (2000, Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock), Frida (2002, Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo), Mr. Turner (2014, Timothy Spall as J.M.W. Turner).    

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

A pretty fair painter himself, Orson Welles put art at the center of his late-career essay film F for Fake, a witty doodle-fest about magic, fraud, art mania and impish master forger Elmyr de Hory. “Every true artist,” Welles remarked, “must, in his own way, be a magician, a charlatan. Picasso once said he could paint fake Picassos as well as anybody, and someone like Picasso could say something like that and gets away with it. But an Elymr de Hory? Elmyr is a profound embarrassment to the art world, a man of talent making monkeys out of those who have disappointed him (by never liking his ‘original’ art).” (Quote from Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

“Writer Ian Christie called Alec Guinness’s painter Gulley Jimson ‘one of the few authentic artist characters in British or any other cinema’ … The scamp Jimson is soul-fraternal with Van Gogh, who confided to his brother Theo, ‘Who am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person,’ but then added with Jimsonian fortitude that ‘through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody.” (From the Alec Guinness/The Horse’s Mouth chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

As shadows loom, Van Gogh (Kirk Douglas) paints his last landscape in Lust for Life (MGM, 1956; director Vincente Minnelli, photography by Russell Harlan, Freddie Young).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 134: 'Maria by Callas,' 'Green Book' & More

David Elliott

    

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

             

APPETIZER: Reviews of Maria by Callas and Green Book

    

Maria by Callas: In Her Own Words
Or should that be “in her own notes”? Of course, her immortal composers were Verdi, Bellini, Puccini, Donizetti, Bizet etc. But the voice was Maria Callas, one of the great opera names in our increasingly crass world. Opera buff and French photographer Tom Volf’s tribute is a fan’s scrapbook, using clips, letters, home movies, diaries, interviews, memoirs and five complete arias.

The triumph here goes beyond musical passages caught on film (some are poignantly without direct sound, the recorded singing poured over flickering images). It is also in seeing La Callas the perfectionist remain Maria the woman. The New York-born teen was pressed into ruthless training by her Greek mother. At first pudgy, she became a willowy beauty (yet with a famously big nose). There is a tender tiny bit, post-performance, when Maria passes a flower girl and reaches out to fondly lift her chin – the kid has a long nose.

She was loved for truly acting her roles, with urgently expressive power (and, this being opera, some ham). Becoming a diva made her act offstage, too. Speaking French fluently (not much Italian beyond opera), she put a toity British glazing on her English in Europe. But listen to the New Yawk tones bursting out, when she confronts the swarming Chicago press: “I cannot do those lousy performances!” As her fat, avuncular husband became a grasping manager, Maria was shedding weight to look like Audrey Hepburn (an international female tendency of the era). She fell very hard for Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, writing of him like a Homeric god: “There was Aristo, contemplating the dark sea.” Ari, passionate but not very aristo, later turned his sun-baked charisma to newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. Jackie flickers by, for in this movie Callas is the only star. Other celebs are mere sparklers.

She could be difficult and had famous, abrupt cancellations, the worst in Rome. Nerves and temper frayed long before the voice aged (she was savvy about her adoring, late-career fan base: “They were probably applauding what they hoped to hear”). Callas wrote plaintively to Onassis, “I am shy and rather strange,” yet we often observe a proud but  vulnerable character, never intellectual (few singers are) but rich in thoughtful feeling. And her soul sang. Never was she more beautiful than in a televised concert singing “Casta Diva” from Bellini’s Norma. Her arms enfold her red-gowned torso as if to embrace and channel the gorgeous sound. One hand’s long, slender fingers spread over her heart. Even a deaf person, watching, must feel her art.   

Green Book

The lessons of the civil rights movement (epic phase: 1954 to ’68) remain very relevant. Few have arrived with the entertainment kick of Green Book. The reality-based movie depicts the working relation and then friendship of black pianist Don Shirley and white employee Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (not to be confused with Jose de Vilallonga, the Brazilian smoothie of Breakfast at Tiffany’s). It is Tiffany’s time, early 1960s, and suave conservatory grad “Doctor” Shirley hires Copacabana club bouncer Tony as chauffeur and bodyguard. Their tour from New York into the explicitly racist Deep South impresses rich whites with Don’s special style, a kind of virtuoso cocktail-classical. His command of jazzy standards, show tunes and Chopin riffs gains more power as Don finds his inner soul brother, with unexpected help from the also evolving goomba Tony.

At the core is a counterpoint. Don Shirley is played dapper and “dicty” (a black term of the era, for pretentiously fancy Negroes) by lean Mahershala Ali. As Ali slowly reveals the inner yearnings of the lonely elitist, Viggo Mortensen’s Tony has the best Yankee slob’s Old South time since Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. The tour is a softer, but not toothless, variant on the risky Jim Crow-era travels of Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. Mortensen, here bulked into a meat slab both amiable and menacing, fortunately does not repeat his fabled nude scene in 2007’s Eastern Promises. Partly written by Tony’s now almost elderly son Nick, this film advances director Peter Farrelly past minor tankers like The Three Stooges and Dumb and Dumber To. There are crackling lines and mean crackers, and sharp work from Linda Cardellini as Lip’s back-home wife and Dmitri Marinov (a former concert violinist) as the cellist in Don’s trio.

Here is the time when blacks used the Negro Motorists Green Book to find cheap (but safely welcoming) motels, and the rich stream of period tunes is not just a Dick Clark platter party. Visit You Tube’s video “The Times and Trials of Donald Walbridge Shirley,” and you realize some of his lippy flamboyance has been ironed out (partly to cover a plot surprise). But he and Tony make a terrific, even poignant duo. And one must relish any movie that salutes both Little Richard and the original KFC.

  

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Racism in 1941 Hollywood was the key reason Orson Welles’s Latin American solidarity film It’s All True was derailed by RKO and chief instigator (and RKO investor) Nelson Rockefeller. They feared “that Welles had gotten dangerously off-track. His Rio movie was lionizing the working class jangadeiros (fishermen) and the Afro-Brazilians of the favelas (slums). The studio cut funds and stopped sending raw stock.” Welles, soon after returning, was fired. Evidently these mentors simply overlooked Orson’s famous “voodoo” Macbeth and Native Son (and 23 blacks appeared in Citizen Kane). Welles took small, impish revenge in The Lady from Shanghai, where the odious snoop Grisby (Glenn Anders) uses Rockefeller’s flippant trademark “fella.” (Quote from Mary Jo McConway’s new book The Tango War.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

The heart, soul and finest New York skyscraper of Fur is Nicole Kidman, as Diane Arbus: “Genaro Molina’s 1997 Oscars photo captured Nicole, lofty above Tom Cruise, her snow-fleshed beauty in a Galliano absinthe-green gown. It’s hard to square that image with the woman who once told reporter Lee Grant, ‘I was an usherette in Sydney. I cleaned toilets. I never think of how I look.’ Director Baz Luhrmann (during Moulin Rouge) saw how ‘she loved to be photographed. She could inhabit the space by making a heightened image and fill the set with emotional energy.’ Still, Kidman battled inhibition, and director Jonathan Glazer (Birth) detected ‘a very powerful inner life going on.” (From the Nicole Kidman/Fur chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available through Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Diane (Nicole Kidman) removes her special blue dress in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Picturehouse 2006; director Steven Shainberg; photography by Bill Pope).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.

Nosh 133: 'Wildlife,' 'Boy Erased' & More

David Elliott

    

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

APPETIZER: Reviews of Wildlife and Boy Erased

This week, two American families in trouble, with a smart son at the emotional center:

Wildlife

The 1950s have been retro-packed as a conformity trunk, crammed with Ike Era “lives of quiet desperation” liberated by Brando, Dean, Elvis, then JFK. There is a more subtle approach, as in Carol. And now, even more subtle, Wildlife. We briefly hear Jack Kennedy’s voice, but the first Hit Parade croon-tune doesn’t sound until half an hour in. The struggling Brinson family’s TV is “on the fritz” in their humble new rental in Great Falls, Montana. Lovely mountains loom, but so do advancing forest fires, as the Brinsons crack into crisis.

Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an eager-beaver who loses his job as golf pro at the club (too chummy, not servile enough for the boss). Pro golf never welcomed Jerry, and now his hard-trying wife Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) turns bored and resentful as Jerry can’t find a job (evidently the streetcar named Desire has dropped this marriage from its route). Watching at the anxious hub is Joe, 14 (Ed Oxenbould), bright and mannerly, his calm, wise face anticipating  how he will look at 40. Jerry, feeling useless as Jeanette becomes a swim instructor and Joe takes an after-school job at a photo shop, goes away to toil on the fire line for a dollar an hour. Jeanette and Joe drive up to see the fire, a fiery foreshadowing of the film’s best sequence.

Jeanette meets Warren Miller, 50-ish, rich in a quiet way, separated and on the prowl. “He wants to learn about poetry,” she tells Joe, but Warren’s chosen poem is her pale, lovely body. Over dinner, the portly smoothie (Bill Camp is superb) launches what you might call elite-Rotarian seduction tactics as Joe observes, stunned. Warren lifts a toast to “your old man not burning up like a piece of bacon.” That brings a funny-queasy, David Lynch shiver, and if it doesn’t revive your old, adolescent thoughts about weird adults, you’re amnesiac. Actor Paul Dano, who directed (and with Zoe Kazan adapted a Richard Ford novel), builds surefire tones and moods along with Diego Garcia's softly colored, velvety, faintly nostalgic images (two shots of the bus station, at dusk and morning, typify his mastery). The story has one burst of fierce melodrama, entirely earned.

Of the leads Mulligan and Gyllenhaal are remarkable. Oxenbould is crucial, as the story breathes through Joe’s maturing mind. The young actor is never cute or off-center or obvious. His fretful, half-aroused, embarrassed voyeurism echoes Kyle McLachlan’s Jeffrey in Lynch’s Blue Velvet. More delicate and intimately spooky, Wildlife is not a dream world. It delves into one of the life-shaping crises that come to many young people, in countless variations of the real.

 

Boy Erased

As Marshall, a Bible-thumping minister in Boy Erased, Russell Crowe doesn’t mind splitting his life between his successful church and running a large car dealership. But he can’t stand the more testing split in his teen son Jared (Chris Hedges). Earnest, pensive Jared is gay but fighting it, after countless warnings of hellfire (the family acts if Satan is venting lava right into their home). Getting out of his closet is tough; even worse is his dad being so closed. Wife and mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman) is devoted to them both, and her sensitive Christian values makes her torn feelings very moving. Kidman, an Aussie playing an Arkansan, is once again among our most subtle stars. Crowe, now so chunky he’s darn-near cherubic, seems stuffed by pious bewilderment.

Jared’s shy but deep interest in boys is admitted, with guilt. Since candid, patient compassion is flagellated by fears of sin, the “solution” is to send Jared to a “conversion camp,”  Love in Action. The action is led by the Lord’s own drill sergeant, Vic Sykes, played by director and adapter (from Garrard Conley’s memoir) Joel Edgerton. Sykes, evidently a bit shaky in his own sexuality, pesters, pleads and bullies. A big, silent boy is driven into despair. The place is a prison of willfully ignorant therapy, where adolescence faces the extra torment of a crudely judgmental belief system.

Boy Erased is stretched and stylized for menace, at times  like a fright movie. Edgerton, like Dano a fine actor and now director, lifts it above some routine passages, due partly to Chris Hedges’s unusually micro-tuned intensity. I thought Hedges was better as the nephew in Manchester by the Sea than Oscar-winning Casey Affleck as his grief-glutted uncle. Not great drama, nor working at Wildlife level, this film has an intelligent moral compass, magnetized by excellent performers. 

SALAD (A List) 

17 Outstanding American Family Dramas

In my order of favor: Paris, Texas (director Wim Wenders, 1984), Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Sidney Lumet, 1962), The Godfather (Francis Coppola, 1972), East of Eden (Elia Kazan, 1955), Alice Adams (George Stevens, 1935), The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940), Raisin in the Sun (Daniel Petrie, 1961), The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946), Picnic (Joshua Logan, 1956), Shoot the Moon (Alan Parker, 1982), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks, 1958), Giant (George Stevens, 1956), Avalon (Barry Levinson, 1990), Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, 1988), The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946), To Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962) and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (Roy Rowland, 1990).        

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Arnold Weissberger, Orson Welles’s lawyer in the Citizen Kane period, was essential to RKO’s embattled defense as publisher William Randolph Hearst threatened to quash 1941’s most brilliant movie. All was at stake: “Weissberger suspected that Hearst would not actually go through with a suit, for fear of having to testify in court about his extramarital relationship with Marion Davies. One of Weissberger’s colleagues suggested threatening Hearst with publicly disclosing that, in Mexico, Marion Davies had covertly given birth to twins. The birth certificate could be produced. Hearst’s greatest weapon was not a lawsuit, or even the threat of one, but the implicit, massive threat of using the power of the press to harass the entire film industry.” Without a Davies scandal, Kane was released but Hearst vindictiveness undermined income. (Quote from Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles: A Biography.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Jackie Brown was a lovingly uplifted tribute to blaxploitation, the ’60s into ’70s genre that made Pam Grier a star, though it often settled for pulp: “Most blaxplo was opportunistic and transgressive, causing white critics to shrink into their seats while black viewers had too much fun to care. There was biracial uneasiness with race-and-rape fantasies (Mandingo, Drum, Goodbye Uncle Tom), a sub-genre of provocation that Tarantino would later stylize terminally (Django Unchained). Blaxploitation’s nadir was the Italian parable Black Jesus, a crass conflation of African political martyr Patrice Lumumba with Christ, starring John Ford’s black mainstay Woody Strode. As a film historian put it: ‘Valerio Zurlini’s film was acquired by a small American distributor, Plaza Pictures, dubbed into English, shortened to play down the Lumumba aspects, and given the American title Black Jesus.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie Brown chapter of my book Starlight Rising, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)   

DESSERT (An Image)

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

The Renoir-worthy Kansas picnic in Picnic (Columbia Pictures, 1956; director Joshua Logan, photography by James Wong Howe).

For previous Noshes, scroll below.