Nosh 178: ' A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,' 'The Two Popes' & More

David Elliott

         

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

(Note: Nosh 179 will appear on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.)

We’re “dressed for church” this week, with a movie about two popes, and another uniting two secular saints of popular media, Tom Hanks and Fred Rogers. Happy holidays!

APPETIZER (Reviews: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood and The Two Popes)                    

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

After seeing the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in 2018, I thought: very good, but that’s it for me and Fred Rogers. I grew up in the Roy Rogers TV era, and my kids would be attuned to Pee-wee’s Playhouse. Fred Rogers, a religious man turned TV educator with very special gifts, a musical man who found the best rhythm and tone for talking to kids with problems on his children’s show from Pittsburgh, was also an inventive pioneer, commercially astute without merchandising himself. Sixteen years after departure at 74, he is a modern legend, now reincarnated by Tom Hanks. Marielle Heller, who directed Melissa McCarthy to an Oscar bid for her charmingly cranky forger in Can You Ever Forgive Me?, might well bring that honor to the multi-prized Hanks, for A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Hanks, Heller and the writers tickle some tears without dipping into the corn syrup of old Hollywood tributes like Pride of the Yankees (Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig), Swanee River (Don Ameche as Stephen Foster) and The Story of Will Rogers (Will Jr. echoing his dad). The movie’s ace card, along with Hanks, is compression. Rather than trot through Fred’s bio (which Morgan Neville’s documentary did very well), this salute centers on Rogers lifting the Esquire profile writer Lloyd Vogel from sneering New York cynicism and acidic rage about his alcoholic father. Fred embraces him with the supple, caring decency that kids sensed intuitively. Much of the pressure on Hanks is relieved by having the adult reactions of excellent actors Matthew Rhys as Vogel, Susan Keleshi Watson as Vogel’s  baby-laden wife, and terrific Chris Cooper as the jarring but finally teachable father.

The story only wobbles in a surreal, confusing scene of Vogel imagining himself as a tiny visitor to the famous TV set, as Fred looms like a godly Gulliver. Fred dispenses calm advice, slightly fuzzy homilies like rescue messages from a centered, pre-Trumped world. We can accept a whole restaurant falling into silence when Fred asks his new, anxious friend to join in a mute minute of reflection. The movie really pauses for a whole minute of pensive silence. If Hanks does not exactly nail the nerdy-pastor quality of Fred’s voice, he has the aura of loving sense and gentlemanly authority. When Fred plays piano (Schumann) with his wife we are spellbound again. Hanks’s work is lovely but not love-me, not a votive candle for him as the Most Adorable Great Guy Since Jimmy Stewart. I sure can’t picture Hanks in Vertigo, but Stewart could never have matched his Mr. Rogers.

The Two Popes

Heavens Above!, a 1963 comedy about a dear English priest (Peter Sellers) who is finally shot into space because the Anglican hierarchy considers his pastoral ideals too naïve and risky, is the oddest “religious” film I’ve ever seen (also quite funny). After 56 years it has a very chatty rival, The Two Popes. A kind of papal peekaboo, a docu-drama with superbly faked Vatican settings abetted by news clips, it examines the relation between Pope Francis (played by Jonathan Pryce) and his stern Bavarian predecessor Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins). Benedict’s stunning 2013 resignation lifted Jorge Bergoglio, Cardinal of Buenos Aires, to become the more liberal and loveable Francis. Not a Catholic, I was moved and bemused. No other film has two aged pontiffs sitting in a lovely room behind Michelangelo’s glorious Sistine Chapel, eating take-out pizza and sipping Fantas before Benedict confides his dark night of the soul and ritually confesses to the startled cardinal. The resulting transfer of power would thunder-clap the Catholic world. Is this history, or fantasy, or a kind of endearingly purgative prayer?

Pryce, sweet but no plaster Jesus, recalls in flashback Jorge’s own long, dark night (tricky dealings with the Argentine junta that persecuted his “radical” priests), and Juan Minujin is very fine as the younger Bergoglio. Hopkins, wearing creaky age and a German accent with flinty precision, provides much of the dramatic tension that makes the conversations more human than pontifical. Director Fernando Meirelles surprises us with abrupt jumps, as he did in City of God. Writer Anthony McCarten flashes the kind of blithe cleverness that propelled his bio-pics about Freddy Mercury (Bohemian Rhapsody), Stephen Hawking (The Theory of Everything) and Winston Churchill (Darkest Hour). In a quick, glancing way the picture raises the crisis of priestly pedophilia. Mostly we savor Hopkins and Pryce as they shape the challenging friction and then fraternal bond of the lonely, intellectual, primly Benedictine German and the modest, tender-hearted, Jesuit (but truly Franciscan) Argentinean. I will not be converting, but these  are two remarkable men. 

SALAD (A List)

The next list, my 12 Best Movies of 2019, will appear on Friday, Jan. 3, 2020.

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Though never a pope, the non-Catholic Orson Welles did play wily Cardinal Wolsey in Fred Zinnemann’s A Man For All Seasons, his red-robed bulk truly filling the wide screen. He was not voluble about it to Peter Bogdanovich: “That came right after the Casino Royale caper, so you can imagine how grateful I was to be associated with something decent. I enjoyed acting with Paul Scofield. A wonderful day – that’s all it took.” (From the Welles/Bogdanovich This Is Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

No actor was more subtle than Alec Guinness, whose artist Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth “has a sexual forwardness rare for Alec. He slyly spoofed the machismo of military men, taking that to a high level in Tunes of Glory. He admired alpha-male friends like Jack Hawkins, Bill Holden and Harry Andrews, and envied Richard Burton’s stellar wallop. Piers Paul Read’s biography suggests a closeted gay or bi impulse, but never finds the closet key. Possibly Alec didn’t either, letting the dress-up of acting reveal the ribbons but hide the risks. One can’t imagine a brazen ‘man’s man’ being half so good at depicting Jimson.” (From the 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 fine movie image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.

On Dec. 12 actor Danny Aiello died at 86. His best film work included Ruby, Moonstruck and (above) Sal the pizza man in Do the Right Thing, in which he is seen between John Turturro and Richard Edson (Universal Pictures 1989; director Spike Lee, d.p. Ernest Dickerson).

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Nosh 177: 'The Irishman', 'The Aeronauts' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Reviews: The Irishman and The Aeronauts)                     

The Irishman

Unlike many towns, mine got a theatrical run of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (bless the Bijou). On the big screen it’s definitely a movie, though taffy-stretched for “epic” TV streaming (three hours, 29 minutes). On a home screen, where I saw it again on Netflix, it seems more uneven, episodic and time-ticking. How Scorsese is it? Very. Top Scorsese? No. It’s a Marty Gras mob rally, and something of a bloated scrapbook. Despite Thelma Schoonmaker’s expert editing there is seldom the potent wallop of Jonathan Hensleigh’s Scorsesean Kill the Irishman (2011).

But Marty has the old gang! Robert De Niro is East Coast Irish hustler turned syndicate gofer, then killer Frank Sheeran. Joe Pesci, sprung from golfing retirement, plays Frank’s Mafia “nice” but icy mentor Russ Bufalino. Original Marty star Harvey Keitel is hood Angelo Bruno (make that Mini Cameo). The royal recruit is Al Pacino, preening as infamous Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic autocrat who got “whacked,” possibly by Frank Sheeran, his bodyguard buddy. Around them is a rogue storm of mostly ugly crooks and creeps. The veteran stars got flashback help from digital “youthing” (no, not Pesci’s “yutes” in My Cousin Vinny). Still, as Steve Zaillian’s script hatchet opens up the rotted wood with abrupt transitions, info bulletins and manly blasts of macho double-speak, these guys are mostly just old. De Niro wears his sturdy, upholstered flesh well, anchoring everything as Frank, doomed to realize that serving two corrupt overlords (Russ and Jimmy) will make him a Judas. As he rots, Frank shows cool nerve, low cunning, few scruples and blank silence for his family. Morally the story is a cesspool, an ash-hole of toxic despair. The almost mute Sphinx of judgment is Frank’s daughter Peggy (when grown, Anna Paquin). Her X-ray stares are unforgiving, and pity is on short rations.

Stride with Scorsese in his goombah work boots and you find predictable rewards: vulgar restaurants, barbaric thugs, mob wives like potted plants, arias of f-talk, croon tunes (salute to Jerry Vale), big cars to die in (don’t take the front seat!) and a brutal hit parade – “Crazy Joe” Gallo has a stunningly fast finish, while Hoffa’s exit gets a long, meditative prelude. Era markers flash: the Albert Anastasia hit, JFK in confetti, Bay of Pigs, Nixon at golf, Dallas ’63. For comedy there is non-boozer Hoffa’s love of ice cream. A solemn shot of Umberto’s Clam House is followed by one of equal piety for the WTC towers. Pesci, using his age superbly, becomes the toughest little clot of cynical conniving since Lee Strasberg in Godfather II. Pacino is not truck-built for Hoffa like Jack Nicholson in Hoffa (1992), yet he is awfully good at bristling, impatient egotism (the Trucker’s Best Friend figured he could beat the mob and the feds).

This pizza is stuffed with old tabloid headlines (a 1992 slice, thinner but juicy, was John Mackenzie’s Ruby, with Danny Aiello oddly touching as Oswald assassin Jack Ruby). The Irishman attains some visceral grip, yet in the last half hour it becomes TV wallpaper, a dull mood-drip of Frank’s dazed, wintry guilt, with a green casket his last gasp of Irish cockiness. Jack Goldsmith, a writer who has turned over many rocks on Hoffa’s death, believes with key FBI agents that Sheeran did not himself cap Hoffa. Well, as the prevailing lingo would say: wha-duh fuh. A necro-nostalgic exhumation, this saga is no genuine comedown for Scorsese, despite being caught in the Netflix net (streaming 24/7 also involves the choking of theaters). No pro lasts in movies without making many deals. But does his spirit sag because he has not equaled Coppola’s The Godfather? “Never put a fish in the car” has a fine ring, but it doesn’t equal “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” (Footnote: This retro crime cafeteria has won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as best movie of 2019. Wha-duh fuh.)
 

The Aeronauts

One of my boyhood thrills was seeing Fogg (David Niven) and Passepartout (Cantinflas) aloft in a balloon over Paris and then the glistening Pyrenees, in Around the World in 80 Days. Mike Todd’s hit, in essence a deluxe travelog, was named Oscar’s best movie of 1956 (few watch it now, but the bravura end-credits are still witty). The Aeronauts uses elements from Richard Holmes’s book Falling Upwards, mostly a gutsy 1862 flight in a coal-gas balloon by England’s James Gleisher and Henry Coxwell. More than Todd’s episodic epic, it has the Victorian storybook charm of the Jules Verne adventures. Eager, red-faced Eddie Redmayne has the role of young scientist Gleisher, seeking to fathom weather by rising high. Felicity Jones, as Amelia Wren, has womanized Coxwell’s job as the bold pilot. Her mourning a dead husband, the balloonatic Pierre, is based on the French spouse of English lighter-than-air pioneer Sophie Blanchard.

Director Tom Harper (of the BBC’s War and Peace) and adapter Jack Thorne make it all work. From the entry of plucky, gung-ho Amelia, with dog and fireworks, the film treats early aerial science as retro but fresh entertainment. CGI enhancements of sky, storm, clouds and a Turner-worthy London sustain beautifully the seven mile rise and then descent. Increasingly cold high-sky spaces are poetic, as when the balloon’s shadow, circled by a rainbow aureole, is seen on a radiant cloud. You might wonder about limited clothing and no parachutes (Gleisher was a fanatic to cut cargo weight). This movie achieves genuine wonder and daring, without camping into ye olde tech-kitsch like Irwin Allen’s silly Verne lark Five Weeks in a Balloon. It is much closer to the fable power of Albert Lamorisse’s Parisian classic The Red Balloon. Amelia pulls off nearly all of the rugged derring-do, so if you have girls from about 8 on up, take them (boys, too).   

SALAD (A List)

My 15 Favorite Gangster Movies

Marvels of organized crime (with star, director, year):

The Godfather (Marlon Brando, Coppola, 1972), Point Blank (Lee Marvin, Boorman, 1967), Scarface (Paul Muni, Hawks, 1932), Drunken Angel (Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa, 1948), White Heat (James Cagney, Walsh, 1949), Casino (Robert De Niro, Scorsese, 1995), Little Caesar (Edward G. Robinson, LeRoy, 1931), Ruby (Danny Aiello, Mackenzie, 1992), Le Samourai (Alain Delon, Melville, 1967), Godfather Part II (Robert De Niro, Coppola, 1974), Key Largo (Bogart/Robinson, Huston, 1948), Al Capone (Rod Steiger, Wilson, 1959), Eastern Promises (Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg, 2007), Mafioso (Alberto Sordi, Lattuada, 1962) and Blast of Silence (Allen Baron, Baron, 1961).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

If Frank Sheeran was a Judas to Hoffa, he certainly never heard the Judas take of Orson Welles: “I think that Judas was the most passionately committed disciple, and that he betrayed Jesus in order to fulfill the prophecies. Well, that’s my theory. I think he took the 30 pieces of silver to convince the Romans that it was a genuine sellout. I think he’s the greatest martyred saint of them all. At least I had a play written on that basis once.” (From Barbara Leaming’s indispensable Orson Welles.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

Like gangsters for laffs, Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (Gene Wilder) are convicted for bilking mostly very old ladies to finance their Broadway musical Springtime for Hitler. When the show is a smash “the producers become convicts (and) soon cons are belting ‘Prisoners of love/ Blue skies above/ Can’t keep our hearts in jail!’ Sing Sing never sang better.” (From the Mostel/The Producers chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

Crime king Rico (Edward G. Robinson) plugs another dapper tough in Little Caesar (Warner Bros. 1931; director Mervyn LeRoy, d.p. Tony Gaudio).

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Nosh 176: 'Pain and Glory' & More

David Elliott

         

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

APPETIZER (Review: Pain and Glory)                    

Pain and Glory

“The eyes, those silent tongues of love.” – Cervantes

Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory finds, through personal pain, creative glory. Notably private despite his gossip zest, a party lion but shy of egotism, the Spanish maestro has made his 22^nd feature no vanity project. “Without filming, my life is meaningless,” says director Salvador Mello, played by Antonio Banderas as a slender, sick, tired and retired Almodóvar. In 1981 Pedro, at 32 the bold and impudent Prospero of post-Franco filming, first greeted Banderas in a Madrid café: “You should do movies. You have a very beautiful face.” Pedro was gay, Antonio straight, yet they soon made mutual love to film (first with the campy hoot Labyrinth of Passion). After long separation – Banderas pursued an American career, his mentor didn’t – their shared consummation is Pain and Glory (Dolor y Gloria).

Start: Salvador Mello in a pool, a long surgical scar tracing his spine. Memories bubble up, of a poor but often bucolic boyhood. Little Salva (Asier Flores) smiles at mama Jacinta (Penélope Cruz) washing sheets in a river. She breaks into song with other women, with flirty touches of flamenco. The sun-soaked warmth evokes both Renoirs (painter Pierre-Auguste, son-auteurist Jean). This movie is a river. It swerves and cascades in the Almodóvar way, as broken currents rejoin with added life. Modern Salva, bedeviled by an agonized back and migraines, is startled by the return of his early macho star Alberto Crespo (virile, almost feral Asier Etxeandia). Now, 32 years after their famous creative rupture, the old boys can still ego-tango. Alberto lusts for a comeback with the one-man show Salva has scripted from his own life. Irritated but amused, Salva offers the script, partly because Alberto brings pain relief with his chalky  caballo: heroin (fortunately only a sub-motif of the plot; Almodóvar has said that he never used “horse”).   

Childhood again: a rustic, whitewashed cave, the home that tireless Jacinta makes beautiful for her brilliant boy. He is a choirboy star, although more hooked on classic movie idols like Marilyn (Pedro chose the same stunning MM clip from Niagara that glows in Bertolucci’s La Luna). As mama sews his sock, using her wooden “egg” (Proust ping for me: my grandmother’s perfectly spheroid darning egg!), Salva asks, “Do you think Liz Taylor sews Robert Taylor’s socks?” The cave dwelling is his imagination crib, the egg a talisman of maternal devotion. Salva will crack mom’s pious shell of Catholicism after he sees the workman Eduardo (César Vicente) nude, washing himself like a Hispano-Roman statue sprung to life. Eduardo’s drawing of the lad (tender but not pedophilic) becomes another talisman, floating in the time stream.

Grown Salva’s supreme Madrid lover, the lost Federico, is the soul hook of the one-man show. Inevitably he returns, now frankly hetero (and a father), played by suave and kind-eyed Leonardo Sbaraglia. Old embers flicker through ash as they talk (photo above) in Salva’s art-filled home, his adult cave and refuge. One of the supremely intimate, barely carnal scenes of gay filming is compact with memories, gestures, words and silences. It’s Pedro perfecto, a chalice of self-mythic elegy. With Federico’s brief return, and actor Alberto having played “Marcelo” in his last Salva movie, the tap root is clearly Marcello Mastroianni and Federico Fellini. Almodóvar was 68½ when he filmed this picture. An 8 ½ poster vamps a wall. That 1963 marvel’s time-foldings of dream, memory, anxiety and desire are even more emotionally loaded in Pain and Glory, yet with no pedantic stuffing.

It’s riveting, without obvious rivets (the medical anxiety scenes are a little generic). Embracing all is the Almodóvarian style jacket of blooming colors, graphics, design and José Luis Alcaine’s almost liquid photography. We could doodle academically, calling this a dialectic of river (time), cave (imagination), egg (love), caballo (false care) and friendship (true care). But as with The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s fluent vision of an aging style maestro in Rome, consummate grace eclipses analysis. In this masculine story Sbaraglia, Etxeandia, Vicente and  young Flores are remarkable. Their terrific eye acting, worthy of Cervantes’s quote, is topped by Banderas’s deepest and most powerful achievement (Salva is no Zorro). Keenly present, since any Almodóvar film must celebrate women, are Nora Navas and Cecilia Roth as Salva’s devoted friends, and lustrous Cruz in her small but moving role of Jacinta.    

Julieta Serrano, now 86, is up to a tough job: following Cruz as Jacinta in her lonely, ritually Catholic dotage (imagine a shift from Sophia Loren to Betty White). After heroin and surgery and the public “reveal” of Alberto’s one-man show, Salva returns to the yolk of the egg and confides to Jacinta his most piercing wound: “I failed you, just by being who I am.” But Jacinta is no homophobic fossil. After all, her loving, pious heart still beats for the beautiful boy of the cave, who became a great Spanish artist.

SALAD (A List)

El Cine Grande de Pedro Almodóvar

In my opinion absolutemente his best:

Volver (2006), Pain and Glory (2019), All About My Mother (1999), Women on the Verge … (1988), Talk to Her (2002), Live Flesh (1997), Bad Education (2004), Broken Embraces (2009), Law of Desire (1987).

WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)

Orson Welles began loving Spain at 18, in a 1933 visit. Biographers cannot decide if, as claimed, he briefly became the boyish matador “El Americano.”  Decades later an Andalusian producer challenged him, saying “he doubted the legend …‘In the history of this towering art,’ he had heard Orson boast, ‘there can be very few people who were as bad as I was.’ But if Orson were as poor a toreador as he claimed, the man said, surely he would have heard of him. Welles roared with laughter.” (His afición for the corrida diminished, yet his ashes would be buried in Spain at the ranch of a friend, a bullfighter. Quote from Patrick McGilligan’s brilliant Young Orson.)

ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)

As Marcello Rubini in La Dolce Vita Marcello Mastroianni “extends a mood, he doesn’t posit an agenda. Ambition flagging, religion vacant, pleasures often sterile, Rubini is chalk in a city of bronze, brick and marble. His essential approach was indicated by Joseph Conrad’s preface to Under Western Eyes: ‘The course of action need not be explained. It has suggested itself more as a matter of feeling than a matter of thinking.” (Much like Banderas in Pain and Glory. Quote from the Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)

DESSERT (An Image)

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

From left: Asier Flores, Antonio Banderas, Penélope Cruz, Pedro Almodóvar and Nora Navas during the filming of Dolor y Gloria (El Deseo, 2019; director Pedro Almodóvar, d.p. José Luis Alcaine).

 

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