David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new each Friday.
Note: Nosh
184 will arrive Friday, Feb. 14.
APPETIZER
(Reviews of The Gentlemen, A Hidden Life)
The Gentlemen
Viewing The Gentlemen is like riding a zip line over a burning pit of
scripts at a Hollywood luau. This British show has a blithe, greedy eye cocked
to what American studios like. Will American audiences? Maybe it’s too verbal
and Brit-hip for U.S. success, though it could flourish in video with subtitles
and munchy extras. The core template is vintage Tarantino, as first U.K.-mutated
by Trainspotting, Sexy Beast, etc. Director Guy Ritchie, a former Mr. Madonna, cropped this turf
before with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels. His subsequent career is an epidemic of derivations: Sherlock Holmes, Aladdin, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,
Madonna’s beach toy Swept Away. Who
needs popcorn in a box when you have it on screen?
The Gentlemen,
a silly-putty crime spree both witty and confounding, has gangs of guys. Leading
the smartest, and preening his status (as in his weird commercials for Lincoln
cars), is Matthew McConaughey. His Yank expat Mickey has cornered the UK black
market in marijuana, using hidden, high-tech farms on posh estates. He’s ripe to
retire, for a grand price. But England’s other super-rich American, Matthew (Jeremy
Strong) wants to take over by cheating. A rich, vulgar publisher (Eddie Marsan)
wants his cut. A crew of very stereotyped Asian hoods covets control. And the
cool guy called Coach (Colin Farrell), a sort of martial arts Father Flanagan
for street toughs, leaps into the action. The suavest player is Mickey’s henchman
Ray (Charlie Hunnam). He trades razored lines with Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a
hustler who narrates the jigsaw story as a hip franchise pitch (Grant’s Cockney
spiels are like a goof on Michael Caine).
As for women, there is heavy
use of the “c” word (I don’t mean caramel), including from Michelle Dockery as
McConaughy’s tough, loyal wife. Downton Abbey fans may choke when she (forever
the beloved Mary Crawley) is almost raped, and when she fires off the line
“There’s fuckery afoot.” McConaughey purrs “I like middle age” and is clearly having
fun, though below the level of his heyday triple (The Lincoln Lawyer, Mud, Dallas Buyers Club). This is not a dumb slob
party, nor is it so archly clever and brain-gamey as Ritchie seems to believe. When
he has Grant evoke “anamorphic cinema” as a legendary heritage, has The Gentlemen earned any right to that
evocation? It’s a zingy, fairly entertaining splurge of talent, but the tone is
manic, and the projectile vomiting scene shoves us further away from the
impeccable English wit of Kind Hearts and
Coronets.
A Hidden Life
It opens with famous shots
from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the
Will, showing Hitler entering Nuremberg for the 1934 Party rally. It should
probably open with newsreels of him entering Vienna in 1938, the Austrian-born Führer
hailed by joyful crowds whom he, by invasion, has “welcomed home to the Reich.”
Austrian farmer Franz Jäggerstätter was present on neither occasion. When
inducted in 1943 the devout Catholic refused to take the required military oath
to the Führer. In A Hidden Life almost
every scene lies close under Hitler’s shadow.
Jäggerstätter’s beautiful Alpine village, St. Radegund, is 45 miles from
Hitler’s now-gone mountain retreat above Berchtesgaden. When Franz was taken to
Berlin, imprisoned, “tried” and killed, his final months were lived mere miles
from Hitler’s huge chancellery.
Geography is crucial because
the land, the German Heimat
(homeland, roots, tribal memory) saturates Terrence Malick’s nature-smitten, solemnly paced homage.
Glorious crags wreathed in streaming clouds, waterfalls, mills, farmed valleys
make the movie seem a Breughel canvas tipping into Bosch (Breughel painted a
few Bosch nightmares). Probably few viewers know that the movie also echoes the
heroic mountain films of young Riefenstahl, visions that made Hitler choose her
for Triumph. In essence, A Hidden Life is a tragic triumph of the
will to martyrdom, very sincerely done (sincerity is not a supreme movie virtue
– Triumph is so sincerely Nazi,
though Riefenstahl was not a Party member).
Even in prison hell, Malick
keeps cutting to the exalted peaks and luscious farm, as if we needed extra
reminders of what Franz is losing. The lacing of German (public) and English
(intimate) speech is artful, but Malick is more a pictorialist than a dramatist.
Over three hours he leaves out much. He barely touches on the WWI combat death
of Franz’s father as a source of his pacifism. He shows Franz’s chapel-like
bedroom but elicits few Catholic thoughts from him. No mention of Franz’s wild
youth, when he sired a child “out of wedlock” (having himself been born in that
state, to a chambermaid). The villagers are tranced by Hitler, Franz by the
land, and the scared, timid Church by its zeal to keep its elegant rococo
churches. But there is much time for Franz’s daughters at play, and for farm
animals enduring with an innocence almost pious.
Most of the farm labor falls
to devoted wife Fani (engrossing Valerie Pachner), who is driven to clawing the
earth in agony. To her suggestion that they take refuge in the deep woods,
Franz is mute. As Franz, August Diel is appealing and imposing yet says very little.
He seems cross-nailed, as an icon of stricken conscience. We humanly regret
Franz’s sad fate, yet what movie is best seen from our knees? For cinephiles
the bonus is a small, moving performance by the late Bruno Ganz, as a military
judge who feels compassion for Franz but knows that the regime demands death
(death was its livelihood). In 2007 Jäggerstätter was beatified as a martyr
saint by Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Ratzinger, forced at 14 into the
Hitler Youth.
SALAD (A List)
Strong Movies of Anti-Nazi Resistance
With main star, director,
year:
The Mortal Storm (Frank Morgan, Frank Borzage 1940), Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart, Michael Curtiz 1942), Hangmen Also Die! (Brian Donlevy, Fritz
Lang 1943), Rome Open City (Anna
Magnani, Roberto Rossellini 1945), Decision
Before Dawn (Oskar Werner, Anatole Litvak 1951), Kanal (Teresa Izewska, Andrzej Wajda 1957), The Counterfeit Traitor (William Holden, George Seaton 1962), The Train (Burt Lancaster, John
Frankenheimer 1963), Army of Shadows
(Lino Ventura, J-P Melville 1969), The
Sorrow and the Pity (Pierre Mendes-France, Marcel Ophuls 1970). Come and See (Alexei Kravchenko, Elem
Klimov 1985), The Pianist (Adrien
Brody, Roman Polanski 2002), Sophie
Scholl: The Final Days (Julia Jentsch, Marc Rothermund 2005), In Darkness (Robert Wiekiewicz, Agniezka
Holland 2011).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
A lot of World War II
propaganda was feeble, not just on the Axis side. Orson Welles regretted
lending his Wonder Show stage magic
to 1944’s Follow the Boys: “It was a
Charlie Feldman effort to make money, and he made a lot (by) showing how brave
all the Hollywood actors were to entertain the boys. Disgusting morally. But
I’d spent so much on the Wonder Show
that the chance to make 50 grand, I couldn’t say no, and also had to give
Marlene a chance to make her money. We needed it, but we were ashamed to be in
the picture.” (Welles to Peter Bogdanovich in This is Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
The superb casting and acting
in Quentin Tarantino’s films is no mystery, given that the director “called his
films ‘completely performance driven’ and in 2012 told Charles McGrath ‘I write
good characters for actors to play. I cast actors with integrity, as opposing
to trying to just match whoever’s hot with something going on.’ Larissa
McFarquhar noticed ‘a point of honor with Tarantino, that he always sits as close
to the actors as possible and watches directly, so they can feel the force of
his attention.” (From the Pam Grier/Jackie
Brown chapter of my book Starlight
Rising: Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
Quentin Tarantino talks to
Julia Butters, 10, outstanding in Once
Upon a Time … in Hollywood (Columbia Pictures 2019; director Quentin
Tarantino, d.p. Robert Richardson).
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