David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Shoplifters and The Upside
Shoplifters
Is having any
family better than no family? Not an
issue for ancient Greek royals, nor the modern, tragic Tyrones (Long Day’s Journey Into Night). Hirokazu
Kore-eda’s Shoplifters stakes out humbler
ground – a tiny Tokyo flat occupied by six people. Spinning that question with
tremendous skill, he took the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year. As Phillip Lopate
noted in a fine essay, the win stirred “lingering resistance on the part of
some high-art cinephiles to Kore-eda’s coronation, perhaps because in the past
he has shown crowd-pleasing tendencies, and because he lacks a signature
art-house visual style.” Let the tsk-tsk bees buzz. At 56 the Japanese wizard
of subtle, fluid, crowded intimacy has made another marvel.
It features “Grandma” Hatsue, a virtual Granny Joad (actor
Kirin Kiki, who died at 75 in September, has a lovely sendoff). She dispenses
nostrums (like salt to prevent bed-wetting) and shared-pot food. Her small
pension is the life raft for “adopted” son Osamu (Lily Franky, a wry and gentle
Kore-eda veteran), whose seemingly common-law wife is Nobuyo (Sakura Ando). Everyone
accepts whatever Osamu shoplifts with his Artful Dodger, the pre-teen boy Shota
(quiet, pensive Jyo Kairi). Increasingly ambivalent about thieving, insecure in
his acquired family, Shota incarnates Kore-eta’s “recurring theme of ‘throwaway
children’ who live by their wits and grow up too quickly” (Lopate). Most cheerful
is Aki (Maya Matsuoka), a sex-parlor model who demurely winks portions of
breast at sadly gazing men. Loneliness is common in this lower depth, and the makeshift
but embracing family is a kind of renegade retort to the order of Japan Inc.
The pet in the petri dish is a little girl, recently taken
(lifted, literally) from an abusive family by Osamu. Renamed Lin, she (Miyu
Sasaki) blossoms under fond attention. She also opens another facet of exposure
(kidnapping) to a legal system that cannot tolerate this patch-pieced family. Full
of tolerance, Kore-eda offers many tangs of revelation in the crammed flat and dense
shops. He can also swing free, as when Osamu, hoping that Shota will finally
call him Dad, charms him while walking across a parking lot. Ryuto Kondo’s camera
rises like a kite, and as the figures get smaller their bond seems to expand. Shoplifters, rich in ensemble fluency, is worthy of its fine ancestors (Oshima’s
Boy, Kurosawa’s Dodes’ka-den, Bresson’s Pickpocket,
even Wenders’s Paris, Texas).
A wonderfully natural sex scene is juiced by warm
summer rain, and each childhood moment registers honest feeling. Like Kurosawa deep
in Ikiru, Kore-eda pulls off a startling
switch of perspective, to reveal more backstory in a wider social and moral context.
This writer-director of profound sentiment is no sentimentalist. When the family’s
story enters public space, it never loses emotional closeness. As before in Still Walking, Nobody Knows, Without Memory, etc., Kore-eda’s master
tool is most clearly and undeniably the lens of love.
The Upside
You’d imagine that a sleek comedy “with heart,” about
a black, ex-con scrounger who becomes chief handler and chauffeur for a very
rich, white paraplegic who lives in a Park Ave. penthouse, would have to be
hapless and horrible – a Driving Miss
Daisy for hedge funders. You would until you see The Upside, which pairs Kevin Hart as Dell, the lippy dude, and
Bryan Cranston as wealthy Phillip, whose lips match his eyes as artists of subtle
wit and restrained pathos (he and we remain aware of the useless arms and
legs). As a thin but equally excellent support for this tripod comi-drama,
there is Nicole Kidman as Phillip’s crucial and appealing secretary. If you
don’t relish how much director Neil Burger (Limitless)
enjoys posing Kidman as a high-rise near short, buff Hart and wheelchaired
Cranston, then your comedy antennae need adjustment.
Converging destinies lift Phil and Dell from
suicidal funk. Their special fun includes the only crotch catheter scene ever backed
by a Stieglitz portrait of Georgia O’Keefe. There is also toity but delightful use
of opera. Yes, the movie preens lavish lifestyle in a manner that hardly
matches the situation or mindset of most severely handicapped people. And the
racial counterpoint is pretty obvious (as it was in the source, the 2011 French
hit The Intouchables). Still, an
excellent cast and crafty direction evade most of the squish traps. There is an
almost vintage screwball pleasure in watching Cranston, Hart and Kidman rise
and revel in sync, topped only by Aretha Franklin singing “Nessun Dorma” from Turandot.
SALAD (A List)
12 Excellent
Movies of Kids in Peril
With their year and director:
The Kid (Chaplin 1921), Shoeshine
(De Sica 1946), The Search (Zinnemann
1948), Oliver Twist (Lean 1948), Night of the Hunter (Laughton 1955), The 400 Blows (Truffaut 1959), Our Mother’s House (Clayton 1967), Paper Moon (Bogdanovich 1973), Fresh (Boaz Yakin 1994), King of the Hill (Soderbergh 1993), I’m Not Scared (Salvatores 2003) and The Florida Project (Baker 2017).
WINE (Vin
Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Speaking
post-Kane to a receptive college
class in New York, in 1943, Orson Welles opened up about his new medium of
film, “so very powerful and yet so very meaningless most of the time. When I
tell that to people in Hollywood they get mad at me and say, ‘You’re just
arty.’ … A picture must be better to see the second or third time than it is
the first time. There must be more in it to see at one time than any one person
can grasp. It must be so ‘meaty,’ so full of implications, that everybody will
get something out of it.” (Quote from Frank Brady’s book Citizen Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Elliott
Gould was a startling, unlikely movie star, rising through “a classic Jewish
mama, then a tough school for show kids, wedding gigs, the Catskills, learning
that nerves will trample you or, if smartly engaged, trampoline you to
applause. Gould’s talent had fuzzy edges, shy glances, twinkling eyes and
pursed, almost lemon-sucking lips. Making Little
Murders, Alan Arkin saw ‘an excellent actor. The character he plays has a
kind of brooding intensity Elliott doesn’t have. He had to work very hard for
that, but was completely successful.’ ” Decades later, Gould and Arkin appeared
together amusingly on TV’s The Kominsky
Method. (Quote from the Elliott Gould/The
Long Goodbye 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.
Addie
(Tatum O’Neal) and “daddy” Moses (Ryan O’Neal) travel the plains Midwest during
the Great Depression, in Paper Moon.
(Paramount Pictures, 1973. Director Peter Bogdanovich, photographed by Laszlo
Kovacs.)
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