David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: The
Goldfinch and Brittany Runs a
Marathon)
The Goldfinch
Some critical snipes at The Goldfinch come off like book reports written by an English Lit.
nerd-snob who disdains movies. But every strong film of a major novel (see list
below) is more deft abridgement than devout facsimile. This stylish, adult,
tricky entertainment is a real page-turner – of scenes superbly photographed,
keenly acted and often suspenseful. Donna Tartt’s novel won a Pulitzer and the
Carnegie Medal. It, too, was fragged by littérateurs
who thought her lavish text was too far in debt to grand old scribblers
(Dickens, Hugo, Stevenson, etc), although Stephen King was a big fan. You don't need Tartt’s 784 pages to absorb this artfully streamlined film, which trusts its viewers to do some thinking.
As in Brooklyn
(2015), John Crowley sets off intense, reciprocal flows of feeling between
people and places. This tale tells of Theo Decker, 13. His mother dies in a
terror blast in the Dutch galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum (Tartt’s
time-tripping of the 1654 gunpowder explosion in Delft which killed young Carel
Fabritius, a fledgling master taught by Rembrandt). Theo survives whole but burdened:
a dying victim foists on him Fabritius’s undamaged goldfinch painting (the film
might smartly have shown this somewhat sooner). Many Oliver Twist-ing
adventures follow. Nicole Kidman, showing hints of middle age, later more aged
by make-up, tenderly provides Theo a posh Manhattan sanctuary. Until his seedy
rogue father (Luke Wilson) turns up, hauling him to a dismal desert suburb near
Las Vegas. The always excellent Jeffrey Wright is a mysterious antiques
restorer who mentors the boy. Theo keeps secret “his” little painting, a sort
of Audubon-Vermeer talisman for a better life yet also a growing danger as he
heads into adulthood.
Crowley gives the story a dreamy mental flux,
crucially photographed by Roger Deakins, the great imagist for the Coen brothers.
With his fluent transitions, focal shifts and sure-shot lighting, Deakins lives
up to Fabritius (at some moments virtually Vermeer). The heart of the excellent
cast is four young actors. Oakes Fegley is quiet, pensive but not passive Theo,
then Ansel Elgort the grown Theo. Charismatic Finn Wolfhard (Dickensian handle!) is the Artful Dodger
figure Boris, son of a Russian émigré thug. Vampirishly pale, he leads Theo
(whom he calls Harry Potter) into mind-trip drugs but also radical friendship.
Boris full-grown is the stellar Aneurin Barnard. Fegley, Elgort, Wolfhard,
Barnard – quite a quartet.
Tartt’s somewhat magical-realist tactics, freely
adapted by Peter Straughan, deliver aesthetic largesse and numerous time-jumps
(this will all be “too much talk, too little action” for the mall crowd that
needs adrenaline drips of violence). There is a flimsy romance, and in the
final 20 of its 149 minutes The Goldfinch
spins some hasty melodrama of intrigue with Euro-crooks. This is not a dud
ending like Roman Polanski’s The Ninth
Gate, a bookish fantasy which seemed to be suddenly abducted by hacks. Tartt’s
yarn is strong, stretchy, textured and vivid. Theo is no quitter, and the
goldfinch lives – perched, forever beautiful, at the Mauritshuis museum in The
Hague.
Brittany Runs a Marathon
Brittany is no chubby club comic lobbing lines about
body issues, even though actor Jillian Bell has comedy creds (SNL writer, the Groundlings). Her
Brittany is seriously desperate. Writer and director Paul Down Colaizzo,
inspired by a friend who jogged away her flab, lets Bell find and sweat the
changes of the near-30 New Yorker, whose poor jobs, drinking, party drugs,
loneliness, envy and humiliation finally drive her to a doctor for weight
relief. Her fast quips are mostly defensive, although her “comical” takedown of a heavier woman who has
found happiness is ugly. Street running brings sweat, freedom, dropped pounds
and a goal: the city’s fabled 26-mile marathon. Girl-snark texting, tweeting
and flirtation gambits get rather tiresome, yet Brittany finds more than
feedback from a caring, funny guy (Umbesh Ambudkar). Bell takes the weight
struggle beyond schtick. The true marathon isn’t about running but
surviving.
SALAD (A List)
Impressive
Filmings of Important Novels
With their source writer, director and year:
Greed from McTeague (Frank
Norris, Erich von Stroheim 1924), Alice
Adams (Booth Tarkington, George Stevens, 1935), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, John Ford, 1940), The Maltese Falcon (Dashiell Hammett,
John Huston, 1941), Oliver Twist
(Charles Dickens, David Lean 1948), Intruder
in the Dust (William Faulkner, Clarence Brown 1949), Diary of a Country Priest (Georges Bernanos, Robert Bresson 1950), East of Eden (John Steinbeck, Elia Kazan
1955), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy,
King Vidor 1956), The Horse’s Mouth
(Joyce Cary, Ronald Neame, 1959), Elmer
Gantry (Sinclair Lewis, Richard Brooks 1960), The Trial (Franz Kafka, Orson Welles 1963), The Leopard (G. T. di Lampedusa, Luchino Visconti 1963), Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Lev Kulidzhanov 1965), The Godfather (Mario
Puzo, Francis Coppola 1972), A Room With
a View (E.M. Forster, James Ivory 1985), Persuasion (Jane Austen, Roger Michell 1997).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
Orson
Welles was an impacter. Startling
impact launched his stage career at age 16 in 1931, in his wanderlusting (more
painting than lust) trip to Ireland. Actor and director Micheál MacLiammóir of
Dublin’s Gate Theatre, soon his mentor, never forgot meeting the “very tall
young man with a chubby face, full powerful lips and disconcerting Chinese
eyes. His hands were enormous and very beautifully shaped … and moved with the
sort of abandon never seen in a European. The voice, with its brazen transatlantic
sonority, was already that of a preacher, a man of power. It bloomed and boomed
its way through the dusty air of the scene dock as though it would crash down
the little Georgian walls and rip up the floor. (He) surveyed us with
magnificent patience as though here was our chance to do something beautiful at
last – yes, sir – and were we going to take it?” You bet. (From David Thomson’s
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
“Audrey
Hepburn was severely tested when her father, a fascist sympathizer, left under
a cloud, divorced, never returned. When the Nazis brutalized Holland, she ‘did
her bit’ in opposition and came close to slow starvation. Later she would turn
down filming The Diary of Anne Frank
because it ‘was like reading my own experience from her point of view. I was
quite destroyed by it.” The story of
tough, endangered youth before fame is told in Robert Matzen’s deeply
researched book Dutch Girl. (Quote
from the Hepburn/Funny Face chapter
in my book Starlight Rising,
available via Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Romy
Schneider reaches for falling fluff on the set of The Trial; behind her are Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins.
(Paris-Europa/Astor 1963; director Orson Welles, d.p. Edmond Richard)
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