Shades of Gray: On James Gray's Early Work

There should be no irony; you are invited by the movie to be totally empathetic with the people in it. We would never talk down to or be condescending to them.--James Gray on Two Lovers 

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My introduction to filmmaker James Gray came about through his second feature, The Yards, which screened at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival with Gray and actors Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix in attendance (the film also stars James Caan, Faye Dunaway, and an unrecognizably brunette, Joan Jett-icized Charlize Theron).

Gray was nervous about presenting such a personal film--the title refers to the Queens rail yards, where his father toiled--in front of such a large audience, but he provided an eloquent introduction, citing Rocco and His Brothers as an influence.  Phoenix, who is quite good in the movie, looked ill at ease and said he was uncomfortable speaking in public. Wahlberg tried to get him to say more, but to no avail. After the film concluded, Wahlberg, who couldn't have been more at ease, threatened to launch into one of his Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch raps if the audience didn't ask any questions. That got a big laugh, and people started to pipe up. 

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The only thing that you can do is try to make sure the film looks beautiful, better than you had imagined, as it slips away from you... If you hire the right people, they can give you something better and more beautiful than you’d ever imagined.--James Gray on all of his films  

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Despite the favorable festival response, The Yards was a non-starter at the box office. It must not have been a priority for Miramax, as I don't recall much of a promotional push. If more people had known about it, I'm certain it would've done better. Gray followed up with another crime film, 2007's We Own the Night, which felt rote and lackluster in comparison, despite solid, but not spectacular work from Wahlberg and Phoenix. (And I don't want to lay too much blame at Eva Mendes' feet, but she's no match for the other actresses who've populated Gray's pictures, notably Oscar winners Theron and Gwyneth Paltrow.) 

As with Luchino Visconti's B&W film,The Yards may be melodramatic, but Gray is looking specifically to the classic European and American melodramas of the 1960s and '70s, and not just amping everything up for the hell of it. The pace is stately but not lugubrious--cinematographer Harris Savides' use of ochre and siena hues recalls the work of Gordon Willis in The Godfather--and the actors make the Old Testament- style dialogue sound surprisingly realistic. Every decision can mean life or death for these characters, and they usually make the wrong ones. 

With 2008's Two Lovers, now available on DVD, Gray returns to the Russian-American milieu of Little Odessa, which I caught just after The Yards. Since his second feature was still percolating in my mind, I wrote the following review. For anyone new to his work, I recommend starting here before moving on to The Yards or Two Lovers. The latter operates almost as a twin, and reunites the director with Phoenix, who imbues Lovers with one of his strangest, most effective performances to date. 

LITTLE ODESSA ***
(James Gray, USA, 1994, 98 mins) 

Only 25 at the time, James Gray wrote and directed this downbeat, but remarkably well executed debut. The soundtrack that accompanies the small-scale drama proves particularly unusual in that it consists primarily of hushed choral arrangements of pieces by Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Mussogorsky. 

It's not what you would expect from a post-Tarantino film about a hit man, Joshua Shapira (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction veteran Tim Roth), and the havoc his career wreaks on his Brighton Beach-based Russian immigrant parents (Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave) and his younger brother (Edward Furlong).  

Like Elijah Wood, Furlong--at the time--looked as if he was here to stay. So many child stars fade from view once they hit adolescence or make the awkward transition into adulthood with the hyper-critical eyes of the world upon them, like Macaulay Culkin, a virtual has-been at the age of 14. But Furlong persevered, for awhile, after shooting to fame in 1991's Terminator 2: Judgment Day, by taking on more interesting and less commercial roles in films like American History X and Pecker. He looked to have a good, long career ahead of him. Well into his teens by 1994, he plays a kid here, but this is definitely a film geared towards adults.

In Little Odessa, Furlong takes the lead over the better known, more experienced actors who surround him, easily stealing the film right out from under Roth--who isn't bad, but this isn't one of his standout roles--and that makes the shocker of an ending all the more tragic. 

Gray's first effort hews to the gloomy side, but it's hard not to admire the skill that went into its making, from the mournful soundtrack to the moody camera work, focusing on the snow-covered Russian section of Brooklyn--the Little Odessa of the title--to the economical script and, finally, to the naturalistic acting of the entire cast. Little Odessa won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and marks James Gray as a director to watch.

Endnote: Except for Little Odessa, Joaquin Phoenix has appeared in all of Gray's movies, making him the Pacino to his Lumet or the De Niro to his Scorsese, comparisons a classicist like Gray would probably appreciate. Images and quotes from ICG Magazine (picture by Anne Joyce, words by David Heuring), Big Pond, and Moviemaker. Cross-posted here.

The Man in the White Suit: Tony Manero

TONY MANERO
(Pablo Larraín, Chile/Brazil, 2008, 

95 minutes)

"Al Pacino! 

Attica! Attica! Attica!"
--Tony Manero 

(John Travolta)

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As played by John Travolta, the Tony Manero of John Badham's 1977 Saturday Night Fever was a 19-year-old Brooklyn stud with a penchant for white suits and black shirts. As played by Alfredo Castro, the Raúl Peralta of Pablo Larraín's Tony Manero is a 52-year-old Santiago stud-wannabe with a penchant for white suits and black shirts.

In Badham's cultural touchstone, the lanky lead imagined himself as a disco-dancing Al Pacino: tough, but smooth (note the Serpico poster on his wall). Compact, wiry Raúl, on the other hand, actually looks like the Pacino of a decade ago--before the eye work and the curiously orange complexion. If he isn't exactly smooth, he's tougher than the preening Tony ("Watch the hair!"), because this aspiring entertainer doubles as a brutal killer.

In his second feature film, Larraín establishes Raúl's contradictory nature in brief, but effective brushstrokes: Peralta's obsession with Saturday Night Fever in 1978 provides a release from the unrelenting gloom of life under dictatorial President Augusto Pinochet, while his lethal escapades allow him to eliminate rivals and to obtain goods he couldn't otherwise afford.

As with Pacino's Tony Montana, Travolta's blue-collar Manero wasn't born to wealth either, but he worked for his money. As Raúl's junkyard associate tells him, "Things cost what they cost, not what you want them to cost," sensible words that mean nothing to a cold-blooded sociopath. When Raúl decides that his performance space needs a lighted-glass floor and a mirror ball, in order to recreate Fever's 2001 Odyssey in miniature, he finds some cruelly creative ways to make it happen (he and his three-person troupe live in the apartments above the cantina where they dance the nights away).

Further, he doesn't lack for female companionship, but like Warren Beatty's infamous bank robber in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Raúl's impotence extends to his entire existence. Unlike Clyde Barrow, however, his appeal for the opposite sex strains credibility. The low-rent Pinochet of his barrio, he's cold and grubby, and neither charms nor satisfies the ladies in his life, which seems to be Larraín's deeply cynical point. i.e. that the Chilean dictator's antipathy acted as an aphrodisiac on his more masochistic citizens.

Though he's in nearly every frame, trained stage actor and co-writer Castro gives an otherwise vanity-free performance. If most antiheroes have one or two compensating qualities, Raúl is about as likeable as Michael Rooker's title character in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and those who failed to find the humor in Henry--it's there--are likely to feel the same way about Tony Manero, its unlikely socio-political South American analogue.

While some critics have described the film as "ugly," both literally and figuratively, there's a cruel beauty to Larraín's assured direction, the Super 16 cinematography (blown up to 35mm), and occasional, disorienting out-of-focus shot, making Tony Manero a fever dream in every sense of the term.

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Tony Manero (John Travolta): "Oh fuck the future!"
Fusco (Sam Coppola): "No, Tony! You can't fuck the future. The future fucks you! It catches up with you and it fucks you if you ain't planned for it!"



Tony Manero plays the Northwest Film Forum 8/21-27. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Images from Highlighter (John Travolta), MUBI (Alfredo Castro), and IMDb (Castro).

Barry Jenkins: He’s Gotta Have It, Part Six

A Chat with Barry Jenkins 

(click here for part five)

Are any of your short films available on DVD?

The thing about going to Florida State University is that I wouldn’t be a filmmaker if there wasn’t a film school there. That’s just fact. And the beauty of Florida State is that you pay tuition which, for me as a Florida student, was $1000 a semester and everything was covered: the equipment, stock, editing facilities, crew. I mean, it was the works, it was everything, but they own your films when you’re done with them.

I had the opposite experience. I majored in art, and aside from the expensive tuition, we had to buy canvas and paint, which adds up, so that’s really interesting. I probably paid more than you, and I own those works, but I was in debt for a long time. I went to Whitman which, for the Northwest, is a really expensive school.

The training was invaluable, it was absolutely invaluable.

Maybe they’ll do something with them, like a collection of student films.

My Josephine is available as part of Crafting Short Screenplays. There’s a chapter on Josephine and a DVD comes with the book. The screenplay and movie are in there.

That’s cool. That’s an interesting way to see it. Many times when I see a first feature that I like, I want to go back and watch the director’s shorts.

That’s how I fell in love with Lynn Ramsay. I saw her film Morvern Callar…

I saw her shorts after her features.

I did too. I met her at the Telluride Film Festival in the student symposium.

What’s that? I’ve only heard of the film festival.

You haven’t heard of the symposium? Well, the festival has an education program. You write an essay, and they invite 50 students out, and you watch the movies.

It’s an expensive festival, so that’s a good deal.

It’s really expensive, so you get a free pass, you just travel yourself out. You have to put yourself up, too, and they encourage you to bundle up, like 10 kids in a condo. You have a certain schedule: you see films, and after you watch them, you get an hour in a classroom setting with the director. It was wonderful. We watched Morvern Callar, and then we sat down and talked with Lynne for an hour. We watched City of God, and then we sat down and talked with Fernando [Meirelles] for an hour. We saw Russian Ark, and then we sat and talked about it with the DP [Tilman Büttner] for an hour. We saw Spider, and we talked to [David] Cronenberg for an hour. It was absolutely ridiculous. Even Dave McKean was there with these two short films, and I don’t think anyone’s ever seen those movies. We got to sit down with him. It was a really great experience. So, I watched Morvern Callar, and I was like, “I love this film.” Lynne brought Ratcatcher, which I also loved, and then I saw the shorts.

The shorts are really good, too. I saw them…well, maybe I’ve only seen one. I have that Cinema16 release, a series of great foreign short films, so I finally got caught up with the short that won the Oscar. And another one, I think it’s called Fly.

That’s Wasp, from a different filmmaker, Andrea Arnold, who was also at Telluride.

That’s funny. I do confuse the two.

She was at Telluride with Wasp. She’s great, she’s funny.

[They're both female Scottish filmmakers born in the '60s. Though Ramsay has never won an Oscar, she won Cannes Jury Awards for Gasman and Small Deaths.]

You and Lynn Shelton definitely like some of the same filmmakers.

Lynn and I are in love with the same filmmakers: Yes! [laughs]

I became aware of her because of her first film…

We Go Way Back.

Which I really hope more people get to see. I really wanted to meet
her, and she’s the friend of a friend, so it was easy to set up. I com-
pared it to [the work of] Claire Denis, which made her so happy.

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Jenkins and I proceeded to chat for another 10 minutes or so, mostly about the struggle to pay the rent while shooting a film (during his tenure at Banana Republic in, I think, the shipping department, he wrote three screenplays) and adaptations, like Morvern Callar and John Hillcoat's upcoming version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but this is the point at which my tape ends, and I only brought one. Incidentally, my recorder ceased to function halfway through our conversation, so Jenkins took a look at it, determined the problem, and with the judicious insertion of a tiny piece of crumpled-up paper, he fixed it.

Fellow Florida State University alum James Laxton

Images from Indiewire and Strike Anywhere Films.

The Dreamy Artisan Cinema of Lake Tahoe

LAKE TAHOE 

(Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico, 2008, 81 minutes)

"The director calls his style 'artisan cinema'; I just call it dreamy."-- Jeanette Catsoulis, The New York Times

 

It's a sunny day in the Yucatán as Fernando Eimbcke's film begins. A red Nissan whizzes by and then, after the screen fades to black, the sound of a crash rings out, after which the picture returns. For reasons unexplained, the teenaged driver has smashed the family car into a telegraph pole. Apparently unharmed, he sets out to seek help for the ailing automobile. 

As in Eimbcke's 2004 feature debut, Duck Season, cinematographer Alexis Zabé uses long, static shots to capture this prologue. Moments later, while Juan (Diego Cataño) waits for suspicious old coot Don Heber (Héctor Herrera) to assist him, Zabé shoots their figures from Yasujirō's Ozu's "tatami mat" level, rendering Heber's vertical figure headless. 

Once convinced Juan isn't trying to rob him, Heber slurps down a bowl of cereal, recommends a distributor harness, and then promptly falls asleep in his backyard hammock, leaving Juan to continue combing the empty streets for assistance. Finally he meets David (Juan Carlos Lara), a martial arts-obsessed mechanic who gives him a ride to the sedan on his bicycle. David offers to repair the damage for 300 pesos (approximately $25 USD), which Juan doesn't have, so the quest for help turns into a quest for money. 

As it turns out, the money is the easy part. Juan borrows the sum from a friend, but help continues to allude him and he can't reach his mother by telephone. The pastel port town of Progreso looks real, but ascribes to a sort of dream logic. Passive if persistent, Juan watches a video with David, then shares a meal with him and his evangelical mother. 

Eimbcke, who wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay with Paula Markovitch, cowriter of Duck Season and writer/director of The Prize, suggests that Juan needs the companionship of these lonely people as much as they need him. The difference is, they seem to know it, and he doesn't. 

Juan walks home, but his mother and younger brother are in no mood to talk, so he returns to town to pick up the missing part. Next thing he knows, he's watching Enter the Dragon with David, hanging out with Lucía (Daniela Valentine), the punk-rock singer and single mother who works with him at the auto parts store, and walking—then losing—Don Heber's beloved boxer. 

A skinny, sad-faced kid whose clothes hang from his frame, Juan knows how to say no, but not very forcefully. The reason for his demeanor gradually comes into relief, but Eimbcke drops some broad hints along the way. 

If the film works, and it does, it would work even better if those hints had been more subtle or had arrived closer to the end, but the way the filmmaker infuses a laconic comedy with loss and longing links Lake Tahoe with Duck Season, and serves as a nominal sequel since he cast the same leading man, and despite the move from B&W to color, urban to rural, interior to exterior. 

On the basis of his first film, among the best of 2006, I wouldn't have predicted that Eimbcke might one day recall Carlos Reygadas, except the distance between Lake Tahoe and Silent Light--Zabé also shot the Reygadas film--is surprisingly short, while a greater gap lies between him and the more genre-oriented Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, though he thanks the latter two in the credits. 

At this point in their careers, Eimbcke and Reygadas have the art house in their sights, but while it's hard to imagine Reygadas transitioning to American-style filmmaking, Eimbcke's interest in restless teenagers—notwithstanding Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También—predicts a career more like Kelly Reichardt or Gus Van Sant than other Mexican filmmakers. 

If Lake Tahoe isn't as funny as Duck Season, a low-income twist on Risky Business in which a bored teen makes the most of an unsupervised Sunday, it's a richer work. Though Eimbcke relies too much on Jim Jarmusch's fade-to-black device and though the sleepy pace has its longeurs, even at 81 minutes, he aptly reproduces the rhythms of small-town life where the seemingly minor episodes between major events and the seemingly random strangers who enter your life can attain mythic dimensions when the familiar can't—at least temporarily—offer the necessary support. 

Lake Tahoe continues at the Northwest Film Forum through July 30 at 7 and 9pm. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. For more information, please click here. Images from Harvard Film Archive (Daniela Valentine) and Rotten Tomatoes (Diego Cataño and Juan Carlos Lara and Cataño with Héctor Herrera's on-screen pooch).

The Little Film That Did: An Interview with Humpday Writer/Director/Actor Lynn Shelton

Last June, Steve Clare (Prost Amerika, Seattle Fine Arts Examiner) and I took Lynn Shelton up on her offer to visit the set of Humpday. 

Afterward, I filed a digressive dispatch about our field trip, while he interviewed the director via email prior to the Centerpiece Gala premiere at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. At the time I wrote, "I have no idea whether this micro-budget film will actually 'work' or not. Based on the quality of Shelton's previous efforts, though, I have faith. The scenes were intriguing, and since she's working with a more experienced cast, the movie might even attract more attention than We Go Way Back and My Effortless Brilliance despite—or even because of—the fact that she made it on a smaller scale." 

Since completion, Humpday has attracted far more attention than I could have ever possibly predicted. Shelton has traveled with "the little film that could" to Sundance, SXSW, Cannes, and Edinburgh and has appeared in a number of high-profile publications, including The New York Times. It's rare for a local film to receive this kind of exposure. It's also incredibly exciting and extremely well deserved. Since Clare used a few of my questions, I secured his permission to reproduce his Q&A here. Humpday opens in Seattle and New York this Friday. 

Clare: In as many or as few words as it needs, how does a Seattle filmmaker become a success?

Shelton: By making regular sacrifices to the aztec fertility goddess CIHUACOATYL. 

Clare: Do you intend to stay in Seattle and continue to make film here? 

Shelton: Yes, I do. 

Clare: Was there a pivotal moment when it dawned on you Humpday was going to be big? 

Shelton: When Mark Duplass said he'd do it, I had a hunch. Signing Joshua Leonard on added to my hopes. And when Alycia Delmore said yes, I pretty much knew I had a blockbuster on my hands. 

Clare: What have you learned about male bonding since My Effortless Brilliance? Do you like us more, the more you find out? 

Shelton: You become even more adorable with every movie I make. 

Clare: In an unashamed moment of unadulterated "luvviness," pay tribute to your co-stars. 

Shelton: Yes, my actors are talented. Incredibly talented. But what impressed me even more was the high level of commitment they brought to the set. The only possible way a film like this could have ever worked was with that kind of engagement on the part of the entire cast, and those guys brought it, they really did. 

Clare: Mark [and Jay] Duplass made Baghead and you've made Humpday. Is there something to be said for one-word film titles? 

Shelton: Only when you combine two words to make one. There is something to be said for that.

Clare: What's next for Lynn Shelton? 

Shelton: I plan on making more films. 

Clare: Do you have any interest in making a film about women? 

Shelton: No. Girls are boring. Just kidding! I'm very excited to work with the female race some day.

[We Go Way Back, her feature-film debut, focuses on a female character.] 

Fennessy: How much of the dialogue was improvised? 

Shelton: 110% 

Fennessy: What do your parents think about it? 

Shelton: My dad and stepmom saw it at Sundance and loved it. My mom and stepdad will see it at SIFF; I have high hopes that they won't disown me but you never know. 

Fennessy: Have you ever been to Hump? 

Shelton: No; it always sells out before I can get a ticket! 

[Slightly revised from the original text.]

Related reading: Click here for my 2006 interview with Shelton and here for the 2008 interview Clare and I conducted with Mark and Jay Duplass. 

Endnote: Humpday opens in Seattle on July 10 at the Harvard Exit and in New York at the Angelika Film Center. According to Shelton, the film "will roll out to other cities in the weeks following (for a complete list, please refer to the Humpday website)." Images from Rotten Tomatoes and indieWIRE.

Everything Dies: Godard's Made in U.S.A., Part Two

MADE IN U.S.A.
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966, 90 mins.)


Click here for part one


In Made in U.S.A., the plot isn't the point, though the film does have one, loosely borrowed from Richard Stark's novel The Jugger* and Howard Hawks' noir The Big Sleep. In Godard's post-modern policier, newly-retired reporter Paula Nelson (Godard's ex-wife, Anna Karina) sets out to determine what happened to her lover, Richard. When he turns up dead, she tries to figure out who killed him. Or so she says.

Since Karina is such a sympathetic presence and since the proceedings play out from Paula's perspective, it's easy to side with her trenchcoat-clad femme fatale even as she murders several men, putting her proclaimed innocence in serious doubt.

Just as the location is an abstraction, death also plays for laughs until Paula's final homicide, which brings her to tears. When she shoots Donald Siegel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), however, he dies in such a comical fashion, it's hard to suppress a smile.

Aside from Siegel, a reference to the Baby Face Nelson auteur, Godard's Atlantic City features Ben Hecht and Preminger Streets and characters named Inspector Aldrich, Miss Daisy Kenyon, Paul (not Richard) Widmark, and David Goodis, author of the novel behind Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player. As is his wont, Godard also works in nods to Italian poetry, German psychology, and Japanese film, as embodied by Doris Mizoguchi (Kyoko Kosaka), who sings a lovely little number in Paula's tub.

Furthermore, Godard and DP Raoul Coutard use the color red here much as in Pierrot le Fou and La Chinoise. It saturates the scene in spectacularly vivid form. When blood flows, it looks more like cherry-flavored cough syrup than actual sanguination.

That said, Made in U.S.A. isn't a comedy, not when Godard aligns the plight of Paula's paramour with left-wing Moroccan opposition leader Ben Barka, who also disappeared for months before his body was discovered (he had been tortured to death).

Consequently, tone and pacing tend to vary wildly, contributing to the picture's poor reception in some quarters, although a few contemporary critics, like David Phelps and Jonathan Rosenbaum, consider it among the filmmaker's finest works.

It's also worth noting that Godard shot his 12th film at the same time as Two or Three Things I Know About Her, which has been more widely seen and celebrated over the years. Nonetheless, I prefer Made in U.S.A., particularly since Godard largely avoids the didacticism that would mar much of his output in subsequent decades. Just as Chinatown and Atlantic City signify places and ideas of places, Made in U.S.A. signifies a place and an idea of a place: the inside of Jean-Luc Godard's big, beautiful brain.

* The pen name of author Donald E. Westlake, whose novel inspired Point Blank.

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"I started off intending to make a simple film; and for the first time I tried to tell
a story. But it isn't my way of doing things. I don't know how to tell stories. I want
to cover the whole ground, from all possible angles, saying everything at once."
-- Jean-Luc Godard, La Nouvel Observateur (1966)



Made in U.S.A. continues at the Northwest Film Forum through 7/9 at 7 and 9pm.
The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Incidentally, though never before available in the US, Criterion now lists a DVD release date of 7/21. Images from The Auteurs and DVD Beaver.

Everything Dies: Godard's Made in U.S.A., Part One

MADE IN U.S.A.
(Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1966, 90 mins)

"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."--Walsh (Joe Mantell), Chinatown (1974) 

"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact."--Bruce Springsteen, "Atlantic City" (1982)

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In Polish-American transplant Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), the title signifies a place and an idea of a place. In Louis Malle's Atlantic City (1980), the title signifies a place and an idea of a place, but the French filmmaker actually shot his character piece in the American city of the same name, while LA's Chinatown only cameos in Polanski's classic noir.

France's Jean-Luc Godard beat both of his contemporaries to the punch with Made in U.S.A., which takes place entirely in a fictional "Atlantic-Cité." The great thing about the concept is that Godard makes no attempt to disguise the fact that he shot his film in Paris with a Gallic cast speaking en français (further, according to Rialto's press notes, the word "cité," in his native country, "usually refers to a housing project").

Though British singer Marianne Faithfull drops by to sing 1964's "As Tears Go By"--acappella, no less--this is still a French filmmaker's comment on American pop culture and the future of the left, circa 1966 (two years later, Godard made Sympathy for the Devil with the song's authors, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and the rest of the Rolling Stones).

Click here for part two

Not to be confused with the Lori Singer/Adrian Pasdar picture, Made in U.S.A., in a new 35mm print, plays the Northwest Film Forum through 7/9 at 7 and 9pm (no 9pm screening on 7/4). Never on TV, video, or DVD. The NWFF is located at 1515 12th Ave. between Pike and Pine. For more information, please click here or call 206-829-7863. Image from Tout le Cine and The French American Chamber of Commerce.