Watchmen is a lot of fun as long as you don't think about it. Elsewhere, Two Lovers reinvents the '70s character piece, and I Served the King of England turns the World War II movie on its head.
Watchmen is the biggest, but certainly not the best, item on this list. For that, scroll down further to find a criminally overlooked film from last year – and one from this year starring an actor who famously made a fool of himself recently on David Letterman’s show. Watchmen (Warner Bros. Pictures) As someone who just finished the graphic novel last week, I don’t consider myself a Watchmen purist, fanatic or expert. It’s a wildly entertaining, convincingly disturbing and ambitiously structured book – if you say that it’s a landmark, then I guess it is. So going into the movie, I had no unreal expectations – I just wanted director Zack Snyder to recapture the comic book’s gritty, twisty essence and be some fun along the way. On that level, Watchmen the film is a success, although the great shame is that it could have been more. An odd, bracing mixture of nihilistic despair and giddy pop-culture referencing, Watchmen is unquestionably the vision of a pure filmmaker, but that vision has all the depth of a dude muttering “Oh man, that’s cool!” with slack-jawed appreciation. Graphic novel author Alan Moore took this end-is-nigh scenario seriously, but for the movie it’s just a playground where awesome stuff keeps happening. As Snyder introduces us to his motley bunch of misfit superheroes in the film’s early stretches, that sort of slick superficiality is a lot of fun – misanthropy done with a breezy élan. But the film eventually has to contend with the messy necessities of drama – story arcs, character development, the stuff where you need to understand human beings – and soon the surface pleasures just aren’t satisfying enough. But for those who hold the graphic novel up as unimpeachable art, I want to point out that it didn’t handle those messy dramatic necessities that well either – for instance, Snyder and his co-writers aren’t too blame for female characters who seem to be the product of guys who have never talked to an actual woman. So, if Watchmen the movie is a kicky thrill that sinks a little when you realize it’s thematically barren, well, you could level similar charges at the source material.
Two Lovers (Magnolia Pictures) Going into Two Lovers, I had a slightly misinformed impression of what the movie was about. Either my friend told me wrong or I just heard him incorrectly, but I believed director James Gray’s sharp character study was about a bipolar man who has two separate girlfriends, one for each personality. Only after seeing the movie and doing some research did I realize that, scientifically speaking, that’s not even possible – they’re two entirely different medical conditions. And one of the things that’s wonderful about Two Lovers (beyond the fact that my impression of the plot was way off) is that Gray never bothers telling us precisely what it is that’s wrong with Joaquin Phoenix’s Leonard. Paul Thomas Anderson made an extraordinary love story built around an unstable protagonist with Punch-Drunk Love, but he dressed the entire movie up in the character’s whimsical, slightly mad way of seeing the world. By comparison, Gray wants to tell a close-to-the-bone ‘70s-style urban drama, and Two Lovers succeeds because in the self-obsessed, slightly mad world of the non-Manhattan areas of New York City, guys like Leonard are typical enough that they escape detection, unless you’re bothering to pay attention, which you probably aren’t since you’ve got your own stuff to worry about. Phoenix is exceptional, hinting at Leonard’s deep psychological torment without tipping into theatrics – as he did in To Die For and Gladiator, he just has a knack for twitchy, unnerved individuals who want to think that nothing’s wrong. As the two women in his life, Gwyneth Paltrow makes for a great spoiled-girl love interest – not since The Talented Mr. Ripley has she been so likeably despicable – and Vinessa Shaw is a wonderful surprise as the good girl after a career of playing bad girls. Gray has made a classic romantic-triangle love story, and he doesn’t so much reinvent the wheel as he does observe these characters with so much concentration and patience that they just feel like folks we know. And in the great tradition of ‘70s character pieces, he finds a wonderful ending that wraps it all up and yet doesn’t.
Must Read After My Death (Gigantic) Writer-director Morgan Dews discovered the depths of the strangeness residing within his family when he stumbled upon hours of audiotapes made by his maternal grandmother during the 1950s. The story they tell, aided by hours of Super 8 film shot around the same time, forms Must Read After My Death, an intriguing personal documentary that uses an inventive narrative technique. Relying entirely on these audiotapes, Dews has his grandmother Allis narrate her own story, with occasional interludes from her husband and children on the tapes. There is an undeniably mesmerizing quality to this approach – Allis died in 2001, so we feel as if we’re hearing from a ghost. And she is a deeply unhappy ghost – these tapes were made during the family’s darkest period, when mental problems were hindering the children’s progress and the parents were drifting apart. But I object somewhat to Must Read After My Death’s vaguely freak-show treatment of domestic misery. As much as our heart goes out to these people, it is not news that the conventionality of the 1950s caused a lot of psychological strife, and Dews seems more struck by the candid, occasionally shocking quality of these tapes than what they have to impart to the rest of us. I mean, what are we to take away from Must Read After My Death? Are we to be happy that we’re not like them? That’s certainly something to be grateful for, but I’m not sure it’s quite enough to make a film from.
Everlasting Moments (IFC Films) Director Jan Troell’s gently affecting film is the sort of experience that’s so loaded with dramatic signifiers that you might find yourself needing a little air. Everlasting Moments tells of a turn-of-the-century Swedish family headed by a saintly mother and a drunken, womanizing father, and the story spans several unhappy years in the lives of them and their quietly suffering children. As a break from the domestic melodrama, the mother (Maria, played by Maria Heiskanen) finds her voice and independence when she becomes interested in photography, and Everlasting Moments becomes one of those art-as-spiritual-balm movies that always works better when the filmmaker deeply connects me to the protagonist’s aesthetic love. Instead, what we have here is an aggressively artful little portrait of a particular group of people at a particular point in time that clearly resonates with its makers but left me shrugging. Well-acted across the board and lovely to look at, but a little too sepia-nostalgic for my taste.
12 (Sony Pictures Classics) It’s been long enough since I’ve seen Sidney Lumet’s film adaptation of 12 Angry Men that any problems I have with this Russian remake are entirely based on the film in front of me, as opposed to any loyalty to (or any memory of) the first film. Writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov moves the action to Moscow, as 12 Russian men debate the innocence of a Chechen boy accused of murder. For a little while, Mikhalkov gives the proceedings a dank grittiness – the jurors are holed up in a rundown gymnasium that is somehow blessed with the most moody and evocative lighting – but at 159 minutes, much of the plot consists of each and every juror telling a snippet of their life story, which miraculously plays into determining their guilty-or-innocent vote. Mikhalkov wants 12 to be an investigation into the battle over Russia’s soul, particularly the nation’s fractious relationship with Chechnya, and I don’t want to discount the high-minded aspirations of the filmmaker – nor do I want to diminish the quality of the performances, which are an essential component when there are so many monologues filling the running time. But once the pattern of the film’s narrative sets in, I did find myself actively rooting for the boy’s innocence simply because the sooner the 12 men came to the same conclusion, the sooner I could go home.
I Served the King of England (Sony Pictures DVD) Of the different cinematic subgenres I’m sickest of seeing, the one that I feel the most guilty about is the World War II film. Whether their focus is on Jewish suffering or simply the evil of those darn Nazis, these films have lately all come across to me the same way: We have no need to be gripping or compelling – the subject matter is dramatic enough – and what’s wrong with you that you expect more? Then a film like I Served the King of England comes along, and you’re reminded that, yes, a director can totally re-imagine the World War II picture – and make it darkly funny at the same time. Based on the novel by Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England introduces us to Jan (Ivan Barnev), a young social-climbing waiter living in Czechoslovakia in the years leading up to Hitler’s onslaught of the continent. Jan could be a less-murderous cousin of Tom Ripley, genially and coldly moving his way up the rungs of high society on the way to his dream of becoming a millionaire. What happens to Jan – and of course it involves Nazis, but not in the way you may be thinking – is something you may not expect from the WWII film: a tremendously entertaining sex comedy. You would be right to classify I Served the King of England as a fable, but it’s not Life Is Beautiful – director Jiří Menzel doesn’t go in for coy sentimentality, and there’s nothing particularly uplifting about Jan’s story. And while the movie recalls the quixotic misadventures found in Forrest Gump – a simple man living in extraordinary times – the balance of the personal and the political is exceptional, and Menzel makes sure Jan is always more interesting than his historic era. In fact, there’s very little musty about I Served the King of England – it’s an alert, lively satirical comedy that never denies the horror and evil it sees all around it. For the first time in quite a while, I actually had the experience of feeling true disgust for Nazism in a film – which, I believe, is the point of such films, yes?
Consumables is a regular overview of popular culture.
