Just when you had given up on American indies, along comes Junebug to show us the difficulties of family on the Red State/Blue State divide. Plus, the latest from Ingmar Bergman and Bill Murray.
Movies, movies, movies. I'm catching up. Let's start with the best of the bunch.
Junebug (Sony Pictures Classics)
There's nothing momentous about what director Phil Morrison and writer Angus McLachlan try to achieve, and that's part of what's so wonderful about it. Junebug is lifelike, small, common, and so utterly exceptional I couldn't believe what I was watching. Alexander Payne has made movies set in small towns that have been truly wonderful, and You Can Count On Me was equally great. But none of those took on the character of the small town as convincingly as Morrison and McLachlan do.
The ads make a fuss about blue state/red state dichotomies, but there is not a single mention of 9/11 here — the folks from Chicago visiting family in North Carolina never stop to argue about Bush. Instead, this is just the most realistic dissection of the mysteries of family, big cities, and religion I've seen in a very long time. And while the movie may be told from the perspective of the Chicago couple, there's nothing quaint, lovable, or folksy about the gang from North Carolina — Morrison has not made a film where the small-towners are fools or saints. They're just people, he says, and he makes you respect them, understand them, love them — even the mother who is truly a nightmare.
Amy Adams has received the bulk of the good notices but there are nothing but great performances — from the woman best remembered from her brief role in Schindler's List to the kid from The O.C. American indies are rarely this patient, rarely this kind, rarely this elliptical and concrete at the same time. It's hard to explain what this movie's about, but I'm pretty sure it's about us. All of us.
Saraband (Sony Pictures Classics)
I was worried how in the dark I'd be with this sequel to a film I never saw, 1974's Scenes from a Marriage. Twenty minutes in, though, I stopped being concerned. Saraband, Ingmar Bergman's purported retirement from film, might be a tad stagy — he's spent the last act of his remarkable life doing theater, after all — but its dramatic intensity tightens around your throat slowly, sharpening your senses until it becomes almost unbearable.
Whereas a film like, say, The Barbarian Invasions brings back its original characters years later for a warm, optimistic reminiscence, Bergman is here to announce that reunited divorced couples and difficult children don't watch their hearts grow fonder as time goes by. Instead, the longer you live — if you're lucky to not die early — the sadder and more reflective you become, as you struggle with the doubts that crippled even the best of years. Bleak stuff, but it's also ruefully funny and, again, so intense and intimate that soon you forget its theatricality.
Bergman is still Bergman: severe to the point of self-parody. But by stripping film done to its essence — performance, script, psychological insights, the sparest string section imaginable, a collection of unforgettable scenes — he haunts you. He cuts to the bone. He makes it seem elemental.
Wedding Crashers (New Line Cinema)
Smart studio comedies are an endangered species. For truly no good reason, this is one of them. Maybe it's the chemistry between Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. Maybe it's because Christopher Walker is kept in check. Maybe it's because the film is naughty in a grown-up way that teenagers aren't old enough to understand yet. But I'm betting it's because of Rachel McAdams who couldn't be more of a Next Big Thing if Vanity Fair told you so from its cover. She goes beyond Cute, stopping shy of Sexy, and convinces you she's an Actress first, no matter how pretty and funny she is.
The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Wellspring)
Both with Read My Lips and this film, Jacques Audiard worries over the nuances of his characters so splendidly that he doesn't quite mind that his plots are ramshackle and undecided. That's not a terrible thing — these are people you care about and want to spend time with. But they feel too large for the movies they're in — they're ready to rumble but the narrative shyly begs off. Romain Duris manages to handle the gangster-with-piano-talent paradox admirably well, and the film's epilogue will have you walking out of the theater convinced you missed the deeper brilliance. Maybe next time.
Grizzly Man (Lions Gate Films)
Werner Herzog wanted to make a documentary about a sad soul who wandered off into the wilderness because the human world didn't want anything to do with him, using hours and hours of footage the sad soul took himself. But Timothy Treadwell's strange life doesn't quite equal a compelling one, and so you feel Herzog struggling sometimes to find the cinematic significance of a senseless death at the hands of a bear. But when the filmmaker lets the images speak for themselves, there's a quiet truth about the ultimate folly in being an outsider, a rebel, an individual which will strike at the heart of the art house crowd.
Broken Flowers (Focus Features)
Reminding us who started this whole modern minimalism movement, Jim Jarmusch returns with my least favorite actor in tow. OK, Bill Murray's not my least favorite — just the most overrated for what he does, which is very little, which is supposedly the point.
But Jarmusch has something to say, and Murray helps him to say it: Sometimes you can learn more about a person by the people he left behind along the way. I don't think I've ever seen a film that gets its character development entirely from the protagonist's encounters — Murray's aging Don Juan tells us nothing about himself, and so it's up to his former flames to fill in the many blanks.
What do we learn? As much as we'd learn about anyone through a few brief conversations and some items in their homes. Jarmusch works so obliquely that the film keeps hinting at its greatness without ever really attaining it. But rather than being slight, it's mysterious and it keeps sparring with you. It takes a real talent to do that, even if the results are less than incandescent.
Kinski, Alpine Static (Sub Pop)
It doesn't often happen, but occasionally an avant guitar band transcends its own artiness, harnessing an instinctive power that seems to be beyond rational thought. The music's not being consciously created as much as it's just happening.
The long instrumental passages that elevated Sonic Youth's A Thousand Leaves were a great example of such slippery grace, and now so is this quartet's wordless explosions of propulsion and reflected beauty. I can't promise that all 60 minutes will flip your wig, but the best stuff — the Crazy Horse fire of "Hot Stenographer" and the brooding elegance of "Waka Nusa" — touches your central nervous system and tickles your brain. Pretentious bands think they're channeling jazz's improvisational energy. Kinski can talk that talk 'cuz they walk the walk.
New Buffalo, The Last Beautiful Day (Arts & Crafts)
Sally Seltmann, like her husband from the Avalanches, wants to reshape old clutter into the warm sounds of a romantic domestic life. Spare piano, cute voice: this here is pretty background music to slow-dance with to your partner.
There's a familiarity in her lo-fi sampling, and those needing an adrenaline boost are gonna get bored quickly. But it's wholly comforting, even when she doubts love's longevity. And it's as relaxing as some free time in the midst of a busy week. The perfect accompaniment to a bubble bath.
Missy Elliott (featuring Ciara & Fat Man Scoop), "Lose Control" (from The Cookbook, Atlantic)
Love her last two albums — love them. Her ability to be smart and grown-up sexy while remaining popular gives me this unusual sense of fatherly pride in her, even though we're about the same age. So what to make of the new single — or the new album I have yet to peruse? Well, this track doesn't dominate on the radio like her earlier joints did. It feels more workmanlike, merely great when you've come to expect terrific and holy-crap-did-you-hear-that?!?
My sources tell me the album isn't even up to that level. I think I'm in denial — I don't want to know and so I pretend The Cookbook doesn't exist.
Damien Rice and Lisa Hannigan, "Unplayed Piano" (single available through iTunes)
I find few current singer-songwriters more irritating than Damien Rice, which leads me to suspect that he has a certain skill even if I find it insufferably mawkish. But a good song is a good song no matter what mush-head wrote it, and here he makes his gloopy pinings meaningful.
His ode to Aung San Sun Kyi works because it has nothing to do with lyrics or vocal performance, where his affectations have taken up permanent residence, but entirely in feel. Moods of melancholy he has no problem with, and Lisa Hannigan works equally hard to be anonymous in a delicate, everywoman way.
Mariah Carey, "We Belong Together" (from The Emancipation of Mimi, Island)
Not a love song to a person, more like to a community — the pop community, the CD-buying public. So she comes up with her best uptempo number — she'd always been surer of herself with the slow stuff before — and she and her handlers make it flirt with both pop and hip-hop enough to get on both stations.
This is the kind of Number One hit you don't feel like a boob for liking — it captures the sound of the city, the summer, the countryside, your relationship, the ocean, Camp Hiawatha far away from home, you name it. And it'll sound great on every year-end retrospective too. And in five years, I'm betting.
Consumables is a regular overview of popular culture.
