Boyhood: Richard Linklater’s Ongoing Moment

Posted on by Mick McAloon

Unfolding like one of Frederick Wiseman’s longitudinal portraits, and with the same cumulative force, Boyhood enacts a miracle. Over the course of its duration, a leisurely 166 minutes, we see a boy age from six to eighteen. There is no CGI or digital manipulation, as there was in, say, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Fincher used motion capture, as well as prosthetics, to render the effects of age over time. Richard Linklater went about things in true Linklater fashion: he shot the film over a twelve year period with the same cast, including Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, who play the boy’s parents. Hawke has likened the process and the resulting film to time-lapse photography, though it’s time-lapse without dissolves. Chapters begin and end without fanfare. Change is registered by a hair-cut or a growth spurt: inches for years, if you like; while revolutions in technology or the swell of a new cultural moment—yet more revolutions—provides us with further evidence that time has passed. Rich in feeling and ravishing to look at, Boyhood is both universal in its themes and distinctly American: it could easily have been called Family or Motherhood or This American Life.

How many films leave you truly satisfied? And how many contemporary filmmakers attempt what Linklater does here: to show you a person grow and change so that not only do you feel altered in some immeasurable way but actually feel concerned about that person’s future? At the end of Boyhood, which is as full and as rich as a great novel, yet as delicate as a poem, I wondered: what will become of Mason Evans? He doesn’t exist, of course. But our investment in Mason’s progress is deep, while our feelings are surely influenced by the knowledge that the young actor who plays him, Ellar Coltrane, has put in the hours. To paraphrase Godard, talking about Jean Rouch’s Gare du Nord: years reinforce years; when they really pile up, they begin to be impressive…

http://anosamoursblog.weebly.com/blog/boyhood-richard-linklaters-ongoing-moment-by-mick-mcaloon

 

Book Review: Five Came Back

Posted on by Mick McAloon

At the height of their respective careers, five Hollywood directors—John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens—went to war. Their patriotism never in question, their motives for enlisting were not entirely altruistic. Capra claimed to have been bored with his success. Ford was not without vainglory and enjoyed the trappings of naval life. Like a character in a picaresque novel, Huston seemed predisposed to adventure from the day he was born. Only Wyler and Stevens seemed to have faced some kind of existential crisis in the run-up to war: Wyler had left family behind in Europe; while Steven’s melancholy temperament was at odds with his showbiz beginnings. A maker of “champagne” comedies and Laurel and Hardy two-reelers, Stevens filmed the liberation of Dachau. That’s one hell of a journey in itself, but Mark Harris gives us the equivalent of five biographies in one, as well as a history of Hollywood over a tumultuous decade (1938 – 1947). Impeccably researched, beautifully written, and organised with great narrative economy, Five Came Back plays like a studio-era best picture nominee: Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives comes to mind.

Wyler’s Academy Award winner drew on his experience overseas, as well as his return to civilian life. In fact, of the five men, only Capra was stationed at home for the duration of the war. Ford, renowned for his immaculate framing and elegiac myth-making, was present at the Battle of Midway, in 1942, and at Omaha Beach two years later. Framing and composition went out the window: what Ford (and his unit) captured with 16mm cameras ushered in a new era of war on film. There was nothing elegant or elegiac about it. But contemporary cinema still reverberates from the shudder and shake of Ford’s footage. Saving Private Ryan’s opening 25 minutes would not exist without the repository of images personally filmed or supervised by this self-proclaimed maker of Westerns. Ford, who could be boastful and belligerent (when drunk), had told the men working under him: “If you see it, shoot it.” George Stevens told his men to “never look away”. Leading by example, Stevens didn’t, though what he saw — and preserved on film — haunted him forever. Huston’s influence, meanwhile, can be felt in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master: the early scenes at a veterans’ hospital clearly drawing on Huston’s Let There Be Light, his documentary about returning traumatised soldiers. Huston’s film was banned by the US Government until 1980. Stevens’s footage of Dachau was also kept under lock and key, though the decision was personal rather than institutional – which perhaps tells you something about the sensitivity of the man: his attempt to shoulder the burden of what he had witnessed was ultimately too much.

I closed Harris’s book with a sigh, moved not only by the sad ending but by the author’s own considerable narrative gifts. Harris wraps up his story with the skill of an old Hollywood pro, something that all of these men, and the studio heads they worked for, would have appreciated. But he never lets us forget that some pictures — “best” or otherwise — came at a considerable cost.

—MM

A slightly different version of this review appeared in the Curzon Magazine dated September/October 2014.

http://www.curzoncinemas.com/news/all/curzon_magazine_issue_46.aspx

BOOK REVIEW: DIFFICULT MEN

Posted on by Mick McAloon

News that Robert Towne has joined Mad Men’s writing staff would seem to confirm the premise of Brett Martin’s Difficult Men: that television—especially premium cable—is now more receptive than Hollywood to the kind of work that Towne and his contemporaries routinely produced between 1967 – 1980.  In Martin’s view, the programmes made during the “third Golden Age of television” are as challenging and ambitious as anything that came out of “the New Hollywood”; and that those “difficult men”—Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Omar Little, Walter White—are as compelling and as morally complex as the 1970’s anti-heroes. It’s not a new argument, but Martin’s is the first book to articulate the reasons—creative, sociological, financial, and technological—for such a seismic shift.

Martin frames his narrative as though it, too, was a long-form television series. He profiles the “showrunners”, that new breed of auteur, who can be as difficult and as driven as their creations. Each writer gets a clearly defined ark, and while the book favours the creators of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood—David Chase, David Simon and David Milch respectively—and gives stand-alone episodes, or chapters, to Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), it is Chase who emerges as the book’s leading “difficult” man.  The Sopranos, after all, changed everything.  Martin cites the three Davids as examples of the writer as Trojan horse: they took well-established formats—the mob drama, the police procedural, the Western—and smuggled their dark dreams into our living rooms, and on to our laptops. For we’re part of this story too: our viewing habits—not only what we watch but the way we watch—have been crucial to the success of the “third Golden Age”: streaming, on-demand, the pleasures and convenience of the box set.  We’re all schedulers now.

But there are self-imposed limits to Martin’s argument, implicit in the book’s title, and which he acknowledges in his introduction: there is little or no room for women—Sex and the City and Girls get the briefest of walk-ons. And while comparisons with Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls are not unfounded—a tendency to dish the dirt, a fondness for macho grandstanding—Martin’s book is actually closer in spirit to Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution. That book, through its wonderful framing device, told the story of how Towne’s generation took advantage of the studio system’s decline; Martin tells a similar story, though one in which a “much maligned medium”—television—is now at the forefront of American filmmaking. The size of the screen and the means of delivery might have changed, but these “difficult men” have been making movies all along.

—MM

WES ANDERSON’S NEW YORKER FICTION—10 Years Later

Posted on by Mick McAloon

It could be something out of a Preston Sturgess movie.  A bookish, young American is travelling alone from London to New York.  His preferred means of travel: an ocean liner, the QE2 no less.  That there are people waiting for him in London — anxious business associates, attuned to modern ways — doesn’t worry him; he is impervious to such distractions.  His name is Wes Anderson, and judging by his movies, as well as the cover of a recent Film Comment, he’s in a world of his own.

There was no high-jinx on-board Anderson’s first Atlantic crossing, no rapacious beauties intent on bagging a husband and a fortune.  What Anderson got was closer to one of Andy Warhol’s films — one set-up, a continuous take — than to the giddy heights of a Sturgess comedy: for the duration of Anderson’s voyage, and for anyone willing to watch, a CCTV camera relayed its static view of the ocean back to the ship’s monitors—a movie without end.  Its title?  “A View from the Bridge”.  It was the bleakest journey of Anderson’s young life.

Anderson is only 31, not that age should matter where talent is concerned.  But consider that by 1970, the year Anderson was born, Martin Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich had each made one film and were at the vanguard of the New Hollywood.  It is a measure of Anderson’s prodigious gifts that he can count both directors as admirers.  After seeing Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first feature, Scorsese wrote the young Texan a fan letter; while Bogdanovich wrote the introduction to the published screenplay of The Royal Tenenbaums.

Anderson’s third film is his most successful to date, and to this observer as good as the brilliant Rushmore.  How much Anderson draws from life, I’m not so sure.  His literary influences, however, are clear for all to see.  Anderson’s inspiration is the literature of the East Coast—the New York stories of Wharton, Fitzgerald and Salinger, as well as a host of New Yorker writers.  But all of the above influences are filtered through a filmmaking sensibility that owes much to his mentors.  So while the Tenenbaums themselves feel like the inhabitants of Old New York, they actually reside in a dilapidated version of the city that has more in common with the Chelsea Hotel than the Algonquin.  But I guess that’s modern filmmakers for you.  Anderson, like Tarantino, is a child of the movie brats.  And indeed The Royal Tenenbaums displays the same love of the medium as Bogdanovich’s early work, though it is Scorsese’s rhythms that lie behind it—from The Big Shave to The Age of Innocence.  Think of it as Pulp Fiction’s preppy kid brother: more refined, less brash.  Like Pulp Fiction, it’s the sum of its youthful maker’s dreams and obsessions:  New Yorker Fiction, if you like.

—MM

ANIMAL KINGDOM—the Glamour and the Grunge

Posted on by Mick McAloon

 

In his book ‘Cultural Amnesia’, Clive James writes that “the atmospherics of Michael Mann’s Heat affect the look of any movie made about crime: other directors, whether working out of the United States, Latin America, Europe or Hong Kong, either go with him, towards glamour, or go against him, towards grunge, but they always have his look in mind.”  There’s more than a touch of Heat to David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom, especially in its depiction of an armed robbery unit that is as wild and lawless as its quarry.  It also has that city-at-night feeling which Mann is so attuned to, though in this instance the city is Melbourne. But despite its cinematic influences (Goodfellas, Magnolia), Animal Kingdom is rooted in the real.   Michôd has spoken in interviews of wanting to “make a film that unlike, say, a Quentin Tarantino or Guy Richie crime movie, took itself seriously, and was set within a big, dark, nasty world, which was nevertheless still quite poetic and beautiful.”  In other words, Michôd goes for the glamour and the grunge.

From its stark opening (it begins with a bark) to its final confrontation (it ends with a bang), Animal Kingdom more than justifies its grand and arresting title. In its native land, it has been called “the Australian Godfather”, and one can see why: a terrific cast at the top of their game; a brilliant script which takes the sequence as its dramatic unit; a family drama in which the family’s youngest (and most innocent?) must make his way in the world.  Where it differs from The Godfather is in its sense of scale and ambition.  But then Michôd’s crime family is not as organised, nor as operatic, as Coppola’s: the Cody’s are not the Corleones, though what they lack in grandeur they more than make up for in their propensity for violence, betrayal, and incestuous feelings.

The film is loosely based on an actual incident in Melbourne’s recent history known as the Walsh Street Killings. But while Michôd uses this incident to ignite the film’s plot, he is after bigger game.  Like the recent Winter’s Bone, Animal Kingdom is about survival. Its teenage protagonist, Josh, must negotiate the perilous terrain of family—or at least his family.  His notorious uncles and grandmother, to whom he turns after the death of his mother, provide Josh with an unsentimental education: “We take it out on whoever turns up.  That’s what we do.”  It is left to Guy Pearce’s homicide detective, and the film’s moral centre, to guide Josh as best he can.  It is Pearce who supplies us with the film’s metaphor of the “animal kingdom”, telling Josh:”You’ve survived because you’ve been protected by the strong, but they’re not strong anymore.”

In case we were in any doubt about Michôd’s intentions, the film is full of bracing scenes in which the strong and the cruel survive at the expense of the vulnerable. Time and again we see goodness expunged, innocence corrupted. Watch how Michôd fixes on the smooth and youthful complexion of a rookie cop, his good manners, and his by-the-book approach as he responds to the report of a stolen car. This is just one of several extraordinary sequences. Already you sense that Michôd is one of those “sprinkler on the lawn” directors who can summon dread from the sweetest of sights. And unlike Josh, the influences that have shaped him (Scorsese, Mann, P.T. Anderson) have been all to the good. Josh has been raised by wolves and acts accordingly.

—MM