American Splendor (2003) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | September 12, 2003
Almost only counts in horseshoes: Paul Giamatti is once again the best thing in a bad movie
American Navel Gazer
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
American Splendor. Starring Paul Giamatti, Hope Davis, Shari Springer Berman, James Urbaniak, Sylvia Kauders, and Harvey Pekar. Based upon original material by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner. Written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. (Fine Line Features, Color, 101 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
Having long admired Paul Giamatti’s acting chops, and having seen Terry Zwigoff’s movie Ghost World—a wonderful and quietly tragic movie also based on an underground comic book series—I was prepared to enjoy a movie that seemed right up my alley.
First off: This movie is well-made and Giamatti gives a great performance, as does Hope Davis (About Schmidt), who plays his wife, Joyce.
However, American Splendor doesn’t put me in the comic book world any more than, say, Remains of the Day, or Spartacus did. Despite the directors using a number of gimmicks, such as inserting comic strip panels and animation and inter-cutting scenes with the real-life Harvey Pekar (the comic book author upon whom the movie is based) and his wife and nerd co-worker Joyce Brabner, this movie still put up a wall between itself and me, whereas in Ghost World, I got totally sucked into the atmosphere, as there was much more graphic unity and cohesion with the plot and characters.
Another reason is that in Ghost World, I found it easier to sympathize and empathize with the characters. Not so with Harvey Pekar. Sure, Giamatti’s fun to watch, but he doesn’t have very good monologue to work with (he’s a bit of a recluse, to say the least) or dialogue. He’s sort of similar to Seymour, Steve Buscemi’s loner from Ghost World (and, I have heard from aficionados, Seymour was based in part on Pekar, a friend of comic illustrator Robert Crumb). Unlike Seymour, however, Pekar has few redeeming qualities.
The harrowing misfortune of living with depression and cancer aside, I’ve never seen such a bitter, negative, and self-indulgent character like Harvey Pekar. He’s billed as a “curmudgeon,” so I was expecting him to be an intelligent cynic with ascerbic wit, sort of a modern-day H.L. Mencken or Mark Twain.
But Pekar never really does more than grunt about not wanting to look on the brighter side of life, because that’s “Hollywood bullshit.” The most intellectual he gets is when he’s a guest on “Late Night with David Letterman” for the fifth time or so, when he accuses Letterman of being a sellout, because his show is on NBC, and NBC is owned by General Electric, a company that makes weapons systems. That’s his great big revelation? Would be perhaps had I not heard it out of the mouths of John Cusack and Tim Robbins so many times before.
Basically, Pekar’s schtick is chronicling his commonplace, everyday—but empty—life. Mind you, not finding something beautiful and unique about it, but just giving his readers (who are these people that waste their time on such mindless drivel?) something that’s “real,” not like the “Hollywood bullshit” he so disdains.
His stories revolve around his job as a file clerk at the Veterans Administration hospital in Cleveland, trips to the supermarket, etc. At the hospital, we run into a handful of his oddball co-workers, but not much else. His journey to the express lane while getting trapped behind a kvetching woman with a handful of coupons is cute, but not terribly novel. From Pekar, I get the feeling of a recycled Andy Rooney monologue: “Did you ever notice that I’m really just an moping loser with nothing to say?”
Except even Rooney uses voice inflection to try to actually interest his audience, as does Giamatti. Had the directors left Giamatti alone to perform the role, maybe I wouldn’t be down on Pekar so much. But, by writing the real Pekar into the script, they sabotage anything Giamatti has done to make him marginally sympathetic, interesting or intelligent.
The real Pekar comes off as sort of a non-entity at best, and a grouch complaining about meaningless trivial inconveniences at worst. He’s (dare I say it?) a bore! A navel-gazing, self-pitying bore!
Thus we are left wanting for any inspiration whatsoever, the victims of a false advertising campaign. There’s no “splendor” at all to his self-loathing and negativity. Pekar is basically a man so nihilistic, he’d make Nietzsche blush.
But, unlike Nietzsche, Pekar has negated even the possibility of there being any heroic overmen, not to mention just decent and interesting people.
Want proof of how Harvey Pekar’s life has been mostly wasted (based upon what’s presented in this film, at least)? Here it is: He worked at the V.A. Hospital in Cleveland long enough to earn a retirement party. That’s a pretty huge chunk taken out of his life.
Have you ever been to a V.A. Hospital? It’s a ready-made central casting for a novel (or even comic book) of epic proportions: So many aging soldiers, Marines, sailors and airmen, and they’ve all got stories to tell. Tales of daring exploits and understated, modest, disclaimers of any heroism at all. At his fingertips, any time he wanted to lunch with them at the cafteria or share a coffee at the canteen, he could have given the world a treasure trove of stories of our many heroes, a few cowards, some braggarts, a few saints and quite a few sinners.
He could have opened up to the rest of us the world of the forgotten veterans too poor to go anywhere else but the V.A. Hospital, of American Legion members who go there rather than their private docs, just to chew the fat and share old war stories with their fellow comrades,of the ancient guy sitting outside the entrance in his wheelchair, using a few of his last precious breaths to suck in nicotine, smoking a Camel through his tracheostomy tube,the heartbreak of lonely old homeless vets, who’ve no family left in the world, just waiting to die.
Oddly, we meet none of these colorful types. Harvey Pekar is too busy staring at file cabinet drawers, complaining about the length of lines at the store, and gazing at his own navel lint to look beyond to see a grand and glorious world outside of himself.
But, of course, Pekar’s world precludes the very existence of such people as heroes, and the wars they fought and won were nothing more than “Hollywood bullshit.”
American Splendor is the antithesis of It’s A Wonderful Life: It unintentionally answers the question “would the world have been better off without Harvey Pekar?” with “who gives a rat’s ass?”
But, of course, any other answer would have been more of the same, phony “Hollywood bullshit.”
I do recommend “American Splendor,” however, when it comes out as a DVD rental, so that viewers can watch some good performances, as well as competent color timing, sound editing and film splicing.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Comedies, Graphic Novel Adaptations, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
The Vagina Monologues (2002) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | April 5, 2003
Speaking From Her Diaphragm
[xrr rating=1.5/5]
The Vagina Monologues. Featuring Eve Ensler, Steven C. Lawrence. Written and directed by Eve Ensler. (HBO/Warner Home Video, 2002, Color, 76 minutes. MPAA Rating: Unrated.)
So, I’m in a Holiday Inn in the Boston area, and I turn on the television. Surfing the channels, on HBO I see Moe Howard from the Three Stooges talking about his vagina and some earth-shattering orgasm he’s gotten.
“Moe has a vagina?” I ask myself in bewilderment, scratching my head. Then, I look closer. “Hold on there just one second, I don’t think that’s Moe!” I say to myself. “This guy’s voice is almost half an octave higher than Moe’s.”
Then it hits me: It ain’t a guy at all, but this incredibly butch woman.
Then, like a ray of light gleaming from the reflection off pond scum, it dawns on me: “You know what? That’s not Moe Howard! That’s Eve Ensler, and this is that Vagina Monologues soliloquy I’ve heard so much about!”
The Vagina Monologues is the brainchild of said Ms. Ensler, and has captivated women across America during the past few years. Yet, the mystery always remained front-and-center in my brain: Why is this play so exclusively popular among women? I mean, I’m a man, and there’s nothing I’d love to do than hear a chick talk about her love hole for two solid hours. The eternal argument goes on among us males: Are you a leg man, or a breast man? And my reply has been, as always: “To hell with that! I’m a vagina man!!!” (The rest is icing on the cake, or rather, pie.)
So, you’d think I would have been ripe for marketing as the target audience. But, alas, gaining admittance to this show requires all the feminine wiles I’m so sorely lacking: Empathy, telepathy, “getting” Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and knowing the secret handshake to the “Hillary Rodham Clinton Girls Only Treehouse.”
Now, being the sexist Neanderthal male I am, maybe I’d be more appreciative if one of the play’s comelier leading ladies like Phylicia Rashad, Sandra Oh, or Donna Hanover (née Giuliani) were performing, but watching Eve (who could never for a moment be confused with that Biblical temptress of the same name, or Anne Baxter’s defining role) prattle on and on about her vagina, as though she were spouting wisdom from Mount Sinai made me realize that P.T. Barnum was absolutely dead-on when he said, “what people want to see most is a freak show.”
Every few minutes, the camera pans or cuts to audience reaction, and there’s a crowd of equally homely, middle-aged, mostly WASP women hootin’ and hollerin’. They’re the target audience of this harangue, all those uptight and upright women for whom Eve is some kind of liberating goddess. (“Yes, ladies, you too can be comfortable talking about your vaginas because Eve has made it okay!”)
Hold on just a second there, where did I see this wolfpack before? Oh, my sweet Lord Jesus and Virgin Mary, these skanks are the same crusty old maids and matrons that sat stiffly in my old Methodist Church and taught Sunday school while I was growing up in that Godforsaken hell-hole in West Virginia! Mother of Mercy Almighty, that really ugly one with the Witchy-Poo hair and TV set glasses, wasn’t she the one who told me I’d go to hell if I kept playing footsie with Kelly Rittenauer during confirmation classes?!?
All the rest of this one-woman(?)-show was more of the same: Eve speaking in hushed tones that build to an (orgasmic) crescendo worthy of Maya Angelou, as though we were hearing Moses reading the Ten Commandments tablets for the first time. I found out a lot of amazing things from this video: Women are sexually different than men. Women are “victims,” victimized by (you guessed it) men. Women know more about their “needs” than men do. (Recognize the pattern here? Men bad). Despite their physical absence in this screed of a play, Men play the heavy with little subtlety and lots of dangerous testosterone. Imagine Edward G. Robinson or Jimmy Cagney inciting a mob to use a battering ram to bust down Eve Ensler’s…. On second thought, don’t imagine it.
Then we come to the play’s greatest revelation. Dear readers, I want you all to stop whatever distracting activity you’re engaged in and give me your undivided attention. That’s right: Put out that cigar, put down that rolling pin, and glue your eyes to this page, ‘cause I’m only going to tell you this once.
Get this: We come into the world by coming out of a woman’s ……….vagina! Really, folks, I’m not making this up!
My favorite bit was when Eve was getting really deep and philosophical, with her secret girl talk about how all women have needs, despite the taboos society place upon women. About how, in our youth culture, it’s thought of as imprudent and gross to talk about, say, old ladies’ vaginas, you know, like your great aunt’s. As an antidote to this stiff prudery, Ensler recommends talking openly with the graying matriarchs in your family about their vaginas and “needs.”
Listen: It’s scary enough thinking about my parents having sex without having to hypothesize about what it would be like if my grandparents were doing the dirty deed.
I can just imagine myself regressing back to those halcyon days of my youth. I’m nine years old again, and visiting my grandma’s house:
“Hi grandma, what’s going on?”
She pats me on the head, and leads me over to the kitchen windowsill, where a blackberry cobbler is cooling. “I’m just fine, hon’,” she says, warm as the cobbler. “How are you doing?”
“Oh, I guess I’m alright…. Grandma, just because I care about you so much, how’s your vagina doing?”
“I beg your pardon, young man?”
“I said, ‘Grandma, how’s your vagina been doing?’ Is Grandpa taking care to give your little kitty the TLC and foreplay you still need to feel like a woman?”
“What?!?”
“No, really, grandma, I just wanted you to feel empowered to talk openly and freely about you vag—”
Then, I envision her chasing after me with a switch, and hauling my ass over to the bathroom sink to wash my mouth out with soap. I can see my mom and dad giving me the third degree and sending me to some head-shrinker to find out why, in the name of all that is Decent and Right and Holy, that I am not only talking to one of my elders about her vagina, but even thinking about it.
But, even that’s one of this video’s lesser flaws.
The one major problem with it is this: It stars Eve Ensler.
By dint of that fact, the audience is confined to the narrow demographic of naive schoolmarms, frustrated librarians, Planned Parenthood volunteers, Wiccan broom riders, Lileth Faire groupies, Frida Kahlo wannabes, and NOW members.
Being a guy, and a photographer by trade, I tend to pre-visualize things in my mind, using the Ansel Adams method. And, if I might add, watching and listening to Eve Ensler go on and on about her vagina forms these images in my head of….
….what Eve Ensler’s vagina must look like.
I won’t proceed down this road better not taken any further. Suffice it to say that this video is enough to drive even the most vagina-obsessed satyr to homosexuality.
If there is one moral to this bizarre gabfest, it is this: Clam up all the talk about your clams, ladies! Come on, I mean, really now. Apparently, Ms. Ensler’s “play” is being performed at college campuses across the United States, and earlier this year was staged in a high school in Amherst, Massachusetts.
I know that we live in an age of “diversity” and “tolerance,” but am I the only one out there who thinks the adults who encouraged and let this play be produced in a high school by minors are sick, disgusting perverts whom any parent with half a brain would shield their children from?
“Ladies,” here’s a little advice from a man who’s been around: When you take the mystery out of sex by wearing buttons that say “I Love My Vagina” in public, you are not attractive, sexy, or profound. You come off as disturbed, narcissistic and incredibly shallow. If you really think about it, Paris Hilton is just Eve Ensler with a lower I.Q.
Leave porn to the professionals. And, for God’s sake, please return the theatre to the masters of the craft, such as Chekhov, Ibsen and Mel Brooks.
Topics: Made for Cable, Movie Reviews, Spoken Word |
About Schmidt (2002) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 21, 2002
Jack Nicholson is less than thrilled daughter Hope Davis brought home Dermot Mulroney and his ponytail, widow's peak, mullet, goatee, and Amway pitch
The Quiet Man
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
About Schmidt. Starring Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney, June Squibb, and Howard Hesseman. Screenplay by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor. Based on the novel by Louis Begley. Directed by Alexander Payne. (New Line Cinema, 2002, Color, 125 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
Alexander Payne’s new movie, About Schmidt, opened in the Philadelphia area this Friday. I have been hearing about it since its limited run began, particularly on conservative talk radio, and some hosts and callers have dismissed it as “what happens when Hollywood makes fun of Midwesterners and Midwestern values.” Well, there’s some truth to that, but I don’t see the source so much as Hollywood, as much as a dead-on self-critique and reflection that could have only come from screenwriters who themselves are part and parcel of the Midwest plains states. Payne and co-scenarist Jim Taylor (who also co-wrote Citizen Ruth and Election with Payne) have made a masterpiece of a character study in finding out what makes stoic and enigmatic Warren Schmidt tick.
When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who introduced me to a writer who would become my favorite novelist, Sinclair Lewis. Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith accurately captured the plain-spoken and dry humor of the region, through Lewis’s naturalistic writing style. But Lewis was more than a recorder of the everyday people around him, he was a master of keen observation and insight, and seeing the quirky denizens of Zenith and Gopher Prairie through his eyes filled me as a reader with the sense of what I call the “inner adventure.”
What Lewis had going for him as a novelist, Alexander Payne has as a moviemaker: The same sense of wry observation, absurd humor that arises out of awkward and painful situations, and biting social commentary that never wallows into the territory of judgmental didacticism. To me, Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Warren Schmidt is, like Main Street’s Carol Kennicott, an angry loner, dissatisfied with the world around him. But, whereas Main Street follows Carol out of college and into a stifling marriage—in which she can only survive by suppressing her innate romanticism and adventurism—About Schmidt catches its tragicomic hero at the tail end of his life, after decades of lonely emotional withholding have dried up the once puissant earnestness and ambition he once had. He lives his life, as Thoreau penned, “in quiet desperation.”
I agree with many, however, who have said, “I don’t know what to make of this movie.” Not that I don’t know what to make of it, but I agree that they don’t. There are many times when Nicholson just keeps a stiff upper lip, and tries sailing through awkward situations by responding with pained silence. And, although some genuine humor came out of some of those scenes, such as scenes in an R.V. park, and one scene in the hot tub with Kathy Bates, many of the theatergoers in attendance laughed at each and every one of his silences, as if on cue, or as if waiting or expecting to be prodded. It is something I first picked up on when seeing Hitchcock’s 1964 flawed classic Marnie at an Austin theater a few years ago, that people break out into nervous laughter during awkward or silent moments. It is a discomforting thing for people to have to face, and stirs the reflexive reaction of the viewer to equally awkward giggling or laughter, rather than having to face the protagonist’s silence with their own. Of course, as allegedly “passive” participants, it is unintentional on their part.
Yet, the ending to About Schmidt (which I won’t give away) was a poignant and cathartic moment, but is the only moment when catharsis is permitted the viewer, inasmuch as we the viewers are handed a veritable table of permissible emotions. Up to that point, Schmidt is a repressor, and likewise viewers repress any honest emotional response to his character. That’s where Payne really got his point across, in spades: It was just as interesting listening to the audience reactions as it was watching Payne’s characters on the screen acting out theirs.
As for the movie as a whole, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and was both entertained and enlightened. The supporting cast was excellent, though two-dimensional. This is by design, because we are viewing these offbeat people through the subjective eyes of Warren Schmidt. Dermot Mulroney as the loutish, Amway-pushing son-in-law-to-be is perfect casting, with his annoying ponytailed mullet, widow’s peak, porkchop sideburns, and cheesy goatee. Howard Hesseman and Kathy Bates also liven the cast with their aging-hippie-cum-white-trash characterizations. I especially enjoyed the hot tub scene with a nude Kathy Bates. It took a lot of courage for Payne to do that, because Bates is overweight, aging and doesn’t fit the image what the fashionistas tell us is beautiful. But lemme tell ya, she is one beautiful woman, and exudes so much self-assuredness and expressiveness. I hope some able sculptor poses her for a Venus statue. It would be much more alluring and fascinating than one of any of the current crop of starved waifs Us magazine tries to ram down our throats.
Another nice touch is using Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes in the soundtrack. Any other director would have used something more obvious, such as Debussy or even Chopin to convey Warren Schmidt’s overwhelming sense of solitude and irresolution. Satie’s music melds seamlessly and beautifully with Nicholson’s onscreen solitary wanderlust.
About Schmidt is not Payne’s funniest movie (Election wins that, hands down) nor his most satirical (Citizen Ruth pushes the envelope a lot farther than this one). However, through Warren Schmidt’s journey into the undiscovered self, Payne has crafted a masterpiece of understated comedic drama on par with Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors or Wes Anderson’s Rushmore.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Comedies, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
Ghost World (2001) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | August 14, 2001
Scarlett Johansson and Thora Birch are up to mischief in "Ghost World"
Every Cynic Is a Frustrated Romantic
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
Ghost World. Starring Thora Birch, Scarlett Johansson, Steve Buscemi, Brad Renfro, Illeana Douglas, Bob Balaban, Stacey Travis, Charles C. Stevenson, Jr., Dave Sheridan, Tom McGowan, Debra Azar, Brian George, and Pat Healy. Cinematography by Alfonso Beato, A.S.C. Edited by Carole-Kravetz-Aykanian and Michael R. Miller. Music by David Kitay. Screenplay by Daniel Clowes and Terry Zwigoff, based on the graphic novel by Daniel Clowes. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. (United Artists Pictures/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2001, Color, 111 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
Ghost World is the best movie I’ve seen in a long damn time. The key to a great movie is that it’s its own world—a self-contained universe. Bringing Up Baby is one such example, so is On the Waterfront and For a Few Dollars More. Any of Billy Wilder’s movies, too. This one was one of them.
I love Enid, played by Thora Birch. A teenage H.L. Mencken, she skewers pretentious poseurs and tips over sacred cows. But, underneath her outer punk persona, there is a soft-hearted hero-worshipper. Her predicament is that she’s stranded on a social desert island and uses cynicism as a shield to protect her from the hopeless banality in which heroes and passion are deemed passé by those who walk through life questioning nothing, but just parroting the answers they’ve picked up from the larger society.
Ghost World abounds in social commentary, but doesn’t fall into the schmaltzy trap of trying to “solve” the world’s social ills. Although on the surface Enid is directionless, she nonetheless has a mania for sketching a diary of the oddballs and weirdoes that make up her small town. An excellent artist and caricaturist, Enid ends up failing art class twice.
Her airhead/hippy/burnout art teacher, Roberta (Illeana Douglas), is a walking cliché of a total conformist affecting an air of anti-authoritarianism. She blows off Enid’s diary and her cartoons of Don Knotts, but pushes her students to instead produce so-called “controversial” art. A really dead-on scene is when one of Roberta’s sycophantic students (Ashley Peldon) creates a sculpture out of coat-hangers, which represents “a woman’s right to choose, something I feel super-strongly about.” It’s a gem of a parody on political art in which the politics are much stronger than the art. I was rolling on the floor when Roberta’s real bad college art film “Mirror/Father/Mirror” clip was playing. God damn, that rings true. Roberta doesn’t encourage the artistic impulse so much as pushing her agenda on the students to be “controversial” and “confront people’s attitudes,” mainly because she has no original ideas of her own.
So, Enid decides to spoof Roberta and bring in a “found object” of a Jim Crow caricature from the 1920s of “Coon’s Chicken,” which depicts a monkey-like negro. This pisses off the other students (who were sotto voce receiving the message that they should only confront people with politically correct controversy), but the irony of the movie is in how Roberta reacts to the Jim Crow poster; Enid can’t get the time of day from her when it comes to her own talented artwork, but her jokes on Roberta’s inanities wins Roberta over to her cause and even inspires Roberta to get Enid a scholarship to art college. All this falls apart when Roberta enters the piece in an exhibit, and the local busybodies force her to remove the poster and fail Enid in her class. Roberta’s capitulation reveals her devotion to “controversy” and “confrontation” to be a hollow pose, and she covers her ass by letting Enid be the lamb to the slaughter.
The relationship between Enid and Seymour (Steve Buscemi) evinces Enid’s yearnings to find someone to look up to, rather than down upon. I liked Steve Buscemi’s performance a lot. I’m so used to him playing funny roles, that it was sort of incongruous seeing him play it (mostly) straight in a comedic movie, but it worked quite well. Like Enid, Seymour is an outcast, but middle-aged, and at first becomes the victim of one of Enid’s and her best friend Rebecca’s (Scarlett Johansson) cruel pranks. But underneath the nerdish and pitiful exterior, Enid comes to discover in Seymour someone as isolated and alienated from society as she is. She finds in him a noble soul, whose passions are worn less on his sleeve than Enid’s are, but locked up in his 1920s-themed room dedicated to his 78 rpm blues and ragtime records and poster art from the same era. Enid sees in Seymour a lot of herself, but also someone who has been run over once too many times in life, and whose social rebellions have shriveled into repressed loneliness. Enid finds in Seymour a hero, and gushes, “I’d kill for a room like yours.” complimenting his passion for nostalgia. To which Seymour—who has given up on the possibility of ever fitting in or finding love— replies, “go ahead, kill me.”
By the movie’s end, Seymour starts asserting his inwardly pent-up feelings to relate to the world through his romance with Enid. He finally getting up the nerve to break up with Dana (Stacey Travis), a nice, though conventional woman, in order to be with Enid, who shares his passions, and thinks like he does. Seymour nonetheless has his love for Enid somewhat unrequited. Just as the revelation that Seymour deserves happiness manifests itself, Enid alienates herself from the world—and the two people she most treasured, Seymour and Rebecca. A happy ending does not win the day, because Enid is compelled to travel down the same lonely path that Seymour has. Perhaps in twenty years, she will have become what he is now.
So, what’s the moral of Ghost World? It’s to go after your passions. The movie’s tragedy is its observation that all-too-often while one may realize his own true self, another puts hers away in hiding. A fine line separates the benevolent universe and the malevolent, and that place is what the authors meant by the movie’s title.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Buddy Movies, Comedies, Graphic Novel Adaptations, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
Memento (2000) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | April 6, 2001
Guy Pearce lets his body language do the talking in "Memento"
Forget About It
[xrr rating=2.5/5]
Memento. Starring Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, Mark Boone Junior, Russ Fega, Jorja Fox, Stephen Tobolowsky, Harriet Samson Harris, and Thomas Lennon. Screenplay by Christopher Nolan, based on a story by Jonathan Nolan. Directed by Christopher Nolan. (Newmarket Films, 2000, Color, 113 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
I am very much into suspense thrillers. However, I approached this one with a wary eye, as it was recommended by a friend who once suggested I see The Usual Suspects, the most flaccid “suspense” movie I’ve ever seen.
Memento is un-momentous for the same reason The Usual Suspects was: It requires the viewer to hang all his emotions on the gimmick peg. For example, I stopped watching The Usual Suspects about 3/4 into the movie.
“It was just, frankly, boring,” I told my friend. “I lost interest.”
My friend screamed at me that I missed the big shock ending, in which the Keyser Soze MacGuffin is explained. I would’ve loved that movie, I was told, if I had simply been patient enough to wait for the big payoff at the end.
I countered that Alfred Hitchcock’s movies also have big shock ending payoffs at the end, too, but that Hitch kept the viewer interested with taut suspense, a great plot and finely-honed dialogue.
So, I went into Memento with a little more patience. I stuck with this one until the bitter end, and it was indeed bitter.
The gimmick in this movie, which I picked up a third of the way into the inaction, is that it is shot in reverse time. Its hero, played by Guy Pearce, must have graduated from the Keanu Reeves School of Cardboard Acting, and suffers from a memory disorder. He can’t remember what happened the day before, so he must reconstruct it physically—with Polaroid shots and body tattoos—to recreate a history of his life, so as not to go totally insane. He also is tracking down a killer (a device borrowed from Hitch). Once he catches the real killer, he can exonerate himself.
But, the story is told with painstakingly pedantic scenes and awkwardly fake understatement. I had no sympathy for the hero at all, and if it weren’t for some very good acting by Carrie Ann Moss and Joe Pantoliano, I probably would have tuned out early.
The main problem with Memento is that it tries too hard to be a film noir for our times, while ignoring just what it was that made those dark movies so memorable. Combing my mind, I cannot even think of one lesser film noir that was less entertaining than Memento, and no, I’m not forgetting Johnny Stool Pigeon or Detour, either. As far as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Out of the Past, or White Heat, forget about it! Memento is so far out of their league that it’s an insult to compare this dreck with those great classics.
Watching movies requires, as we all know, the “willing suspension of disbelief.” And I’ve got plenty of that suspension: It keeps me well-entertained even by such formulaic movies as The Money Pit and Brian’s Song. When it comes to movies, I admit to being an escapist.
But, when something is so patently ridiculous that it defies belief, that’s where I draw the line. For example: In order to reconstruct his identity, Pearce been tattooed all over his torso. Okay, fine. I’ll buy that.
However, just look at those tattoos: The producers obviously wanted them to look so cool that they went whole hog, having a tattoo artist not just scrawl utilitarian messages on his body, but recreate the Sistine Chapel according to Marilyn Manson across his chest and arms. This one affectation comes off as more pretentious than Federico Fellini’s entire oeuvre.
Of course, there are not many scenes of Pearce actually getting a tattoo. They would be too laughable if actually explicated. However, I can imagine what one scene from the cutting room floor might look like:
PEARCE: I need this message tattooed.
TATTOO GUY: What does it say?
PEARCE: “He has a gun, and he’s coming for you.”
TATTOO GUY: That’s a lot of words, but if I just use navy blue, I can do it for you pretty cheap.
PEARCE: Cheap? I have $1000. Go to town, man.
TATTOO GUY: Where do you get all that money? I mean, you live in a fleabag hotel, with no obvious means of support.
PEARCE: I got it from Chris Nolan, my director. He said I’ve got to look “scary
cool.” Use this CD cover as an example for your fonts.
TATTOO GUY: Wow, that is cool. Motörhead’s “Sacrifice.” Lots of cool Goth script. This will go perfect with the one I did from that Mercyful Fate t-shirt you brought in last week.
PEARCE: Last week?
TATTOO GUY: Oh, yeah—right. Sorry, dude, forgot.
PEARCE: Anyways, we’re going after the MTV crowd: Nolan told me not to worry too much that there’s nothing really cool about me at all, at least not in the Robert Mitchum or Elvis sense. Nolan said, “image is everything,” so with these tattoos, and working out at the gym all day, so that my pecs look really ripped, I can’t lose.
TATTOO GUY: Bitchen, dude.
Of course, there is a bona-fide shock ending by the time this mess wraps up, but you’ll figure out that Pearce is the killer long before he does.
If you have the intestinal fortitude to sit through this half-hearted art-school film, I recommend Edward Dmytryk’s 1965 classic amnesia thriller Mirage as the perfect antidote. A tightly-shot suspense flick in the Hitchcock tradition, Gregory Peck doesn’t need pecs nor tattoos to deliver a convincing performance. Instead, he relies on Peter Stone’s crafty dialogue and brilliant plot. Peck also does something else that has eluded Christopher Nolan and Guy Pearce.
He acts.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Dramas, Independent Films, Movie Reviews, Suspense Movies |
