The Last Sin Eater (2007) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | February 9, 2007
Liana Liberato stars as Cadi Forbes in "The Last Sin Eater"
The Importance of Being Earnest
[xrr rating=3/5]
The Last Sin Eater. Starring Louise Fletcher, Henry Thomas, Soren Fulton, A.J. Buckley, Stewart Finlay-McLennan, Peter Wingfield, Elizabeth Lackey, Thea Rose, Gabrielle Fitzpatrick, and introducing Liana Liberato. Music by Mark McKenzie. Cinematography by Robert Seaman. Screenplay by Brian Bird and Michael Landon, Jr., based on the novel by Francine Rivers. Edited and directed by Michael Landon, Jr. (FoxFaith, 2007, Color, 141 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG-13).
Another costume drama, The Last Sin Eater tells a tale of redemption strikingly similar to Pan’s Labyrinth through its heroine, another girl on the cusp of adolescence and responsibility of adulthood. They also share a similar plot structure (the ordeal) and even the same stock characters. However, the two are worlds apart.
The fledgling FoxFaith line of inspirational Christian movies released this picture. To me, it’s kind of “made for TV” filmmaking that’s like the proverbial fingernails dragged down the chalkboard: Awkward, dramatically inconsistent performances (especially among the children actors); uneven pacing and slack editing; generic-looking costumes and sets; inter-cutting of 35mm location shots with what appears to be 16mm stock footage; and, a director who uses embarrassingly primitive special effects like “Chroma-Key” bluescreen process, which Alfred Hitchcock deemed obsolete as long ago as 1962, when he made his terror classic The Birds. Dismissed by most reviewers, don’t hold your breath waiting for the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to bestow its cherished imprimatur upon this “nice try” by a director whom the producers should have barred from the editing room.
And, although you might think I’m gearing up to “pan” another film (pun intended), think twice. Why? Because, since I was a kid, I don’t watch movies simply to revel in their technical merits. I go because I want to be entertained, perhaps even enlightened, by a great story.
The technically virtuosic Pan’s Labyrinth left me cold because it was all style and no substance. Yet, despite its glaring aesthetic deficits, I loved this one precisely because it had the crucial ingredient the former lacked: A great story. More so than its message, a movie’s story is its soul.
The Last Sin Eater takes place in a Welsh settlement in 1850s Appalachia. Ten year-old Cadi Forbes (Liana Liberato) hides a dark secret that weighs heavy on her conscience. She tries hard to repress it, but an incident at her grandmother’s funeral reopens the barely-healed wound.
At her burial, something’s horribly amiss: The ceremony, bereft of comforting eulogy, seems more of a witch’s sabbath than a passing onto the next life. Held under the cover of darkness, Cadi’s granny lies in state before the silent mourners, a piece of bread and a bladder full of wine lying on her chest.
Cutting through the eerie stillness, a hooded figure appears, the Sin Eater (Peter Wingfield). He scarfs down the bread and gulps the wine, and in a sorrowful voice—having cleansed the old woman’s sins by condemning his own soul—recites a solemn wish for her forgiveness. No one looks at or speaks to the Sin Eater (it’s rumored that the very act of communicating with the wretched outcast brings eternal damnation) but while everyone’s heads are gravely bowed, Cadi hears something painful yet oddly benign in his voice. She doesn’t fear looking into his eyes, because she already feels doomed by her transgression.
Cadi’s identification with the Sin Eater soon becomes an obsession: Unable to live with herself, a couple days later she seeks him out. She goes into the mountains to find him, despite others’ warnings.
Here is real heroism: Cadi’s refusal to heed superstitious gossip and deny the evidence of her own experience buttresses her resolve to forge on in her quest. We soon learn her secret—her sister’s accidental death, by falling off a tree bridge over a waterfall—was prompted, partly, by Cadi’s stubbornness. However, her very intransigence is also the key to her eventual redemption.
Around this point, the plot comes to a standstill as it meanders. Unable to take the clumsy dialogue of the three child actors, I get ready to exit the theater. Only one thing keeps me pinned in my seat: What will happen next?
Cadi eventually tracks down the Sin Eater to his secret cave, he reluctantly performs the sin eating rite, never having done it for a living person. She feels nothing, and descends the mountain just as encumbered as she was going up.
On her way home, she happens upon a Man of God (Henry Thomas) alone and preaching the gospel to no one in particular along the river. Seeing that she’s troubled, he gets her to open up about her predicament. He laughs, and divulges to Cadi that the mortal Sin Eater cannot relieve her guilt, that long ago there was a true sin eater named Jesus Christ, whose grace has made it possible for her to be forgiven for her sins while still alive, rather than having to wear them like an albatross around her neck until death.
Suddenly, Cadi feels the weight of the world lifted from her shoulders. She runs to tell everyone. “Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
But now the mystery has just begun. Why is the immigrant enclave ignorant of this common knowledge of Christ’s salvation? Why must a doomed man endure ostracism, serving a miserable sentence performing atavistic pagan rituals? And why does village bully Brogan Kai (Stewart Finlay-McLennan, whose thuggish performance recalls Ward Bond and George Kennedy) corner the Man of God, killing this “outsider,” lest his words reach the village?
As Cadi hides from Brogan, she returns to the mountain, where we find out the settlers’ real sin, a secret that’s haunted two generations. Cadi tells the Sin Eater the good news, but he’s unable to accept the tragic fate of having been denied the love of the woman he loved, fathering children and a purposeful, fulfilling life for naught. His agony resonates deeply as he begs her off. “It means I will have wasted twenty years of my life in this cave and never saved a single soul from damnation,” he cries, breaking down.
Being an old-fashioned movie, Louise Fletcher (best known for her Oscar-winning role of sadistic Nurse Ratched in 1975’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) as village elder Miz Elda is the movie’s Deux ex machina, who calls a town meeting that night to divulge the secret. Her testimony opens up a lot of old wounds, but, rather than burning the village to the ground a la avenging angel Clint Eastwood in his 1973 revenge fantasy High Plains Drifter, Elda’s words instead lift the shadows of superstition and scapegoating that kept them in darkness.
The Sin Eater renounces his dark avocation, becomes a preacher and saves souls instead in the sunlight by the river. The movie closes with Cadi exclaiming its moral, that she’s been set free because Christ died for her sins. Not very subtle, but consider the context and target audience.
But, that audience already knows that bit of information. The moral was a rather ingenious MacGuffin for a life-affirming message that sin is an aberration, not man’s constant state and a this-worldly metaphysics that individuals have the inherent right and dignity to live as men, not objects of sacrifice. In other words, “Jesus died for our sins, so now we can all get on with the business of living.”
Maybe it’s not just the sex, moral decadence and profanity driving the faithful to these new religious pictures. From the looks of this one, maybe it’s not only preaching to the choir, either. Perhaps, just like everyone else staying away in droves from movie theaters nowadays, they too just want to see motion pictures that tell fascinating stories, project a benevolent sense of life and present man as clean, heroic, and productive.
And maybe, just maybe, they’re getting fed-up with being patronized as unsophisticated rubes for wanting everybody to live—horror of horrors—happily ever after.
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: Christian Movies, Costume Dramas, Dramas, Movie Reviews, Religious Dramas |
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | January 19, 2007
“I’m NOT ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!”: Doug Jones as Goatboy in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth”
Pretención
[xrr rating=3/5]
Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno). Starring Ariadna Gil, Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Álex Angulo, Manolo Solo, César Vea, and Roger Casamajor. Music by Javier Navarrete. Cinematography by Guillermo Navarro. Edited by Bernat Vilaplana. Written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. (Picturehouse/Warner Sogefilms, 2006, Color, 114 minutes, in Spanish with subtitles. MPAA Rating: R.)
One consequence of Hollywood’s descent into the morass of mindless formula-driven folderol was the rise of independent filmmakers. They’ve stepped in to fill the void left by unimaginative producers who cynically market the same tired sequels, remakes, and thinly veiled plagiarisms of last year’s blockbusters.
Pan’s Labyrinth, billed as a “fairy tale for adults,” has almost everything I love in moviemaking: great performances; riveting action; superior production values, including scrupulously researched costumes and sets; tight, precise editing; gorgeous cinematography with rich, warm colors that embrace the eye; and a self-assured director who seamlessly melds special-effects sequences with the drama, without jarring the viewer’s visual sensibilities. Universally praised by critics, Pan’s Labyrinth recently won three Oscars, including best cinematography, art direction, and makeup.
Yet, something’s missing, and it ain’t Bunny Lake.
What were the best bedtime stories you remember? Dollars-to-doughnuts, they were the ones in which mom and dad kept you in suspense, doling out the fable in miserly doses. “And then what happened, Daddy?” you’d ask over and over as you sat up in bed, gripping the blankets in breathless anticipation of news about the hero’s fate.
Like a bedtime story, Pan’s Labyrinth opens with narration. It’s a device useful in prefacing or encapsulating a fantasy story’s basic premise, but it’s best used briefly—just enough to orient the audience and hint at what lies ahead.
Yet, from frame one, the narrator tells us that once upon a time there was a princess who lived in an underground paradise, where there was no pain or fear. But, dreaming of what life must be like above on Earth (much like the mythical heroine Undine), she escaped to live among the mortals and died as a mortal.
Fine—a great set-up. But then the narrator cannot shut up: “However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess’s soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her….”
Cut to a Rolls-Royce limo driving along a road through the forest, where we meet the story’s heroine—a beautiful young girl, Ofelia (played by Ivana Baquero), accompanying her pregnant mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil). We immediately learn that the bloody Spanish Civil War is nearing its end, and that Ofelia likes to lose herself in fairy-tale books. Then, while the car is stopped in the woods, she discovers a large grasshopper—actually a fairy in disguise.
Thus, about five minutes in—given information that’s telegraphed as clumsily as a Rex Grossman pass—we already know that (a) Ofelia is the ancient princess incarnate, and that (b) the mother-daughter story is merely a vehicle to transport her back to her underground kingdom.
So, at the outset, Pan’s Labyrinth breaks the first rule of storytelling: Do not give away the ending. That’s why it’s called “the end.” As Eli Wallach said in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.” Not just good advice for gunslingers, but for filmmakers as well.
Forced to accompany Ofelia along on her predestined journey, I tell myself: “Perhaps you’re being too harsh. After all, our heroine is a sweet, precocious girl with a vast imagination. Maybe the narration was a red herring, meant to throw us off the trail.” So we continue.
We next learn that Carmen has brought Ofelia to live with her new stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López), in a castle that’s been converted into a company headquarters for part of Generalissimo Franco’s cavalry. Vidal, who commands the outpost, is a brusque martinet with a sadistic streak. He disdains Ofelia and regards Carmen as little more than a vessel to bear him a son to carry on the family name. Outside the castle, the forest is thick with Republican rebels whose gunfire pesters the soldiers and frightens Ofelia and her bedridden mother.
“Wow, what a horribly unsuitable life Ofelia has been forced into,” I think. But, sure enough, one night the grasshopper/fairy shows up to lure Ofelia to its lair, the underground labyrinth that’s conveniently located on HQ property. There, Ofelia meets Pan (Doug Jones), a cloven-hoofed man-goat. Pan informs Ofelia that she’s been chosen to perform three deeds that will require all her daring, cunning, and sober judgment.
“Great!” I’m thinking. “This story’s salvageable after all! Now, the rest of it will involve Ofelia’s adventure through the dank underground maze.”
But that’s not what happens. Ofelia is sent back up to face the dreariness of life in the castle and the horror of warfare.
Yes, Ofelia is resourceful, compassionate, and brave. But, there’s no mystery or suspense. Whether she’s stealing a golden key from a giant evil toad, nursing her frail mother to health with the aid of a magical root put under her bed, or re-entering the labyrinth to filch another treasure, the narrator’s conceit has reduced Ofelia from a heroine to an automaton performing predictably heroic acts. What rightfully should have been a suspenseful tale of a little girl’s emerging heroism instead becomes a tedious exercise in connecting easily anticipated plot dots.
The movie ditches the fantasy quicker than you can say “Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” and the Spanish Civil War plot comes to dominate. Captain Vidal is one bad hombre, leading a posse of officers so rigidly fascistic they even open their umbrellas in heel-clicking unison. When they capture some saintly peasant partisanos, Vidal takes special glee in offing them, point-blank, with head shots from his Luger. For me, Vidal came off as an unintentional parody of Al Pacino’s coke-addled gangster Tony Montana in Scarface: He sneers viciously and punctuates his dialogue with the f-word as much as an R-rated movie will allow, which is all the time. I kept waiting for him to break out at any moment with, “You wanna f*ck with me? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!”
At this point, I’m thinking, “What fairy tale? What labyrinth?” I suddenly find myself fantasizing about director del Toro and his producers meeting during pre-production:
“Okay,” del Toro says, “so we’ve got about a half-hour of this medieval underground fantasy stuff that we can beef up to two hours with lots of mind-blowing CGI special effects and surround sound.”
The fat money-guy sucking his stogy and blowing smoke in everyone’s face ain’t convinced, though. “It’s been done. Last year. Lord of the Rings. Got anything else?”
“Okay, so how about we take the Lord of the Rings story and then bring in For Whom the Bell Tolls—you know, to fill it out?”
“Genius!” the money guy exclaims. “Run with it!”
So, in the tension-laden penultimate scene—after Pan has given Ofelia a chance to redeem herself by bringing him her newborn baby brother—she, in an act of defiance, refuses to sacrifice the kid to his clutches. Very noble. Then, Ofelia is subsequently—and perfectly predictably—dispatched by Vidal’s pistol. No, I haven’t given away the ending: you could see it coming an hour ahead of time.
What ought to have been a heart-rending, cathartic moment becomes instead an afterthought. (“Gee, I was wondering when the heartless Captain Vidal would shoot Ofelia, so that she could pass her final test and resume her rightful reign as princess of the Labyrinth Realm…”)
As the credits rolled, I sat there fuming to myself. You mean I sat through this thing just to be served the shopworn moral that “this Earthly life is but a vale of tears”? I thought I was spending my $7.50 to escape that sort of thing for two hours.
Feeling like the victim of a manipulative emotional mugging, I bolted from my seat. While in the lobby afterward, I overheard a gringo couple exclaiming what a masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth was. Mostly, they discussed the ethereal lighting, the upbeat soundtrack, the great special effects—everything except the story. But, they can be excused, because middle-class gringos are easily lulled into thinking that watching movies with subtitles makes them erudite and culturally sophisticated.
I was more inclined to agree with the Mexican guy whom I heard giving his pal his own assessment: “I knew it’d end that way.”
“Yeah,” his friend rejoined, “me too. The f*cking narrator said it would.”
Sadly, the film industry has come full-circle. In the decade or so since the trickle of independent films has grown to a torrent, the young Turks operating outside of the system have proven that they too can create works just as slick, hackneyed, and shallow as their Hollywood counterparts. The term “independent” once described wunderkind upstarts like Orson Welles and John Cassavetes or geniuses like Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger who earned the clout to strike out on their own. Now, it’s become a euphemism for “dependent on the good graces of Robert Redford and film festival juries.” I offer Pan’s Labyrinth as Exhibit A that the “independent revolution” is over.
However, if you want to see a truly spellbinding fantasy flick that twists and turns and offers up a universally uplifting message at its end, I recommend Labyrinth, the 1986 movie starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly. It speaks volumes about the current state of independent film that the Muppets’ late creator, Jim Henson, could have delivered a yarn more gripping and suspenseful than this offering from the indies’ latest fair-haired boy.
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: Costume Dramas, Dramas, Fantasy Movies, Foreign Films, Independent Films, War Movies |
Miss Potter (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 30, 2006
Renée Zellweger as Peter Rabbit's creatrix in "Miss Potter"
Color Me Charmed
[xrr rating=4/5]
Miss Potter. Renée Zellweger, Ewan McGregor, Emily Watson, Barbara Flynn, Bill Paterson, Matyelok Gibbs, Lloyd Owen, Anton Lesser, David Bamber, Patricia Kerrigan, and Lucy Boynton. Music by Nigel Westlake. Cinematography by Andrew Dunn, B.S.C. Edited by Robin Sales. Written by Richard Maltby, Jr. Directed by Chris Noonan. (MGM/Phoenix Pictures, 2006. Prints by Technicolor. 92 minutes, MPAA Rating: PG).
This biopic, starring Renée Zellweger as famed children’s author and illustrator Beatrix Potter, is director Chris Noonan’s first feature film since the enchanting Babe, released eleven years ago. Even though Zellweger’s goofy brand of charm swept me off my feet in movies like Nurse Betty and Bridget Jones’s Diary, I prepared to go on auto-pilot while I watched what I thought would be a benign but sappy “chick flick.”
Yet, when the opening credits rolled, I sat straight up as Zellweger dipped her painbrush into a water glass. In the close-up of the stirring brush, the water turns from translucent to a deep royal blue. I was struck with the sense of instant recognition upon seeing the work of a great but forgotten artisan materialize before my eyes.
No, I’m not referring to Beatrix Potter, but to another woman from the early twentieth century, Natalie Kalmus. From the 1930s through 1950, she was color consultant for Technicolor, the company behind the opulent film process invented by her husband, Herbert Kalmus. For without Technicolor—a process Natalie Kalmus supervised down to the choice of paint and wardrobe fabric colors for such movies as Gone With the Wind, Duel In the Sun, and The Red Shoes—Miss Potter’s director of photography Andrew Dunn would have had difficulty capturing that particularly saturated hue of royal blue.
This is no small detail. While there have been great advances in multi-channel digital sound, nothing on the visual side has ever topped the warmth and feel of Technicolor’s dye-transfer prints, which the company reintroduced to the screen in 1998 after a twenty-year absence. Although they discontinued that process in 2002, they’ve been able to maintain that trademark “look,” working with filmmakers at every step of production to create lush, vivid final prints with a new proprietary photochemical process. How fitting that this movie chose to honor the work of an artist whose exacting attention and mania for color detail in the printing of her work matched that of another.
Miss Potter opens as thirty-two-year-old spinster Beatrix Potter occupies an upstairs bedroom of her upper-crust parents’ London home. While it would seem she leads a charmed life of comfort and security, Beatrix is a veritable child-woman, bereft of both connubial bliss and human companionship outside her family, her life dominated by her snobbish, uptight mother (Barbara Flynn). Having rejected one unsuitable suitor after another (products of her mother’s matchmaking), she has sworn off marriage. It appears that this poor little rich girl is fated to grow old, gray, and barren—as though she’d never lived at all.
Beatrix’s predicament is that she’s a decidedly eccentric personality trapped in a period when the social circles prescribed and proscribed by rigid British formality allow for very little behavioral deviation, particularly from women. She has no friends to speak of, save for the cheeky farm animals that she sketches and paints. In fact, the lonely woman carries on imaginary, though serious, conversations with Peter Rabbit, Hunca Munca, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Benjamin Bunny. In mid-drawing, she stops to scold them for their mischievousness, scrunching her nose, dimpling her cheeks, and squinting at them. In delightful, colorfully animated watercolor sequences, they wink back, oink, and shake their tail feathers. If another American actress affecting an English accent (such as Gwyneth Paltrow) had been cast in this silly role, I’d probably have left the theater straightaway. But Zellweger has such an irrepressible ebullience that her dotty prattle seems whimsical and endearing.
Little does Beatrix realize that her miniature, imaginary world holds the key that will let her escape the lonely house and make her way in the real world. When she calls upon a publisher, portfolio in hand, the Warne Brothers (Anton Lesser and David Bamber) at first dismiss her children’s book as unprofitable nonsense. But they decide to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit anyhow, as a sop to their younger Pother, Norman. Acted with spirited resolve by Ewan McGregor, the sissified Norman has tired of “playing nursemaid” to his elderly mother and finally put his foot down, demanding a position in the family business. He takes Beatrix’s “bunny book” quite seriously and throws himself into its publication.
Now, movies with mama’s boys named Norman usually wind up with female corpses in the bathtub, but this tale’s passions are far more sensible. Norman’s inexperience winds up being a boon to Beatrix, who’s initially skeptical about his business acumen. He allows her to carefully supervise the book’s presentation and printing. Soon, their business partnership blossoms into romance, although Beatrix’s mother disapproves of her whirlwind courtship (as she intones, aghast) “with a tradesman.”
Unfortunately, in order to give us a glimpse into her furry characters’ origins, the film takes side excursions into Potter’s childhood that almost undermine the movie. Child actress Lucy Boynton’s portrayal of young Beatrix comes off as snotty and petulant. If the movie were merely about Beatrix Potter’s quirky little “drawrings,” then it would appear that she hasn’t matured at all since childhood, except by no longer being annoying.
However, the movie’s true drama is about Beatrix’s maturing into a level-headed, business-savvy woman, and the main story arc, as old as Romeo and Juliet, redeems the picture. Norman’s marriage proposal forces Beatrix, for the first time in her life, to make a decision against her parents’ wishes. Upon visiting her banker, she discovers that her books have made her wealthy beyond her wildest dreams. Now having the means to strike out on her own, Beatrix finally chooses independence.
Richard Maltby’s script also touches upon Potter’s tireless efforts as a conservationist. Here, the Technicolor effect is felt most strongly, conveying breathtaking mountain and waterfront vistas filmed on location in the Isle of Man and Scotland. Another nice touch, I thought, was how the script related Potter’s efforts to preserve her beloved Cumbria from land development and possible ecological despoilment. Although shown silently attending a meeting of local agitators, our Miss Potter’s solution is to attend a real-estate auction and to bid on a foreclosed farm. It’s an uncomplicated (though perhaps unintentional) demonstration of how the free market can provide non-governmental solutions to its own perceived failings. By the time she died, in fact, Beatrix Potter had bequeathed to the National Trust for preservation thousands of acres in England’s scenic Lake District.
Complementing quietly heart-rending portrayals by Zellweger and McGregor is a poignant one from Bill Paterson, playing Beatrix’s enthusiastically supportive father. When he makes a point of purchasing one of her books, she protests that she could have simply given him a copy. “But I wanted to buy one, like everyone else,” he replies, beaming with a parent’s pride. Emily Watson also turns in a quirky performance as Norman’s sister, Millie, a proto-feminist who wears neckties and encourages Beatrix’s nonconformist aspirations.
While composer Nigel Westlake’s score is treacly during the film’s “fairy tale” moments, he does what any sensible British film composer ought to during scenes depicting Beatrix’s and Norman’s ardor and sorrows: he lifts heavily from Elgar and Vaughan Williams, which is always welcome to my ears.
And though the story is uneven in its exposition, I nonetheless found a soft spot in my heart for Miss Potter. It’s a tender film that transforms the screen into a stunning Technicolor storybook, as is appropriate for this hugely popular children’s author. Projecting a quirky, benevolent sense of life, Miss Potter carries itself with quiet dignity and shows how one woman gained the world by keeping her soul.
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: Biopics, Costume Dramas, Dramas, Foreign Films, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
Rocky Balboa (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 20, 2006
Adrian has passed on and the ice-skating rink just got a kiss from the wrecking ball, but you can't keep a good man down
Somebody Down Here Loves Ya
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
Rocky Balboa. Starring Sylvester Stallone, Burt Young, Antonio Tarver, Geraldine Hughes, Milo Ventimiglia, Tony Burton, A.J. Benza, James Francis Kelly III, and Talia Shire. Based on characters created by Sylvester Stallone. Music by Bill Conti. Director of Photography, J. Clark Mathis. Edited by Sean Albertson. Written and directed by Sylvester Stallone. (MGM/Columbia Pictures, 2006, Color, 102 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG.)
A confession: For years, as a guilty pleasure, I haunted my local multiplex to revel repeatedly in the serial cinematic exploits of Sylvester Stallone’s most famous celluloid hero. Yes, I hereby confess that I actually enjoyed all those Rocky movies with Roman numerals in their titles. I even sort-of liked Rocky V (1990), the one that all the film critics mock.
But that’s because I’m not a “film critic,” you see; I’m a movie enthusiast. Although I’m nominally Roman Catholic, my true religion is that uniquely American art form known as motion pictures. Every Friday night that devotion draws me to the services conducted at the local mission—the Mission Drive-In Theater in San Antonio, that is—where I take communion, comprised of hot-buttered popcorn and a Coca-Cola slushy. In the lobby, posing proudly amid my pantheon of movie gods—right there with blown-up images of heroes portrayed by John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Robert Mitchum, Burt Lancaster, and Gregory Peck—stands Sylvester Stallone’s enduring creation: the quintessential American underdog, Rocky Balboa.
For more than thirty years, Stallone has never been given his proper due as a screenwriter. Recently, for the first time in over a decade, I watched a DVD of his original, low-budget sleeper, Rocky (1976). I was struck all over again by the masterpiece of understated, eloquent drama that Stallone and director John G. Avildsen had put up on the screen. The tale of the small-time pugilist and loan shark’s enforcer with the soft spot in his heart, who gets his miracle shot at the heavyweight boxing championship on America’s Bicentennial, Rocky became the unlikely winner of the 1976 Academy Award for Best Picture—and an instant classic.
To a great extent, Rocky worked so well because of its indelibly memorable supporting cast. There was Talia Shire as Adrian, the painfully shy pet shop cashier and the object of Rocky’s affections. There was legendary character actor Burgess Meredith in the role of his lifetime as Mickey, Rocky’s elderly, cantankerous trainer, whose fatherly devotion inspired the lowly club fighter to believe in himself. There was Burt Young as drunken leech Paulie, Adrian’s bullying brother. Here were people taken from Stallone’s own tough childhood in South Philly, made even more real through brutally honest dialogue and poignant situations. But no matter how lowly or bad, they and all the other characters in the film—even the loan shark (played by Joe Spinell)—got caught up in Rocky’s quest and ultimately redeemed themselves. Their lines and gestures were so simply, beautifully, economically imparted that, at times, they seemed to rise to poetry.
In one scene, Rocky visits the boxing gymnasium to ask Mickey why he’s been running him down for so many years. Mickey snorts back at his protégé, “Ya don’t wanna know!” When Rocky presses him, the old man unleashes all the fury he can still muster:
“Okay, I’m gonna tell ya! You had the talent to become a good fighter, but instead of that, you become a leg-breaker to some cheap, second-rate loan shark!”
“It’s a living,” Rocky mumbles.
“It’s a waste of life!” Mickey roars back.
Along with other memorable scenes, that one—with the pain and anguish on Burgess Meredith’s face revealing his heartbreak over the younger boxer’s unfulfilled promise—could easily have been scripted by such dramatic luminaries as Budd Shulberg, Paddy Chayefsky, or Rod Serling.
The film has left its enduring stamp on the culture. The steep flight of steps that rises up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art has become one of the most-visited attractions in the city. There, tourists re-create Rocky’s ascent during his famous training scene, pumping their own fists in imitation upon reaching the summit. These rituals are a testament to an iconic character that millions worldwide regard as the embodiment of their highest aspirations and deepest dreams. Rocky Balboa reminds them that within them lives the power to make their own dreams real—if they only put as much heart into pursuing their goals as he did when he stepped into the ring against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), giving everything he had and more.
Sadly, the Rocky series is generally held in low critical esteem, largely because of subsequent inferior installments. Although Rocky II (1979) was an excellent sequel (after losing a split decision in the first movie, Rocky finally won the title from Creed in the second), the following two films (1982 and 1985) pitted Rocky against flamboyant, cartoonishly indomitable opponents (played by the scowling Mr. T and the stone-silent Dolph Lundgren, respectively). Fun stuff, but nothing to rival the first two. The fifth film (1990) was a complete letdown, a tired, anticlimactic outing about Rocky Balboa in retirement, down on his luck and dealing with the challenges of fatherhood.
Sixteen years after that fizzle, were you expecting yet another Rocky? I certainly wasn’t. But happily, Stallone has returned to first principles. Avoiding the predictable Roman numeral “VI” and simply using the lead character’s name as its title, Rocky Balboa focuses once again on the essence of its protagonist, regarding him as a man first, and a boxer second.
The movie takes its place with several other film series that recently have gone back to basics and started to take their heroes seriously: Batman Begins (2005), last year’s Superman Returns, and the new film of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale. Unlike those blockbusters, though, this picture doesn’t try to recapture its early magic by casting a younger man in the hero’s role: instead, it audaciously asks the viewer to take seriously the prospect of a man pushing sixty, yet becoming a contender for the heavyweight championship of the world.
It opens with Rocky visiting the grave of his dead wife Adrian (Talia Shire once again, in flashbacks). She died of “woman cancer,” as the Rock describes it. Every year on their anniversary, he takes a sentimental journey through the old neighborhood, visiting landmarks from their first meeting and dates, dragging the insufferable Paulie in tow. As he reminisces, you see that her absence has broken his heart. Yet Adrian remains omnipresent throughout the movie, as the spirit that moves him on.
Visiting an old watering hole, he runs across a girl from the neighborhood, Marie (Geraldine Hughes), a single mom trying to raise a teenaged son and make ends meet by tending bar. A comely lass with the map of Ireland twinkling in her eyes, she and Rocky clumsily, tentatively, spark a relationship. Rocky meanwhile becomes a mentor to her son (James Francis Kelly III), keeping him on the straight-and-narrow.
Otherwise, the former champ leads a predictable, comfortable life running an Italian restaurant, greeting and regaling patrons with old stories of past bouts and glories. His whiny twentysomething son, Robert (Milo Ventimiglia), complains about living in Rocky’s shadow while he tries to make it in the business world. Rocky gives him the kind of speech fathers stopped giving their boys a couple generations ago, but should resume giving:
The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows! It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!”
He schools his son to have some pride in himself. “I stopped thinking about what other people thought a long time ago. . . . The only respect that matters in this world is self-respect.”
One night on ESPN, a panel of sportscasters debate who was the greater boxer—current heavyweight champion Mason “The Line” Dixon (played by real-life light-heavyweight champ Antonio Tarver, stepping up in class), or the former two-time champion, Rocky. In an on-air computerized video simulation, Rocky KOs Dixon. This wounds the champ’s pride: he’s gotten to the top by defeating a bunch of has-beens and fall guys, never facing a real challenger for his championship belt.
“All of boxing is hoping for a warrior who can thrill us with his passion,” a ringside announcer carps as Dixon defeats another chump. Desperate for respect, his handlers pitch the idea of a pay-per-view exhibition fight in Las Vegas between their man and the legend who hasn’t been in the fight game for twenty-one years.
After a few awkward moments mid-movie, there’s The Rest . . . and, well, you can pretty much guess the rest. Our Rocky begins training hard, old-school style. Once again he pounds his fists against bloody slabs of meat in the cooler; he lifts barbells; he does one-arm pushups; he plows through the Philly’s snowbound streets and sprints to his rightful place atop those famous Steps. “Gonna fly now!”
The film culminates with the inevitable fight between Rocky and Dixon. Since Rocky is too old and stiff to bob and weave, his corner man, Duke (Tony Burton), counsels: “So, every time you hit him, you got to make a dent. . . . So what we’ll be calling on is good old-fashioned blunt force trauma. Horsepower. Heavy duty, cast-iron, pile-driving punches that will have to hurt so much it’ll rattle his ancestors. Every time you hit him with a shot, it’s got to feel like he tried kissing the express train.”
Cinematographer J. Clark Mathis’s camera frames the fight scenes tight, and they come fast and furious, like watching Goya’s Segundo de Mayo spring to life. Rocky may be old and weathered, but he’s still solid as the hull of a battleship. Composer Bill Conti’s martial score, built around his famous trumpet fanfare from the original, got my pulse pounding once more, and before I knew it, it was 1976 all over again, and I was rooting for the Italian Stallion. There was Rocky Balboa standing toe-to-toe with the heavyweight champion of the world and giving him a run for his money.
Sixteen years after the debacle of Rocky V, we’ve got a Rocky movie that believes in itself once again. Though it may not match the first in originality and drama, in heart and soul Rocky Balboa lives up to its tagline: “It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
Sadly, the Rocky franchise is over, at last, but the old warrior is going out on his own terms.
Thank you, Sly Stallone, for not throwing in the towel.
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, Movie Reviews, Sequels, Sports Movies |
The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | December 16, 2006
Will Smith gets self-respect the old-fashioned way in "The Pursuit of Happyness": He earns it
Life of a Salesman
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
The Pursuit of Happyness. Starring Will Smith, Jaden Christopher Syre Smith, Thandie Newton, Brian Howe, James Karen, Dan Castellaneta, Kurt Fuller, Takayo Fischer, Mark Christopher Lawrence, and Geoff Callan. Screenplay by Steve Conrad. Music by Andrea Guerra. Director of Photography, Phedon Papamichael. Edited by Hughes Winborne. Directed by Gabriele Muccino. (Columbia Pictures, 2006, Color, 116 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG-13.)
Actor Will Smith shines in his portrayal of a real-life, self-made investment broker in this emotionally exhausting but ultimately inspiring biopic.
It’s the 1981 recession, and Chris Gardner struggles to make ends meet as a self-employed medical-equipment salesman who has a family to support in San Francisco. With a stack of bone-density scanners gathering dust in his efficiency apartment kitchen, and with wife Linda (Thandie Newton) pulling double shifts at a neighborhood laundry, he can barely pay the bills. Chris spends his days shuttling his five-year-old son, Christopher, to day care (the film’s title refers to Chris’s constantly nagging the owner of the day-care center to correct the word’s spelling on a mural there) and trying to hawk his expensive equipment to doctors and hospitals with shrinking budgets.
Looking for a way out of his dead-end job, Chris spots a well-heeled businessman (Geoff Callan) parking a red Ferrari and quizzes him. “Man, I’ve got two questions for you: What do you do, and how do you do it?” The man informs him he’s a stock broker with the prestigious Dean Witter Reynolds firm and that he’s “good with numbers and people.”
Suddenly, Chris sees his life as it could be. Watching the men and women exiting the brokerage house, he reflects, “They all looked so damned happy to me,” and wonders, “Why couldn’t I look like that?” After impressing one of the senior brokers (Brian Howe) by solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle during a taxicab ride, Chris applies for a Dean Witter internship program and lands an interview.
However, all that Linda can see in Chris’s decision to become a broker is a pipe dream. “Salesman to intern is backwards,” she protests. Unable to handle the stress of the landlord breathing down their necks for back rent, she leaves, forcing Chris to raise their son alone. As if that weren’t enough, on the night before his big interview with Dean Witter, the police show up at his doorstep to arrest him for a pile of unpaid parking tickets.
After spending the night in the police lockup, Chris—disheveled, wearing jeans and a tank-top undershirt—barely makes it to his interview on time. “I could not think of a lie bizarre enough,” he explains awkwardly to his skeptical interviewers. “I just got out of jail for unpaid parking tickets and my wife left me.” One asks him: “What if a man walked in here with no shirt, and I gave him a job?”
Chris replies good-naturedly: “He must’ve had on some really nice pants.”
He lands a spot in the internship program, not by bluffing his way out of the awkward situation, but through his forthright honesty and sense of humor. However, there’s a catch—the internship is unpaid and will last six months. Even after the program ends, there are no guarantees: only one intern out of twenty will be hired by the firm.
Already having moved with his son into a hotel room to save money, Chris is faced with the dilemma of either trying to provide fully for his son right away or taking thechance that after a half-year he’ll land a salaried position as an investment broker. Figuring that he can make rent and keep Christopher in day care if he can sell just one bone-density scanner a month after work and on weekends, he decides to go for it.
But his troubles are just starting. When the IRS seizes his checking account for back taxes, Chris and his boy are evicted from their hotel room. With only the clothes on their backs, they are turned out on the streets. But whether sleeping on subways, buses, or in luncheonette booths, Chris never leaves Christopher’s side or reveals a hint of discouragement.
As much as The Pursuit of Happyness is the story of Chris Gardner’s struggle to succeed in the business world, it’s also the story of a father’s love for and commitment to his child. At their lowest point—forced to spend the night sleeping on the floor of a men’s room in a train station—he never lets on to his boy that their state is desperate, even as he’s about to go to pieces. Much like the Roberto Benigni character in 1997’s Life Is Beautiful, Chris conceals the indignity of their situation from his youngster by playing a make-believe game of hiding from cavemen and dinosaurs. The scenes between father and son are among the movie’s most natural, convincing, and genuinely moving, no doubt because of the bond between Will Smith and his real-life son Jaden, who plays Christopher.
At one point, while shooting hoops at a neighborhood playground, Chris realizes the power that an adult’s words can have on a child. He makes a self-effacing quip, telling Christopher not to bother spending too much time working on his game because he himself was never any good at basketball, either. The boy puts down the ball and slumps in resignation. Angry at himself for his own thoughtlessness, Chris counsels his son:
Don’t ever let someone tell you you can’t do something! Not even me!. . . .You got a dream, you gotta protect it! People can’t do something themselves, they wanna tell you that you can’t do it. You want something? Go get it. Period!
What makes this movie ring so true is that Chris Gardner heeds his own advice, even though he seems trapped in an inescapable maze. Constantly down but never out, he refuses to slink away and abandon his dream. His quest becomes a frantic chase: rushing to catch buses, arriving late at sales calls, picking up his son from daycare, tracking down a bone scanner that some hippies stole from him, securing a place to sleep in a homeless shelter. But homelessness is never depicted—or regarded—as more than a transient condition. And Chris Gardner is always in transit: everywhere he goes, he’s running. Indeed, I believe Smith spends more screen time running than Dustin Hoffman did in the 1976 thriller Marathon Man.
Unlike the anti-business messages conveyed by so many of today’s movies, this film depicts the business world as gruelingly tough, but ultimately fair—even liberating. Most refreshing are the scenes showing Chris in the Dean Witter internship program. I cheered to myself as he applied his quick head for numbers, shaving seconds off “cold calls” by not hanging up between phone conversations and by going straight to the top of a company’s contact directory rather than starting at the bottom, as is customary.
In many respects, The Pursuit of Happyness reminded me of business-themed comedies from the 1980s, such as Trading Places and Working Girl, but without the bitter “getting even with the boss” side plots. If anything, the movie extols the productive nature of the stock market while regarding government as the parasite. While talking with a prospect who wants a retirement fund that yields high returns but low taxes, Gardner quips, “So, basically, you don’t want nobody’s hands in your pockets but your own.”
Italian director Gabriele Muccino—best known for his 2001 romantic comedy The Last Kiss—adapts his lighthearted style effortlessly to this somewhat weighty story, his first American film. Meanwhile, director of photography Phedon Papamichael exploits the steep streets of San Francisco and Oakland as a metaphor to capture the ups and downs of Chris’s world. In the Dean Witter offices, Papamichael’s camera moves left-to-right, visually conveying the business world’s virtues of drive, economy, and progression. For his part, Will Smith digs deep into his dramatically demanding role, giving his most forceful performance to date. Is this really the same easy-going guy who starred in “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and Men in Black?
As for the real-life Chris Gardner, today he is a multi-millionaire who runs an investment firm in Chicago. Speaking about this stirring, feel-good movie (which, ironically, is at times also one of the bleakest movies I’ve ever seen), Gardner hailed the ability of Smith and director Muccino to capture life “when the whole world tells you how small you are, but you see how big you really can be.”
And big he is. The Pursuit of Happyness is one of the most positive and heroic portraits of a businessman that I’ve ever seen. The choices that Chris Gardner makes under the most trying of circumstances reveal his indomitable, optimistic resolve and character. Smith, who produced as well as starred, first seized upon the idea of making this movie after seeing an ABC “20/20” profile of Gardner. “Chris represents the American Dream,” he remarked. “The promise of America is such a great idea. Nowhere else in the world could a Chris Gardner exist.”
And, I might add, nowhere else in the world could a movie honoring a Chris Gardner exist.
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: Biopics, Dramas, Movie Reviews |