Oh, Brother (Warrior and The Trip)

The Deer Hunter of Rocky movies, Gavin O'Connor's 140-minute pseudo-epic Warrior (2011) makes grandiose claims to the meaning of America: Imagine Stallone and Dolph Lundgren taunting each other in the ring with Russian roulette trigger-pulls rather than punches and you have an inkling of this film's self-regarding machismo. (Hmmm, Russian roulette: such a Franco-Commie ring to it; let's call it "Freedom spins.") O'Connor's twist on the go-for-it inspirational sports genre follows not one character or team but estranged brothers - the Conlons - on parallel tracks toward duking it out in the ring (or cage) for a cool few million that each desperately needs. We know Warrior is a serious film because it's always telling us it is, as sure a sign of trustworthiness in cinema as in life.

As the older Brendon, Joel Edgerton gives a good performance, bringing a few incongruous personality strands (talented high school physics teacher, happily married husband and father) into an aging bruiser who, for all his intellectual proclivities, likes to pummel and get pummeled. As younger Tommy, the ripped, tattooed Tom Hardy gives a good pose. Tommy is your standard tough-guy screw-up head-case prodigy played by an actor who's taken too many rides at A Streetcar Named Desireland. A veteran of the Iraq War, it's revealed that the seemingly self-centered Tommy heroically saved the lives of fellow soldiers, no easy feat when you're constantly admiring yourself in a hand-mirror.

Because complications are the mulch in which cliched narrative grows, it's eventually revealed that secretly sensitive Tommy is an AWOL coward too, though somehow this crucial piece of news fails to faze his cheering throngs in the slightest. (The military police whom we are told are waiting to take Tommy to the stockade after the championship bout - why wait? - are also conspicuously off-camera.) Also included is a Burgess Meredith/Pat Morita trainer/mentor in the form of their father, Paddy Conlon, an alcoholic on the wagon. As always, Nick Nolte transcends stereo-typecasting. Hints of abusive parenting abound: Brendon won't let Paddy see his grandchildren; Tommy rejects him as a father but lets Paddy train him again because "You were always good at that much." Actually, it's not clear exactly what makes Paddy good at training, especially since the strategy-free Tommy, who knocks out his opponents within seconds, doesn't seem to need any help. But Nolte sells the character's savvy (he has a great scene where he guesses the number of pill containers stashed in Tommy's jacket based on sound), his hope for reconciliation with both sons (and that they reconcile with each other), his fear of failing them again (giving the same number of days he's been sober even though more time has elapsed).

Yet another filmmaker who assumes shaking the camera automatically creates an atmosphere of grit and authenticity, O'Connor sells much harder than Nolte and far less convincingly. I know nothing about the movie's phenomenally popular "sport," which I believe is called Chop-Sockey Hit-Hockey, but like video games, Kim Kardashian, and The Big Bang Theory, I'll give the benefit of the doubt that millions of people are into it. Where Warrior fails is persuading me why I should be into it. Rather than genuinely take us into the world of its subject, the movie offers a very superficial rendering, coming on hot and heavy to body-slamming the audience until it acquiesces its love.

Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon aren't siblings, but in The Trip (2011) they convey a sense of exasperation laced with affection that feels lived-in, the product of a friendship-cum-rivalry extending over several years. In Michael Winterbottom's mischievous funhouse comedy Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005), Coogan and Brydon played versions of themselves, a relatively famous British comic actor and his less-famous sidekick, working together - and with a larger cast - on an adaptation of "an unfilmmable novel." (The novel's unfilmmability became the movie's subject.) In The Trip, a comic road-movie (edited from a multiple-part BBC series) wherein the principals sample the best restaurants in England, Winterbottom deepens the implications of the Coogan-Brydon relationship from the earlier film into ruminations on aging and belonging. It's a light venture, and while I wouldn't assume that their portraits are strictly autobiographical - they're too cagey as performers for that - the contrast between Coogan's haggardness and Brydon's content becomes sneakily affecting.

Now in his mid-40s, Steve Coogan plays himself as an egotistical bad-boy unable to shake the Alan Partridge persona that made him (in Britain) a star. He also can't rid himself of more self-destructive attributes - drug-addiction, womanizing - that surface during his tour through the English countryside. Although the same age as Coogan, the Rob Brydon of the film is emotionally stable, happily married, and fairly well-known in his own right, a sidekick who won't be pushed aside. Coogan's competitive insecurities inevitably flare up around Brydon: his face falls hilariously when the latter is recognized instead of himself; or when Brydon, a dazzling impressionist, reveals that one of his "voices" has become an iPhone app.

One of the funniest moments in Tristram Shandy occurs when Brydon, apropos of nothing, launches into a Pacino imitation. ("FFFFffffuck YOU!") Much of The Trip - perhaps too much - is devoted to Brydon's impressions (Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Roger Moore, and others) and Coogan's attempts to one-up him. Beneath these deceptively casual bull-sessions is a festering jealousy, yes, but also genuine admiration and a spirit of creativity and play. Winterbottom has that same spirit: He stages a couple of inspired dream sequences (one with an American movie star got all the attention from critics, but I preferred a more subtle yet revealing fantasy involving a newspaper headline), and his visual sense remains as acute as ever. An image from Tristram Shandy that has stuck with me in the years since I first saw it features an ensemble of bit players dressed like Ancien Regime soldiers running with sparklers at a late-night party. From the interiors of the restaurants to the food on the tables to the expansive settings in nature, The Trip is equally gorgeous. Also, in moments like one where Brydon keeps a respectful distance on a couch from a young female fan, Winterbottom conceives his shots to convey information about his characters. And he does it again at the end, in a scene reminiscent of the conclusion of Local Hero, when Coogan, alone in his spacious apartment, and affected by his journey more than he realizes, makes a decision, places a phone call, tries to connect.

Overblown (Take Shelter)

(Impossible to discuss this movie without giving it away, so be aware there are spoilers.)

Shotgun Stories, the 2007 drama from writer-director Jeff Nichols, remains one of the most impressive debuts of its decade. The movie, about a blood feud between two sets of rival brothers in rural Arkansas, depicted lower-class Americans without a trace of the condescension which Alexander Payne and Joel and Ethan Coen are always accused of, and which Jason Reitman and Kelly Reichardt actually employ. Shotgun Stories builds in intensity, but its best scenes depict the wit and resourcefulness not uncommon among the economically desperate. Nichols could be accurately called a classical filmmaker, yet he frequently stages sequences that don't play out the way you expect. The peace-loving sibling of the main trio, for example, doesn't suddenly resort to violence in order to prove he's a man. It's a movie made by a director who treats his characters with respect.

Take Shelter (2011), Nichols' follow-up, received a modest yet considerably larger audience as well as even stronger reviews - an impeccably crafted film with a talk-about ending that's given it an element of staying power. It takes nothing away from Nichols' abilities as one of the most promising filmmakers of his generation when I say that I think he misfires badly this time: psychological thriller is not his metier. Take Shelter stars Michael Shannon as Curtis, an Ohio construction worker with a wife and daughter who begins to experience troubling nightmares. The family dog bites him. His daughter is kidnapped. Most of all, the weather turns dark and terrifying in the form of downpours and twisters. His dreams take the form of waking visions when he starts to hear thunderclaps that nobody else hears and sees birds circling in ominous formations that nobody else sees. Convinced that a massive storm is coming - while also considering the off-chance that he's losing his mind - Curtis invests his money and energy into rebuilding the underground tornado shelter on his property, estranging himself from his family and putting his job at risk.

Anything can happen when a skilled filmmaker clashes with the conventions of a genre. (Random good example: Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight; random bad: Martin Scorsese's Cape Fear.) Take Shelter gives us an Everyman whom Everyone thinks is going crazy, along with a deaf child in need of a medical procedure that requires his healthcare plan, in case our emotions were in need of further goosing. Yet Nichols keeps the other shoe from dropping for so long that I wish he had avoided the inevitable altogether. It's revealed that Curtis's mother (Kathy Baker) is a diagnosed schizophrenic who abandoned him when he was a child, and the possibility that Curtis too may be inflicted by bipolar disorder is treated (at first) seriously and compassionately. Eventually, though, Nichols resorts to the deck-stacking side-stepped by his first film, the kind where most of the protagonist's problems would be avoided by simply telling those around him what's going on. Curtis loses his job as the result of a contrived chain of events involving his co-worker/best friend Dewart (Shea Whigham), culminating in showy fisticuffs at a community dinner where Curtis bugs his eyeballs and screams at everybody that "A STORM'S A-COMIN!", or a jeremiad to that effect, as tables are turned over and silverware goes flying.

Screaming and eyeball-bugging come all too easily to Michael Shannon, whose knack for overacting can be amusing in doses but is frequently hard to take at center-stage. Relatively subdued in Shotgun Stories, Shannon's soft-spokenness in Take Shelter is belied by his own physical tics. We need to see Curtis as a normally functioning human being to care about his decline, and Shannon - like Vince Vaughn in the Psycho remake - looks like he's woken up with flopsweat his entire life. It's not entirely his fault, though. Nichols directs his actor to spend half the movie craning his neck up to the sky, and what he sees (and we see) look like fairly impressive special effects - yet nothing more than CGI. I imagine it will be argued that if Curtis is hallucinating then his hallucinations should have an air of unreality. But I think that circling birds -- like the bats swarming over downtown Austin in Terrence Malick's Tree of Life, an indelible image that looks and feels authentic -- need to appear real if we are to believe that Curtis believes they are real.

Credit Nichols for testing himself, and I hope he doesn't stop trying different things, but it's clear that he isn't playing to his strengths here. His interests in Take Shelter clearly lie in depicting the everyday struggles of characters dealing with crummy jobs and rising gas prices and high pharmaceutical co-pays. He's also highly adept at conveying a loving marriage under siege. As Curtis's wife Samantha, Jessica Chastain, in one of her half-dozen remarkably varied performances from last year, gives to her co-star much more than she gets - but that's right down her wheelhouse as an actress. There seems to be nothing that isn't: Chastain is put through the paces of bewilderment and frustration, anger and fear toward her husband's madness, only to double-down on steely resolve to help him overcome it. Her big moment, in what should have been the film's climax, is both touching and powerful, only to be betrayed by a denouement in which the director ditches his creative integrity. Nichols probably needed the ending he came up with to get the movie made in the first place: What studio wants to greenlight an honest movie about mental illness? And, yes, it's still "open to interpretation" that either the storms in Curtis's head turn out to be real or his wife is now sharing in his insanity. Both options are utter nonsense; though I suppose if you're Terry Gilliam or Randy Quaid (quite a target demographic), one or the other has appeal.

Dancing around a Void (Pina and Damsels in Distress)

Pina (2011), the Oscar-nom'd Best Documentary directed by Wim Wenders, continues the genre's current trend of revealing little about its subject. Or even having a subject. Or arguably not being a documentary at all. This is not a knee-jerk criticism, noncomformity being generally a good thing; but the PowerPoint presentations of Al Gore and the metaphysical musings of Werner Herzog and the stock-footage shenanigans of Alex Gibney or Michael Moore don't push the envelope so much as neglect to stamp postage on their messages altogether. And on the off-chance there is an actual topic front and center - like professional nutjob Joyce McCarthy in Errol Morris's Tabloid - it's of so little consequence I feel the same way I do toward recently ballyhooed docudramas that magnify ephemera like the crappy movies of Howard Hughes or the bogus impact of Billy Beane: Why was this movie even made? Why should I be watching it?

I didn't feel quite that harshly toward Pina, which has some imaginatively staged dance numbers, some of them in urban or natural settings. Shortly before filming began, Wenders, who has made at least one notable documentary (1999's Buena Vista Social Club) and one of the greatest movies ever made (whether that movie is Paris, Texas or Wings of Desire depends on you), was faced with the death of his subject, the groundbreaking choreographer Pina Bausch. How, then, to fill the void? (In Buena Vista Social Club he had the opposite problem - keeping the overbearing Ry Cooder's ego out of the way of the compelling Cuban musicians and their terrific music.) Pina showcases Bausch's most famous dance numbers as performed by her troupe, a polyethnic, gender-balanced mix of younger and older dancers who supply the expected "talking-heads" without heads that do any talking. In what some may find an overly artful touch, Wenders has each of them face the camera silently while the audio from their interviews plays in voiceover.

Like Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Pina was made in 3-D, and even more than Herzog's film (which I mostly liked) it demonstrates both the best (depth of field) and worst (blurriness of motion) that the technology can offer. And while it's clear that Pina Bausch had a profound impact on her proteges, the most they reveal about her - or at least what Wenders lets us hear - are blinding insights like "Pina taught me to find strength in fragility." It's apparent to even this dance non-expert that a recurring theme in Bausch's art is the struggle between the deterioration of the body (through disease or age) and the will of the spirit: One dazzling set-piece occurs in a large sterile room - possibly a mental institution - in which the dancers navigate obstacles between each other in the form of several chairs. If the movie had spelled out such themes with real-life parallels I'd probably be critiquing that narrative tack instead. It's good to see Wenders, who has a habit of indulging his own pretensions, flirting with relevance again. He's still halfway down the rabbit hole, though, allowing his subjects to speak for themselves without fully considering what their words, and his images, mean.

Whit Stillman's return to the screen following a fourteen-year absence isn't as momentous as Terrence Malick's end to his 20-year exile - 1998, the year of Stillman's last movie (The Last Days of Disco), was the same as Malick's resurfacing (The Thin Red Line) - but the unique niche that Stillman occupies is worth noting. Or at least the go-getting young-adult rarefied-air landscapes of Metropolitan and Barcelona used to be original before Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbauch aggressively expanded the area's urban planning.

The weirdest thing about the self-conscious weirdness of Damsels in Distress (2012) is it feels like Stillman trying to do an Anderson movie, rather than the other way around. It's been a while since I've seen his earlier films, but the arch flatness (or flat archness) of the dialogue and deadpan absurdity of the shaggy-dog scenarios seem more exaggeratedly cartoonish than in previous Stillman efforts. (Unlike his disciples, Stillman moves the camera quite a bit in Damsels - unlike Stillman too, in fact.) As Violet, the lead distressed damsel of a quartet out to better the lives of the culturally deprived co-eds at Seven Oaks College, Greta Gerwig hits the right tone: When she explains the virtues of good hygiene for suicide prevention, or why stupid guys make the best boyfriends (to give women a purpose in life and feel better about themselves), the twisted comic logic is ticklish. And as Frank and Thor, a pair of boneheads from a local "Roman" frathouse (the campus's version of Greeks), Ryan Metcalf and Billy Magnussen provide the funniest takes on inspired stupidity since Bill Pullman in Ruthless People and Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda.

Unfortunately what is at first clever and charming becomes exhausting twee overload by the film's second half. Damsels sets up one of Stillman's key themes - the efforts of a collective to change an individual (here a transfer student played blandly by Analeigh Tipton), only to have that individual shake them up instead - but doesn't follow through on the premise. The comedy gradually unspools, ending with not one but two dance numbers, a classical-style musical sequence followed immediately by Violet's purported new "dance craze" over the closing credits. It's one of those bring-the-cast-together climaxes you find in Wes Anderson's work, only without the emotional resonance of the best of them. Parts of Damsels in Distress are fresh and delightful, but the worst bits are as stifling as The Life Aquatic or The Darjeeling Limited - movies made ostensibly in the open air, yet actually within the world of a filmmaker who forgot to crack a window.

Blu-Ray Binges: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a movie without a villain. Sure, you could argue the aliens, the military, or Teri Garr fit the bill, but you won't hear much of that from me. Some of their actions are certainly questionable, but as Jean Renoir would say, they all have their reasons, and everyone is reconciled at the soaring Devil's Tower Philharmonic climax (except my beloved Teri, who gets the shaft here as she did in Tootsie). What's amazing is how Spielberg makes the movie compelling anyway, sometimes by setting up temporary threats (aliens), obstacles (military), and skeptics (Garr) in the path of Roy Neary - played by a rarely-better Richard Dreyfuss - yet often through the structure of the film itself.

The parallel narratives of Close Encounters - Roy's quest to discover what the UFO encounter and his subsequent visions mean; the Franco-American scientific initiative, led by Francois Truffaut's Lacombe and Bob Balaban's Laughlin, to hold a summit with the alien visitors - dovetail beautifully, showcasing Spielberg's ability to convey the magical in the commonplace and the human in the extraordinary. I don't know how much of Paul Schrader's original concept Spielberg kept in his screenplay, but the growing possession of Roy by his visions anticipates Jesus accosted by the Holy Spirit in the Schrader-scripted Last Temptation of Christ. It's certainly in keeping with the religiosity of Schrader's own films (he has said he wanted to make Close Encounters a metaphor for the story of St. Paul), albeit with more welcome humor that is likely a product of Spielberg's sensibility.

Funny as it is to see Dreyfuss playing with his mashed potatoes and later tearing up his house, it's deeply unsettling too (more so than the horror-movie scare tactics Spielberg employs in the kidnapping of Melinda Dillon's son). Spielberg uses a dual perspective: We identify with Roy's confusion and obsession, yet we also understand why his wife and children would be concerned, upset, and want to flee. Fear is also the military's emotion of choice to drive the inhabitants of Wyoming out of the rendezvous area: one of my favorite scenes is the brainstorming session of ideas for what will scare the citizenry the most, followed by the incongruously menacing image of Higgly-Piggly and Baskin-Robbins trucks driving down the interstate. In Close Encounters, the overcoming of fear occurs through communication. It's touching to hear Truffaut struggle with English (a language he never mastered) and Balaban accommodating him in his comfort zone; it's transcendent to listen to the evolution of the musical cue that originates with the natives in Africa and mastered by the team of Lacombe and Laughlin and played by Dillon's son and ultimately bridges the communication gap between the extra-terrestrials and humanity. Overcoming fear is a key component of the film; when Roy removes his gas mask and calls the military on their bluff, it's a great moment because he's doing it as an ordinary man rather than a hero - which makes his actions all the more heroic.

I watched Close Encounters last week for the first time in years, picking up the impressive Blu-Ray set with all three versions of the film from which to choose (the1977 Theatrical Release, the misconceived 1980 Special Edition, and the mea-culpa 1998 Director's Cut). Although the movie has aged well, it reveals its age in interesting ways. One is how the teamwork between the French and Americans (an even less likely peaceful union today than people and aliens) personifies the 70s Hollywood movie-brats' tip of their hat to the French New Wave. Until the overlong climax, Close Encounters is as propulsive and tightly-edited as the best of Truffaut's or Godard's own films, remarkably free of the speechifying and unnecessary drawing out of events that has plagued Spielberg's later work. (Lincoln...I'm just dreading it.) There's a interminable sequence in War Horse, where we see a letter being written by one character, then the letter being delivered to another character, then the other character being told that he has a letter, then that character opening the letter, then that character reading the damn letter, that illustrates all the narrative plodding that Spielberg's script and Michael Kahn's editing in Close Encounters avoids.

An even more fascinating artifact of the 1970s is Roy's decision to join the aliens in their intergalactic tour, a culmination of the hippie-vagabond impulse from the decade prior. Close Encounters makes this choice not even really a choice; it feels preordained, the character's destiny (and the director's cut, like the original theatrical release, wisely leaves us outside the mothership and the Disneyland interiors of the special edition). Roy clearly loves his kids and (perhaps less so) his wife, but hints of fissure exist even before his first extra-terrestrial encounter fractures these relationships irreparably. (Disruptive and damaging as the aliens' "invitations" are, they're still easier to forgive than the outright kidnappings of the WWII pilots and Dillon's son; somehow, though, you feel inclined to let these slide too). Spielberg has said that were he to make the movie today he would not have had Roy leave his family, and while that's an understandable outlook I'm glad he's resisted the George Lucas impulse to go back and change things. ("Sorry, I'm staying" - talk about a narrative dead-end.) Close Encounters is the kind of movie Spielberg couldn't make anymore even if he tried (occasionally, he has), not just because his worldview has shifted but because it has a confidence that most of his recent output lacks. The last movie he made prior to the debacle of 1941, it may have also been the last time he wasn't afraid to fail.

IU Cinema Experiences: David Copperfield

Though barely over a year old, the Indiana University Cinema has already started a February tradition of screening a silent film with an original score performed by live orchestra, a privilege made possible with the internationally renowned Jacobs School of Music on campus. Last year's inaugural film, Fritz Lang's Metropolis set to a classical arrangement, left a deep imprint on everyone who experienced it (and easily bested the clamoring Alloy accompaniment at Ebertfest a few months later). This year's selection, the 1922 screen adaptation of David Copperfield, by the Danish filmmaker A.W. Sandberg, commemorates the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens and throws in an extra twist with music by the youthful Ari Fisher, a Jacobs School sophomore who won a competition to compose a new score. Last night was the world premiere, with a tour of the country shortly to follow.

Suffice to say that Fisher's taste is impeccable, his instincts sound. He doesn't try to hip up the music, make it "relevant" in the Moroder manner. Neither does he crib from famous scores - much to Kim Novak's relief - nor does he Foley the movements of the actors. (One exception: the cracking sound of a whip, which is a tad jokey but not overplayed.) His score begins lushly and loudly over the opening credits, then drops into a lower key for most of the action. (The 18-piece orchestra sits in a narrow pit directly below the screen, and it's a huge compliment to say that you often forget they're there.) Occasionally it's a bit too low key; the intro is so evocative I wished he'd have returned to it more often. Yet as the plot branches off in several directions, the music becomes more varied. This adaptation of Copperfield is high on comedy, which the score underlines without goosing the audience. Unsurprisingly, there is a fair amount of pathos as well, and the score wisely opts for a discordant, percussion tone without cramming the portentousness down our throats. Dickens could be maudlin, but Fisher never is.

The movie itself is less than satisfying. One of the few Dickens novels I haven't read, my knowledge of David Copperfield is based largely on a classic Cheers episode, where Frasier Crane starts a book club at the bar and resorts to pulpy embellishments of the plots to hold everybody's attention. (Frasier: "It's about these two, uh, coppers who find several murder victims in a field...with their body parts switched." Carla, impressed: "Man, that Dickens was a sick dude.") I am, like the rest of the Western world, familiar with the names Mr. Micawber (played by Frederik Jensen) and Uriah Heep (Rasmus Christiansen), and both seem rather short-shrifted in Sandberg's film, which runs only 80 minutes. (Heep is barely introduced as the villain when he's quickly whisked away by the police for crimes we never see.) The narrative is top-heavy with David's impoverished upbringing and rushes through his later phase as a twentysomething lawyer (the younger and older Copperfields are played respectively by Martin Herzberg and Gorm Schmidt). There is a romantic triangle of a fashion, and a tragic death, and plenty of oddball humor involving donkeys (a Dickens or a Danish thing?). While the print is first-rate, the movie rarely compensates at the eye level: Sanberg's visuals are competent but never terribly imaginative.

It's probably unfair to compare an unknown version of a Dickens' classic with one of the greatest movies ever made, but Metropolis was a much more overpowering experience. Still, David Copperfield is worth seeing, if only just to hear it.

IU Cinema Experiences: Pather Panchali

In the spirit of trying something different to see how it goes, this post begins a semi-recurring column titled "IU Cinema Experiences," in which I reflect on films that I've seen at the Indiana University Cinema here in Bloomington. Those already sick of the breathless coverage of the goings-on with my favorite local movie venue may roll their eyes on cue, but I'm taking this tack as a way to review older, classic films within the context of the overall experience with an audience in a theater. I thought of this after reporting last week on viewing Once Upon a Time in the West, one of the greatest moviegoing experiences in memory. (To my original summary of that masterwork I would add the idle thought of Stringer Bell from The Wire being a successor to Henry Fonda's Frank - a thug yearning for the white-collar respectability he's clearly not cut out for - and the fascination and pleasure in Leone's employment of intricate mechanics - of plot, of railroads, of industry - into his customarily warm-blooded filmmaking.) As one of my easterly readers noted, the revival of vintage film is par for the course in New York, but it's a game-changer here in the Midwest, and the fact that visiting VIPs from both Coasts have been taken by what they've seen here compels me to report on it as it's unfolding.

Yesterday afternoon's screening of Pather Panchali (1955) kicked off the Spring Semester's impressive "City Lights Series," following an overnight ice storm that left more empty seats than there likely would have been otherwise. I'd been looking forward to the movie because I'd seen a couple of Satyajit Ray films last year - after hearing about him long ago from glowing reviews by the likes of Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael - but his famous "Apu Trilogy" remains on Netflix curiously unavailable, so this was my chance to see the first of those films (indeed, the first film Ray made). Even sight unseen I had the idea that the movie was a coming-of-age tale about a boy's impoverished childhood while growing up in rural India. That's more or less true, leaning towards less, because Apu (Subir Bannerjee) is depicted as one part of a familial ensemble rather than the center of the story. The narrative begins - as is frequently seen through the eyes of - Apu's older sister Durga (a wonderfully assured Uma Das Gupta), whose petty larceny, it is implied, is part of the same gene pool as her cunning, opportunistic Auntie (Chunibala Devi). Yet significant parts of Pather Panchali are devoted to Apu's lonely mother (Karuna Bannerjee), who stays at home to care for the kids while their idealistic, playwright-aspiring father (Kanu Bannerjee) travels in search of work to make ends meet. The title of the film - the same as the original novel - means "Song of the Little Road," and Ray's movie casually unfolds as a string of vignettes from a folktale, held together by the calm, steady voice of a gifted orator.

Legend has it Ray had never shot a reel of film prior to the making of this one, and practically every scene in Pather Panchali - if not the meandering pace that connects them together - shows his instinctive movie-sense. One scene featuring Auntie telling a fable to her niece and nephew begins with a close-up of her shadow on the wall, slowly pulling back to reveal her gnarled face. (If I must confess to finding her character often irritating and hard to bear, I also have to admit that she's an unforgettable enough presence that the movie would be considerably less without her.) Another key sequence takes place during an evening monsoon, with Durga ill in bed, and her mother struggling to protect her against the wind and rain breaking through the rickety dwelling. Ray doesn't overdramatize the storm the way a Hollywood production would; it's very naturalness is what's terrifying. Yet his subtle visual touches - a door, a window tarp, a candle - are indicative of a master filmmaker.

Pather Panchali was the first film out of India to capture the attention of John Huston, Akira Kurosawa, and the world press at Cannes (and it's amusing how that sentence reads with authority despite my having only recently read about it). Also worth noting is Charles Burnett, during his visit to campus a couple months ago, said that it was Satyajit Ray - more than Italian neorealists like De Sica, so claimed by many critics - who was the primary influence on Killer of Sheep. (In retrospect, it's head-slappingly clear that Burnett's episodic debut about growing up in a poor African-American household shares many similarities to Ray's.) Of the three Ray films I've seen so far, Mahanagar (The Big City), a funny and bracing depiction of gender politics in 1960s Calcutta, remains my favorite; the third, The Music Room, while also a fine film, suffered from a shoddy DVD transfer and Hooked-On-Phonics subtitles. The 35mm print of Pather Panchali was imperfect, yet I suspect high-quality by what appears to be the dismal standards of Indian film preservation. More than Apu, who has every reason to feel dissatisfied, we should be thankful for what we have.

Le Carre, Leone and Labyrinths (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Once Upon a Time in the West)

(Warning: Spoilers.)

At last Thursday night's screening of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West - in glorious 35mm at the IU Cinema - retired Executive Director of Film Preservation (at Paramount) Barry Allen described the structure of the film as "like a labyrinth...a series of concentric circles revolving around Claudia Cardinale's character at the center." That's an intriguing way to put it, and it also could apply to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson's raved-about new adaptation of John le Carre's classic espionage novel. The films are similar in complexity and employ the power of suggestion rather than overstatement. Leone's narrative, however, shoots outward from Cardinale Central to convey the expansion of modern America across the Old West; Alfredson follows le Carre's plot inward through a deadly thicket of Cold War treachery to the identity of the traitor responsible.

Commanding the investigation from along the periphery is George Smiley (Gary Oldman), whom we learn early on was forced into early retirement along with his boss, Control (John Hurt), following a botched rendezvous in Budapest leaving their operative Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) wounded. The Budapest debacle is one of at least three key flashback sequences woven into the narrative, the tale of Ricki Tarr (Tom Hardy) and a drunken Christmas party at "the Circus (MI6) being the other two. Ricki, another low-level "scalp-hunter" on the run from both the Brits and Russians, wants to exchange information about the KGB mole in order to help a Soviet spy (Svetlanda Khodchenkova), with whom he's become romantically entangled, defect. Meanwhile, at the Christmas party (reportedly not in le Carre's novel), we gradually become privy to the consequences of an affair on the pair of cuckolded parties.

All of this is even more complicated than it sounds, to where only an arrogant (read: intellectually insecure) viewer would claim that it's a cinch to follow. The original 1979 BBC Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring the gratingly precise diction of Alec Guinness, packed presumably as much of the book's plot that would fit its 5-plus-hours running time; the granular level of detail left many le Carre fans enthralled, but for me if it moved any slower it would have been going backwards. Alfredson's adaptation poses the opposite problem: building a complicated international thriller around glances, suggestions, and inside-baseball lingo. At times the enterprise comes across as Cliffs Notes le Carre, yet on the whole the movie held me. It's a relief to see an adaptation of a novel (the screenplay is by Bridget O'Connor and Peter Straughan) that respects the source material without genuflecting toward it, and trusts the actors (more than that: depends on them) to get the point across. While Oldman leads a stalwart British ensemble, including Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, and Benedict Cumberbatch - half of whom appear almost visibly relieved to have finally graduated from Hogwarts - Alfredson, his DP (Hoyte van Hoytema), production designer (Maria Djurkovic) and art director (Tom Brown) envelope their cast in an atmosphere that not only reminds you of an early 1970s film but looks like it could have been made during the era it depicts. It's a movie that spells out nothing, couching its emotions and its violence until they burst in tandem, like a teardrop falling from a bullet.


Last week I mentioned that I rarely review older, classic films, finding little to say about them that hasn't already been said. But I do want to mention briefly that Once Upon a Time in the West, a movie I'd seen before (several times, on DVD), is simply stunning on the type of big screen for which it was clearly made. I'd expected Ennio Morricone's multilayered score to register strongly in a theater hot-wired for sound, but I hadn't counted on the enhancement of the performances (particularly Jason Robards, whom I'd previously considered the weak link, but whose subtleties come into sharper focus; and Gabriele Ferzetti's invalid railroad baron, whose longing to see the Pacific grows unexpectedly poignant) as well as the increased clarity of the labyrinthine narrative, unusually dense for a Western, each turn of the plot clicking satisfyingly into place. Despite lousy winter weather and a concurring IU home basketball game, the Cinema was almost completely full, and hardly a sound was heard during the three-hour running time. Afterwards we floated out of the theater, oblivious to the cold, a colleague telling me the next day that going to the movies "doesn't get any better than this."