Where God Lives (The Tree of Life)

Anyone who has ever prayed to God and/or cursed His name (i.e., almost everyone) may find themselves as overwhelmed as I was during the "creation" sequence of

The Tree of Life. Then again, you might hate it. This twenty-minute passage -- a lavish CGI set-piece documenting the origins of the universe -- has received several conflicting interpretations, the most dismissive from the peevish Barnes & Noble clerk who informed me that Terrence Malick had stopped the narrative cold for a "NOVA episode." That initial prologue, however, is what separates Malick's digression from a nature special: the patriarch and matriarch of the O'Brien family (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain), living in Texas circa. 1950s, receive news that one of their three sons has died. Overcome first with grief, followed by the inevitable Malickian interior monologues, the voices of the bereaved O'Briens rise on the soundtrack and continue skyward to the stars. We don't know how their son was killed, much less "Why?", but as we watch the cosmos, the oceans, the volcanoes, the Earth and its early inhabitants come into being, a thought springs to mind: God may be too busy to listen.

I have no idea if that's what Malick wants us to think. Indeed, a rough outline may make The Tree of Life sound like the kind of "Christian movie" evangelicals would long to release. (Baptisms, sayings-of-grace at dinner, the oft-cited example of Mother O'Brien holding one of her children, pointing to the sky and cheerfully exclaiming "That's where God lives!") The overall tone, though -- as the movie shifts from a creation epic back to the story of the O'Brien household years before their family tragedy -- is non-denominationally spiritualist, transcendentalist, Deistic. If there is a God in The Tree of Life He doesn't intervene, yet Malick intimates over and over again that Something is out there, visualized in the opening and closing images as a portal of light that's as awe-inspiring and unsettling as the monoliths in 2001.

If Malick is conversing with Kubrick in the heavens he seems to be speaking to Spielberg on the ground. His work with his preteen actors -- especially Hunter McCracken, who portrays the central character, eldest brother Jack (Sean Penn plays the grownup version of the character, forgettably) -- rivals the thrilling spontaneity of the youthful cast of E.T. The trio of O'Brien sons are raised by their dreary Father (Brad Pitt) to be dutiful and disciplined; naturally, they respond by going on the prowl with other neighborhood kids I recognized only too well. They hit each other and wrestle, shoot BB guns and throw rocks through an abandoned house's windows, blow up bird eggs and tie frogs to bottle rockets. Spielberg captured how the world is experienced by a child while I was growing up; Malick reminds me of how it felt then, now.

Did childhood feel as fragmented as The Tree of Life depicts it, though? In a superb piece deserving of more attention, Matt S(chneider?) of the fine blog Catecinem argues that the revered Terrence Malick and the reviled Michael Bay actually have a "shared sensibility." Matt explains that the constant jump-cuts in The Tree of Life gave him a headache, undermining his admiration for the film's artistic ambitions; whereas he sort of enjoyed Bay's equally choppy technique in the latest Transformers movie. Matt isn't claiming that Transformers 3 is a "better" movie than The Tree of Life; what he's suggesting is a double-standard by critics and other moviegoers. "The way Bay shoots an action scene is stylistically akin to the way Malick shoots a pair of boys wandering through a neighborhood," he writes. "Yet the former is incoherent hackery, whereas the latter is stylistically ambitious....Again I ask: why?"

That's a good question, albeit one that I think answers itself. The best action movies -- The Road Warrior, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Terminator, Casino Royale, et al. -- show an intrinsic understanding of the holy trinity of space, time and movement. Despite having immeasurably bigger budgets and special-effects to play with (or possibly because of them), Michael Bay is oblivious or indifferent to these things. He's forged a signature style of arrogant ineptitude that gives hackery a bad name. (The original hacks of Hollywood actually knew what they were doing.) Malick's method is trickier to ascertain. Would The Tree of Life be more effective if it actually had standard scenes, rather than a series of fragments of scenes? Could the film's central narrative stand without the avant-garde passages that surround it?

That version of The Tree of Life might have made a good movie too. It wouldn't have been a Terrence Malick movie, however. I realize that runs counter to how I usually roll -- making fun of auteur worshippers -- but so be it. Malick's film has plenty of other qualities that normally make me retch: the aforementioned spiritual overtones, Freudian psychology, a mother-figure who is Pure and True, lots of oohing and ahhing over babies. The reason they didn't, I think, is because I love to see an artist caught up in his own grand passions; oftentimes they catch me up in them too. "This is Malick's big one," wrote David Edelstein, "his long-gestating answer to 2001 and Paradise Lost...." Yet what's astonishing is Malick seems to have grown less cynical as he's gotten older, a virtue that informs his responses to Kubrick, of course, but also to the all-grown-up Spielberg, who can no longer make the movies he once made better than anyone else nor the adult fare that real adult filmmakers still make better than he does. Malick's dinosaurs don't act like actual dinosaurs did; the compassion one shows another seems to be a riposte aimed at the jaded mechanics in parts of Jurassic Park and the entirety of The Lost World.

It's also a credit to a director when a dinosaur set-piece isn't even the nuttiest scene in his movie. Behind the narrative innovation, Malick usually comes across as relatively square, so it's a thrill to see him release his energies into confounding images: I still can't get out of my mind the giddy sight of Mother at one point inexplicably floating through the air, like Wendy without help from Peter Pan. Nor will I forget young Jack stealing a woman's dress, only to throw it in a river as a result of sexual panic. Or contemplate killing his father by dropping a car on his head. Malick isn't blind to the darker impulses of human nature, which is what makes his lingering sense of wonder all the more wonderful. On Facebook, Ryan Kelly noted that Malick celebrates "the birth of our planet as much as the birth of an infant child." And he hears the voices of his characters, talking constantly to themselves, leaving you with the suggestion that the universe, however preoccupied with its own concerns, is in its own way listening too.

What Would H. L. Mencken Have Thought of Michael Bay?

"What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable ideational content so much as an idiotic and irritating technic. The first moving-pictures... presented more or less continuous scenes... But the modern movie is no such organic whole; it is simply a maddening chaos of discrete fragments. The average scene, if the two shows I attempted were typical, cannot run for more than six or seven seconds. Many are far shorter, and very few are appreciably longer. The result is confusion horribly confounded. How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters ten times a minute? Worse, this dizzying jumping about is plainly unnecessary: all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and other such half-wits to whom the making of movies seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency of performers capable of playing them if they were imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoiding action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless postures and grimaces... These mummers cannot be said, in any true sense, to act at all. They merely strike attitudes -- and then are whisked off. If, at the first attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not struck, then all they have to do is keep on trying until they strike it. On those terms a chimpanzee could play Hamlet, or even Juliet."

-- H. L. Mencken, "Appendix from Moronia: Notes on Technic," 1927 (excerpted in American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate, 2006)

Color Lines (One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress)

"Franklin had a mystical control in his first two movies, One False Move (1991) and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995); he knew when to draw the moment out and when to compact it mercilessly. (The climax of One False Move -- one of the most intense I've ever seen -- lasts all of thirty seconds and reverberates for hours.)" -- David Edelstein

***

Carl Franklin, a fine director, has had a hard go of it following a relatively celebrated debut twenty years ago. In a recent IU Cinema podcast on film criticism, I mentioned One False Move as perhaps the finest example of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel's advocacy for below-radar films. Franklin's first movie certainly qualified: Without Siskel and Ebert's support, it likely would have been lost forever in straight-to-video limbo. As it happened, One False Move put its star, Bill Paxton, and co-star/co-screenwriter Billy Bob Thornton on the map, and garnered its director the prize of adapting to the screen Devil in a Blue Dress, the first novel of Walter Mosley's celebrated mystery series featuring post-WWII African-American detective Easy Rawlins. Despite good reviews, Devil was a box-office bust, and Franklin has worked along the margins ever since: the mediocre One True Thing and High Crimes; the breezy yet inconsequential Out of Time; and a string of TV credits (including "Peleliu Landing," one of the better episodes of HBO's disappointing The Pacific) all to his credit. Not a bad filmmaking career in all, especially considering how scant the opportunities are for African-American directors in Hollywood, yet nonetheless somehow unfulfilling of his early promise.

One False Move opens with a pair of violent thugs, Ray and Pluto (Thornton and Michael Beach) aided by Ray's girlfriend Fantasia (Cynda Williams), stealing a pile of cocaine and cash from some drug-dealing friends in Los Angeles. The sequence is initially disarming, then horrifying: the dealers, all African-American, live in a nice apartment rather than a stereotypically scuzzy bottom-dwelling, and are first seen videotaping their own buoyant party; after their uninvited guests tie them up and find the money and drugs, Pluto, a quiet, bespectacled, college-educated black man whose weapon of choice is a knife, casually stabs each of them to death. Franklin shows not a single drop of blood, and lets the videotape of the party -- with its participants dancing happily only minutes earlier -- play on the television in the background of the murder scene. Viewers of One False Move never forget this opening movement, yet it's astonishing how unexploitive it is. Franklin is unusually sensitive in depicting the loss of life, and his respect carries over through the rest of the movie.

As Ray, Pluto and Fantasia hit the road, a pair of hardened LAPD detectives, Dud Cole and John McFeely (Jim Metzler and Earl Billings) crack grim jokes about killers with Disney names and quickly learn from the tape that the trio are headed for Star City, Arkansas, where Fantasia's family and infant son live. Cole and McFeely contact Star City chief of police Dale Dixon (Paxton), an excitable go-getter who goes by the name "Hurricane" and leaps at the chance to work on a big case. The LAPDers size up Dale as a yahoo and blowhard, yet Thornton and Tom Epperson's layered script never settles for surfaces. At a family cookout, Dale thoughtlessly utters a racial epithet and is kicked under the table by his wife. (McFeely, who is black, lets out a knowing smile.) Yet we also see him deftly handle a domestic dispute involving an irate husband wielding an axe. Later, in a poignant scene, Dale struggles to keep his dignity when he overhears the urban pair mocking his dream to join the force in Los Angeles. Paxton is an actor I've often been on the fence about; at times, in other performances, I think he overplays. Here, though, as the killers (and a very big secret) come closer to Star City, it's clear that the Hurricane's bluster is partly an act. There's a frailty and fear to the character, yet a core of strength reveals itself too.

One False Move is not the type of thriller that tightens like a vise. The further the characters head South, the more leisurely (though never sluggish) Franklin's pacing becomes. Thornton and Epperson open up their narrative in unexpected ways: as with their scripts for A Family Thing and The Gift, (and Thornton's script for Sling Blade), One False Move is fascinated by Southern cultural mores and the unspoken blurring of color lines. Interracial romance (Ray and Fantasia) and interracial partnership (Ray and Pluto, Cole and McFeely) are never just devices in their framework; they couch sociopolitical concerns that harken back to the great noirs of the 1940s and 50s (and anticipated the Clinton presidency). The movie feels so loose for the majority of its running time that its climax becomes even more stunning. As David Edelstein suggests, the close of One False Move sets off seismic tremors that few films can rival.

Racial blurring is also entwined thematically in Devil in a Blue Dress, a movie whose arrival to the screen was in itself miraculous. A period piece set in 1948 Los Angeles and populated by a predominantly African-American cast, the movie is a Chinatown-style thriller starring Denzel Washington as Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins, an unemployed black man struggling to pay the mortgage on the house he owns and loves, who takes up a missing-persons case offered by a pencil-mustached hood (Tom Sizemore) that leads him into a treacherous political labyrinth involving the titular mystery woman (Jennifer Beals) and an imminent mayoral election between the conservative incumbent Todd Carter (Terry Kinney) and self-proclaimed "friend of the Negro" challenger Matthew Terell (Maury Chaykin). As Easy discovers that his case is more complicated than it appears, he calls in a wildcard: his childhood Texas friend Mouse (Don Cheadle), a loyal yet trigger-happy thug with a glittering gold tooth, a gun the size of a crossbow, and a penchant for ignoring moral niceties.

In his review of Carl Franklin's High Crimes, Charles Taylor wrote that "the commercial failure (of Devil in a Blue Dress) robbed us of what might have been an adult franchise of mysteries starring Denzel Washington." Indeed, early last week, in an exchange of emails with Steven Santos, I recalled this movie fondly and couldn't wait to see it again. On second viewing, however, I have to admit that its dismal box-office was somewhat deserved. In addition to directing, Franklin wrote the script (adapting Mosely's novel), and while I'm ordinarily an admirer of any filmmaker who can streamline his own narrative (Devil clocks in at a swift 100 minutes), this is a rare instance of a movie with a richness of theme and character that needed to be longer to do them justice (at least 20-30 minutes). Beals strikes a vivid pose but isn't given enough time to register; her relationship with Washington, which should be crucial, dissipates. Even the real love story, the tense friendship between Easy and Mouse, is blunted by keeping the latter character offscreen until two-thirds into the movie. (This may have also kept Cheadle's breakout performance from contending for awards that year.)

Unlike One False Move, the first half of Devil in a Blue Dress wades through some sluggish patches (and features a line uttered by Washington --"Where are all the white women at?" -- that unwisely recalls Blazing Saddles). Yet the movie hits its stride when Cheadle appears, and once again Franklin sticks the landing: the climax, another explosion of violence that builds on everything that comes beforehand, is vividly staged. It's a shame that the movie's failure prevented Franklin from taking another crack at the material (not least of which it may have kept Denzel Washington out of the clutches of Tony Scott). Yet he's also partly to blame.

Past Imperfect (Midnight in Paris)

(Warning: Spoilers.)

Remember, in Annie Hall, the scene at a Hollywood party, when one of the guests says about a studio exec: "He gives good meeting"? Owen Wilson gives good double-take. His abashed likability as an actor rests partly in his lazy drawl of a delivery, slightly in his busted nose, and largely in reaction shots that range from touching ("Please stop belittling me," his insecure, depressed writer tells Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums) to sublime (a genuine sense of joy and wonder at Jackie Chan's fleet footwork in Shanghai Noon). Wilson plays another writer, named Gil Pender, in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, a successful Hollywood hack on vacation in Paris with his materialistic fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her well-off, freedom-fries loving parents (Mimi Kennedy and Kurt Fuller). Wilson's double-takes get a workout when Gil, alone on a midnight stroll, is magically transported back to 1920s Gay Paree, where he meets the luminaries of the "The Lost Generation" -- among others, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein -- a fitting happenstance for our hero, being a lost soul himself.

"The best Woody Allen movie in years!" seems to be the response to every other Woody Allen movie these days. But the critics seemed to mean it this time, following a successful premiere at Cannes. (Not always a sure thing for Franco-centric movies -- see Inglourious Basterds.) Midnight in Paris is the first Allen film I've seen in a movie theater since Hannah and Her Sisters, and only one of a handful that I've bothered watching over the last couple decades. I liked the sunnily cynical Vicky Cristina Barcelona and admired the grim Match Point, but Midnight in Paris goes deeper than those films, and in a disarmingly casual manner. You would expect Gil, who hopes to break from screenwriting by penning a serious literary novel (which we learn is about the owner of a "nostalgia shop" that sells old clocks and other pieces of antique ephemera), to be wowed by his fantastical encounters with his heroes, and he is. What makes the premise work, however, is that Gil's bug-eyed wonder gradually gives way to the realization that these icons were once people too.

You come to see Allen's intentions through the fact that nearly every actor underplays: Tom Hiddleston makes a suave Fitz; Corey Stoll, as Hemingway, achieves an effect best described as subtle machismo; Kathy Bates is effectively low-key as Stein, who offers Gil useful advice on his book. (Getting Kathy Bates to downplay anything is quite an accomplishment.) Occasionally a broad caricature -- such as Alison Pill's twangy Zelda Fitzgerald or Adrien Brody's delightfully daffy Salvadore Dali -- pops up to provide a dash of color, but the context of every scene takes Gil's magical visitations at face-value. In one of the film's most buoyant moments, Dali is joined by his friends, the young Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Ven) and the American artist Man Ray (Tom Cordier), and the trio of Surrealists are intrigued by yet completely unskeptical of Gil's story.

Separated by a few generations, Gil is nevertheless ID'd as a kindred spirit to these artists of yore (who also include Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso, Josephine Baker, and T.S. Eliot), and he feels an incontrovertible itch to leave his fiance and her overbearing family and settle in Paris. It's unclear whether Gil has it in him to be great, and the movie could have used a few scenes with him at a laptop (or typewriter) applying his craft, but it's refreshing that a passage from his book that we do hear (recited by Stein) sounds truly promising. (Few things are depicted by Hollywood as unconvincingly as talent.) Gil's prose also captures the attention of one of Stein's guests, Adriana (Marion Cotillard) -- mistress first to Picasso, then Hemingway -- with whom Gil falls in love.

Midnight in Paris really starts to hit a groove once Wilson and Cotillard are together onscreen: the former, whose dialogue sounds initially like it's written for Woody's vocal inflections, finds his character's center; the latter, who is in danger of getting typecast as an otherwordly presence, "the Magic Frenchwoman" (being the most beautiful actress currently in movies will do that to you), becomes flesh. Adriana, unlike Gil, sees nothing special about the time she lives in; at one point, she and Gil hitch a carriage ride back to an even earlier historical era, the Belle Epoque, where she is awed by the likes of Degas and Gauguin -- who, tellingly, are as disappointed by their generation as she is hers and Gil his.

Allen takes his central idea so much further than cutesy-poo "What famous person would you like to have dinner with?" gimmickry that the opportunities he misses become more glaring. He wastes a gifted comedienne in Rachel McAdams, and blows a potential comic goldmine by not having Inez go back with Gil and interact with his idols. Better still would have been sending her family back: the always-priceless Kurt Fuller -- no slouch at reaction shots himself -- would have been more than game. Instead, Allen falls back on a few easy Tea Party jabs, without realizing that contextualizing their worldviews within the world might offer something more revealing. (To put it another way, the only thing funnier than Sarah Palin lecturing about Paul Revere is imagining her actually meeting Revere himself.) Faring marginally better, despite the relative thanklessness of his role, is Michael Sheen, unrecognizable as a buff, bearded know-it-all whose vanity Inez finds irresistibly attractive. It might have been fun sending him back in time too, so he could quarrel with historical figures about the facts of their own lives.

Happily, Midnight in Paris follows Allen's main throughline and becomes, quite by accident, very much a movie of the moment. Our cultural nostalgia blender continues to be on puree -- the Spielberg self-homage Super 8 only the latest in what strikes many of us who endured the 1980s as a return to a past not worth revisiting. Yet I have to admit that Allen's movie has given me pause: Were those of us who grew up experiencing Spielberg's (and other filmmakers') early movies more fortunate than we realized then or now? I've also been pondering the message of the equally timely, most recent South Park episode: Does begrudging contemporary moviegoers the pleasures of even a pale imitation of our 80s cinematic experience -- or refusing to recognize that that imitation may even have its own value -- make me, to use medical parlance, "a cynical asshole"?

I think that blog-pal Sheila O'Malley's affectionate yet not uncritical attitude toward nostalgia, best exemplified in her semi-regular "Diary Friday" pieces, is akin to what Woody Allen is getting at in Midnight in Paris. Cynics have accused Allen in recent years of casting younger actors, whether appropriate to their roles or not, as a means of getting his movies made, and they're not wrong. (Ditto his move to European settings, where it's evidently cheaper than shooting in New York.) Watching Owen Wilson, though -- as I did with Rebecca Hall in Vicky Cristina Barcelona -- I realized that there's nothing jaundiced about Allen's attitude toward the young generation of actors: he feels genuine affection for them. Yet it's easy to forget that Wilson, while certainly spry compared to the 75-year-old director of his movie, is now in his early-40s, on the cusp of middle-age and, as we all know, a battler of some personal demons. He looks in better shape than when he appeared in The Darjeeling Limited a few years ago, but the quiet despair of his character feels so authentic that when Gil finally finds relief it carries over to the other side of the screen.

After seeing Midnight in Paris, I reentered the real world in an unusually sanguine state of mind, a sense of calm and patience staying with me for the remainder of the day. In this lucid state, my mind drifted to Wilson's funniest line in The Royal Tenenbaums. "We all know Custer died at Little Big Horn," his Eli Cash, author of American historical fiction, says. He continues, "What my book presupposes is...." and then caps it with a wonderfully goofy flourish: "...maybe he didn't?" Eli is a lost boy and a tortured soul, reshaping history without really understanding it. Gil, more wisely, comes to terms between recognizing the past and living in the present, and learns that the middle-ground between those poles may be found on a long boulevard in a lovely walk through the rain.

Lost Causes (Carlos and Duck, You Sucker)

Carlos (2010) may be the least glamorizing biopic -- and/or portrait of a revolutionary -- I've ever seen. Oftentimes this sort of film employs a subjective point-of-view: the director will depict the destructiveness of the character, yet filter it through a sheen meant to suggest how the character sees himself. Because the subject of a biopic is usually self-destructive as well, this also tends to dilute the harm done to others. Not so with Olivier Assayas's approach. He's crafted what looks like a straightforward gritty docudrama with the tale of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan Marxist who became known as Carlos the Jackal, arguably the most notorious world terrorist prior to Osama Bin Laden. Whereas Bin Laden's ideological primitivism was vividly clear, Carlos (inhabited flawlessly by Edgar Ramirez), as depicted in the movie, adopts Palestine, socialism, anti-imperialism, and any other cause du jour on the table at any given moment. He leads a ragtag, surprisingly polyglot network of Arabs, Germans, and Japanese, and the sharpest critique of the movie is how implicitly it shows terrorists using legitimate social injustices as a means to channel their own violent frustrations and self-aggrandizement: Carlos and his team don't always seem to fully comprehend the issues they're fighting for, but they feel very strongly about them.

Like Das Boot, Carlos was released initially overseas as a TV miniseries (in Assayas's France) before a considerably cut-down version appeared in American theaters last year. I haven't seen Carlos Lite (reportedly 160 minutes), but the full three-part, five-plus-hour version (presently streaming on Xfinity) covers the 1973-1994 period of the Jackal's life, from his first, botched assassination attempt of a Zionist official to his ultimate capture by French authorities, and it never feels bloated. Assayas and his editors Luc Banier and Marion Monnier dash through several years at the beginning and end of the narrative, yet ingeniously slow things down in the middle to depict the central event of Carlos's career: his taking of hostages at the 1975 OPEC summit in Vienna. This fateful day, covered in over an hour of screen time, demonstrates both the audacity and foolishness of Carlos's methods. He threatens the Iranian and Saudi ministers with death, signs autographs, saves the life of a wounded German cohort (a sensitive performance by Alexander Scheer), and impulsively shoots an emissary in a physical struggle to show that he means business. The emissary, alas, turns out to be from Libya, transforming Qaddafi's previous sympathies instantly sour as his government refuses to grant permission to the Jackal's team to land their negotiated DC-9 on Libyan soil. The escapade veers into farce as the plane jaunts back and forth between Algiers and Tripoli, all the while wanting to go to Baghdad (where Saddam Hussein's friendly regime awaits) but not having enough fuel to get there. Carlos ends up revising his assassination plans, cutting the Saudi and Iranian ministers loose in exchange for $20 million -- a not inconsiderable sum, but a compromise that alienates him from his idealistic underlings and earns him a pink slip from a cold pragmatist boss (Ahmad Kaabour) fed up with Carlos's cultivated celebrity image.

Carlos is another example of Assayas's versatility, an eclectic resume that includes the meta-movie-about-moviemaking Irma Vep (with his then-wife Maggie Cheung), the skeezy Euro-thriller Boarding Gate (with Asia Argento), and the family-estate drama Summer Hours (with Juliette Binoche). Truth be told, I've always been an Assayas agnostic. His Summer Hours, heralded as a masterpiece by many, struck me as a nice nap; all of his films, in fact, have an overly thought-out quality that belies the director's efforts to appear freewheeling. (Summer Hours ends with a lengthy tracking shot past a "spontaneous" dance by a group of teenagers that could have been choreographed by Paula Abdul.) Some of these schematics come up in Carlos: When a detective tells his partner that he wants to follow up on a lead before a weekend with his family -- and, please, don't bring your gun -- you know he's a goner. (Ditto later with a woman whose pregnant belly is lingered on right before she answers the doorbell.) The refusal to romanticize Carlos, while on the whole admirable, also has a dramatic downside: the movie (scripted by Assayas, Dan Franck and Daniel Leconte) often has a skimming-on-the-surface feel. Carlos is a bit wanting on a psychological level; we never really get inside anyone's head.

The trade-off, however, is a compellingly broad depiction of how heads-of-state use a wildcard like Carlos, then dispose of him once he wears out his welcome. It's a tribute to Ramirez (a familiar face who has had supporting roles in Che and The Bourne Ultimatum) that he holds our attention without our sympathies for the complete running time. Carlos may be a bonehead but he's also a dangerous one; we comprehend the magnetic pull he has over his subordinates, particularly his wife and mistresses. His narcissism must have rubbed off a bit on me: Here I thought I had clever parallels all mapped out between this movie and Che and Munich, only to see Fernando Croce going typically deeper in calling the film an extension of Jean-Luc Godard's themes in his late-1960s La Chinoise and Sympathy for the Devil. Carlos captures the tragically misplaced ideology that those movies anticipated then, and the fatigue that we feel looking back now.

Known more for his artistically groundbreaking films than any semblance of political radicalism, Sergio Leone directed, around the same time as Carlos the Jackal's emergence, a movie that confounded critics and audiences in the immediate post-Bonnie and Clyde/Easy Rider era with both its retrograde classical style and mixed messages about "the revolutionary spirit." First, though, let's start with the title: When it comes to creating false impressions and turning off moviegoers, Suck, You Ducker Duck, You Sucker (1971) is about as bad as it gets. Leone had also suggested an alternative title, the only marginally better A Fistful of Dynamite, but preferred Once Upon a Time...the Revolution, which captures the true essence of the movie as the crucial go-between of a second trilogy that began with his masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) and culminated over a decade later with his final film, the gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Whereas Leone's "Man with No Name" triptych (A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) added a progressively darker, spiritual dimension to the American Western genre -- loved by audiences; hated, initially, by critics -- his "Once Upon a Time" trilogy forges the link between the decline of the frontier and the dawn of urbanity.

Once Upon a Time in the Revolution (yes, let's replace the ellipses with an "in") was a game-changer for Leone in more ways than one. The narratives of his previous films gradually evolved from focusing on a solo character (Eastwood) to a duo (Eastwood and Van Cleef) to a trio (Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach) to a foursome (Bronson, Fonda, Robards and Cardinale). Revolution wipes the slate clean. We're back to two protagonists this time: Mexican mercenary Juan Miranda (Rod Steiger), and IRA terrorist John Mallory (James Coburn). Juan and John team up after the former's successful heist of a stagecoach in rural Mexico, and the latter happens by on a motorcycle. (One of Leone's many signals that modernity is fast approaching.) After Juan shoots out John's tire, the latter responds by casually unveiling a jacket filled with explosives (another cue). Following some patented Leone macho posturing -- Coburn shouts "Duck, you sucker" right before every dynamite blast; the director insisted that this non-catchphrase was common American slang -- Juan concocts a scheme to use John to rob a bank in the town of Mesa Verde. John agrees to the plan, only to reveal, once they get there, that he's enlisted an unwitting Juan as part of the Mexican Revolution.

I wasn't going to mention that Once Upon a Time in the Revolution reminds me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom -- because, yes, it's a stupid analogy, but let me explain what I mean. Revolution is shot in a mannered classical style similar to that of West (a letdown to audiences after the break-the-rules "Dollars" films), yet it's also the most playfully free-associative of Leone's movies. Like Spielberg's maligned middle-film of the Indiana Jones series (we'll pretend Crystal Skull didn't happen), parts of Revolution seem to pop out of the director's unconscious. At times it even seems disinterested in its own story, preferring to indulge visual flourishes -- such as a priceless sight-gag of Steiger cutting a slit through an image of a political leader to reveal his own eyes -- that remind you that you're watching a movie. (Leone was actually going to hand the directorial reins of the film to someone else before a furious Steiger made him stick around.)

Once Upon a Time in the Revolution is so mischievous it's not difficult to see why some thought it wasn't taking its own ideas seriously. (More troubling, in actuality, is an early scene treating Leone's recurring preoccupation with rape in a bizarrely cavalier manner. Whereas Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon a Time in the West created the first and last three-dimensional female character in Leone's body of work, we're back in Cro-Magnon territory here.) Yet a streak of melancholy runs through the film, a grim awareness of the tragic sacrifices individuals make for their causes. The British film scholar Christopher Frayling, who provides terrific DVD commentaries for all but one of Leone's spaghetti westerns (replaced, for some reason, by Eastwood hagiographer Richard Schickel on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), explains on the Revolution track that the end of this movie anticipates the even darker atmosphere of Once Upon a Time in America -- a pair of films separated by thirteen years that thematically don't skip a beat. Once Upon a Time in the Revolution isn't flawless -- gauzy flashbacks to John's menage a trois relationship back in Ireland are guaranteed to provoke snickers -- yet it manages to enhance the overall trilogy while not being all of a piece itself. It's a grand epic, a forgotten yet essential film.

Going in Circles (Somewhere, Dogtooth, and Meek's Cutoff)

Picking a fight over a movie has its kicks, but part of the fun depends on the adversary. For example, Ali Arikan's recent Pirates of the Caribbean piece, which boldly upbraids a blockbuster predestined to suck, baits fans too inept to formulate a cogent argument, and has received a hearty round of Hurrah-for-Karamazovs from fellow blogger/critics who have all written immeasurably better things, strikes this reader as no more than a boring provocation. (There's a point to be made against the masses lining up like lemmings for the latest Hollywood refuse, but Ali's facile broadside doesn't come close to making it.) In contrast Eileen Jones, who occasionally plays the "moron" card as cheaply as Mr. Arikan rails about "cunts," nevertheless explains quite wittily and elegantly why Rob Marshall's movie fails (and how Gore Verbinski's maligned immediate predecessors succeeded far more than they were given credit for). Even better was Jones's challenge to critics of the Coen brothers' True Grit (and admirers of Hathaway's), which forges a fascinating link between the film, Portis's book, and Laughton's Night of the Hunter, and mounts a convincing defense that the Coens's body of work -- contrary to its critics and even a few admirers -- has been anything but cold.

Part of what makes an argument effective is the worthiness of its opponents; it's those same opponents, however, that can make crafting such an argument daunting. High-profile pictures -- The Dark Knight, The Tree of Life -- breed a religious fanaticism in their devotees that can be difficult (and tiresome) to deal with, but Nolanoids and Malickheads typically have a mass facelessness -- like the torch-and-pitchfork crowd at the end of Night of the Hunter -- that give their onslaughts a welcome dash of the ridiculous. Find yourself disliking a smaller film like Meek's Cutoff, Somewhere, or Dogtooth, however, and you may find yourself up against formidable admirers of one, two or all three of those movies, often critics you respect. Movies like these are invariably described by their fans as "challenging": they make the viewer work a little to understand them. I'm all for a little audience effort (Certified Copy being a recent example), but my litmus test ultimately boils down to this: Are you working harder than the movie is to express itself? Kubrick and Malick, Kiarostami and the Coens can all be difficult, but I always have the impression that they know what their movies are about. I'm never left with the sense that they're giving anything less than their all.

The least offensive of the aforementioned threesome, Somewhere is Sofia Coppola's latest non-movie about characters stuck in mind-numbing stasis. As in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette, Coppola traces celebrity and affluence as the causes of this condition, and I do feel that some critics of her work are off-base by begrudging her for writing what she knows. The problem with her films isn't their insularity, but what she puts into them -- dying stars inside of black holes. Lost in Translation overcome many of its flaws because Bill Murray, as a movie star adrift in a strange land, so beautifully rendered charm out of ennui. (Scarlett Johansson, not so much.) Somewhere casts an inexpressive B-list actor (Stephen Dorff) as a fame-fatigued A-lister, and fails to make his estrangement -- from his daughter (Elle Fanning), from himself -- even remotely as persuasive. (Imagine what Murray would have done with the scene where Dorff's face becomes frozen under layers of movie makeup and you have a semblance of what's missing.) The movie has some affecting moments that evolve from long silences: an ice-skating practice; an older gentleman's guitar solo that captivates the hero more than an assembly of pole-dancers ever could. Inevitably, though, I have qualms about a filmmaker who believes that the best way to convey inertia is via an inert approach.

Somewhere looks downright admirable compared to Dogtooth, the acclaimed Greek black comedy about a father (Christos Stergioglou) who raises his three grown-up children on an isolated family estate that they are forbidden to leave. The kids, all maladjusted blanks with misbegotten vocabularies, are "protected" from the outside world -- represented by the patrarch's place of business, a dreary factory -- yet chaos emerges via a young woman (Anna Kalaitzidou) hired to prostitute herself to the older adolescent son (Hristos Passalis) and, more importantly, contraband videocassettes of Rocky and Flashdance that inspire the eldest daughter (Aggeliki Papoulia) to flailing rebellion. Steven Boone has taught me more about visual syntax than any film critic around, but I must respectfully disagree with his assertion that the lead-pipe directorial style of Giorgos Lanthimos adds up to anything other than a thudding hollowness at the narrative's core. More than one admirer has compared Dogtooth to the best of Luis Bunuel (puh-leeze!), but the surrealist master always posited his malicious contraptions within a larger sociopolitical framework and made his targets worthy of their punishments. The cheap, empty cruelty of Dogtooth is closer in spirit to the early work of Michael Haneke and is every bit as despicable.

Which brings us to Meek's Cutoff, the most recent widely-praised film by my least favorite current filmmaker. The previous efforts of Kelly Reichardt, Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, approach modern malaise from the opposite end of Sofia Coppola's economic spectrum: For Reichardt, it's poverty that's the cause of society's ills, a perfectly valid worldview negated by the filmmaker's insistence that the lower-class live out every interaction of their lives in staggering torpor. The sun not only never shines in her monotonous Pacific Northwest milieu, the characters never laugh, never crack a joke or a smile, never express or act out a subversive thought. When a character makes a rare act of selflessness, like the security guard who gives Michelle Williams money in Wendy and Lucy, he's made to look like a dunce.

I had braced myself for more of the same with Meek's Cutoff, her period-piece foray into 19th-century pioneering, so it was seductive to be confronted by sunlit vistas of an expansive Oregon desert, as ravishing as they are treacherous. (The peerless cinematography is by Chris Blauvelt, a relative newcomer with camera-operating credits for David Fincher and Gus Van Sant.) Although Reichardt's sub-laconic, micro-minimalist style works far better coming out of the mouths and registering on the faces of 1845 settlers, her ensemble is more varied this time out. (There's even, my God, a joke or two, albeit the biggest laugh is derived from an opening title card that reads "A Primitive Nerd Production.") Michelle Williams provides a stronger moral center than she was allowed in Wendy and Lucy; Paul Dano's precise enunciation is as hypnotic as it was in There Will Be Blood (hard to believe his breakout role, in Little Miss Sunshine, was a character who refused to speak); Shirley Henderson's dreamy British diction is a constant source of amusement. The most colorful character is the titular Stephen Meek (a bearded Bruce Greenwood), a posturing, self-aggrandizing guide who has persuaded (perhaps disingenuously) this handful of pioneer men and women to abandon the larger wagon train and follow him to a suitable terrain to call home.

The opening third of Meek's Cutoff casts such a spell I had nearly convinced myself that Reichardt had wrecked my thesis for this post. Eventually, however, her dunderheaded storytelling instincts kick in. The lost pioneers capture a solitary Native American (Ron Rondeaux), and much argumentation ensues over whether the man should be killed (Meek's preference) or used as a guide to a desperately-needed water source (the Williams/Patton option). I've read reviews describing Meek's Cutoff as an allegory for Bush's failed leadership in the Iraq War; if that was the intent, it's muddled by the fact that we never see Meek persuade anyone to do anything. His con -- if that's what it is -- occurs before the narrative opens. The movie is more about the perils of following: yet that too is hampered because the decision to follow the Cayuse Indian has no consequences one way or another. His motives are depicted as ambiguously as Meek's, no matter how much blind faith Williams puts into him. (Stabs at fragmented communication between the settlers and the Cayuse are about as convincing as similar scenes in The Ewok Adventure.)

I know, not every movie needs a payoff. To make the whole Waiting for Godot thing work, though, an artist has to captivate by other means, and Reichardt's ideas are too half-baked to warrant such high regard. She sets up a potentially riveting narrative -- growing suspicion that Meek is all bluster, mounting hysteria that the Cayuse is leading them into a trap -- and abandons it not due to the demands of the story, but because, I suspect, she feels above such niceties. Too bad. Despite succumbing to her worst impulses, Kelly Reichardt has come dangerously close to making a good movie. Maybe next time.

Too Many Secrets (Farewell and The Tourist)

Farewell (2010) tells a great story from the ground up: In the early 1980s, during the last pinnacle of the Cold War, a high-level Russian intelligence agent passes state secrets to a low-level French operative, leading ultimately to the downfall of the Soviet Union. The Russian, Sergei Gregoriev (Emir Kusturica), is a fortysomething epicurean, gregarious and reckless, in possession of a fed-up, middle-aged wife, an obsessed mistress, and a teenage son with an appreciation for "decadent Western music." The Frenchman, Pierre Froment (Guillaume Canet), is a thirtyish intellectual, whose ambition and timidity pull him in opposite directions and threaten to estrange him from his own young wife and infant children. The movie begins in media res (finally, an excuse to use that phrase!), with Sergei waiting for Pierre while ensconced in the back-seat shadows of the latter's car. It's an opening reminiscent of Alan Pakula's work with Gordon Willis, yet where Farewell departs from its forbearers in the genre is Sergei and Pierre choose to conspire not at a loading dock or in a underground garage but rather directly outside a public event (a circus performance featuring one of Pierre's daughters). The hiding-in-plain-sight joke turns into a running gag, as the pair continue (at Sergei's behest) to rendezvous in one public area after another, exchanging government records during the harsh light of day. Sergei's scheme is so counterintuitive that his colleagues in the Russian intelligentsia overlook it entirely; it's so mundane that it takes a while for the French and American presidents -- Mitterrand (Phillippe Magnan) and Reagan (Fred Ward) -- to realize the gold mine of information that's landed in their laps.

This has all the makings of a terrific thriller, a human-scaled epic out of le Carre, so it's puzzling that Farewell never quite grips as a satisfying whole. The director, Christian Carion, works with an ambitiousness that exceeds both his budget and skill. Individual sequences, like a white-knuckler at a border crossing, are deftly staged. But there's a lack of momentum from one scene into the next; even a montage late in the movie featuring the international rounding-up of covert KGB agents (one of them played in a wordless cameo by Diane Kruger) lacks a sense of how this humdrum operation affects the bigger picture. Inconsistency also plagues the performances. Kusturica (who is a Serbian film director) plays Sergei like a Russkie Brendan Gleeson, expansive, flawed and soulful, whose commitment toward giving his son a brighter future is the catalyst for his actions. Canet (perhaps also better known as a director, namely of the superb French thriller Tell No One) renders Pierre an effective everyman, less goal-driven than Sergei to "change the world" than he is at bucking for promotion, yet increasingly terrified of getting caught, getting killed, or losing his family. On the downside, Fred Ward's turn as a bizarrely engaged Ronald Reagan is a constant source of distraction, and reminded me of Phil Hartman's priceless countermythical impression on Saturday Night Live: "I've got to do everything by myself!"

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck makes up for the cunning of his surveillance experts in his last film, The Lives of Others, with a vengeance in the first five minutes of The Tourist (2010), opening with a laughably conspicuous black panel van tailing Angelina Jolie from about ten feet behind. Jolie plays an English mystery woman (a secret agent, or femme fatale, or something) named Elise Clifton-Ward, who shows her knack for undercover work by appearing in magazine-cover attire and burning a surreptitious note dropped at her table in an outdoor Parisian cafe. A head of British intelligence (Paul Bettany, spending the movie glaring at computer screens and barking orders into microphones) commands his team to Get That Note!, and they tail their leisurely-paced high-heeled target down the street before losing her in a subway tunnel. I was hoping to see Jolie give her pursuers the slip through a gaggle of nuns, but von Donnersmarck sadly lacks a flair for the ridiculous.

Rather, The Tourist doesn't seem to know it's ridiculous. Or perhaps the movie senses this quality (there is a lingering whiff of desperation) but won't embrace it. Obviously von Donnersmarck wanted to make a lighthearted Hitchcockian travelogue -- To Catch a Thief, et al. -- and that kind of movie would have been more than welcome, but what he came up with instead can only be described as laboriously breezy. (Come to think of it, To Catch a Thief wasn't that great in the first place.) On a train for Venice, Elise meets Frank Tupelo (good sport Johnny Depp), a mild-mannered American tourist who becomes her dupe as she plots to evade both the clueless Brits and a ham-fisted gangster in order to rendezvous with her white-collar thief-lover. The leads have zilch chemistry, the chase scenes move at half-speed, and the director appears to have advised every male actor in the cast to react to Jolie's entrances like a cartoon wolf clubbing his own head with a mallet. No question she's still a looker (though the botox is starting to get in the way), but it's a weird case of overselling from a filmmaker whose debut was breathtakingly calibrated. The Tourist is a comatose non-starter.