Moviegoer Diary: Car Wash, Tell No One

CAR WASH

Plot In A Nutshell
Michael Schultz’s 1976 ensemble comedy about a day in the life of a Los Angeles car wash.

Thoughts
I spent most of my Sunday at a garage—I bought a car from my sister, who lives in the States, which means that the car had to pass a federal and an out-of-province inspection. The whole process took about eight hours, during which time I read two books (for the record, they were Joan Didion’s fairly insufferable novel Play It As It Lays and Jeffrey Stepakoff’s memoir about working as a TV writer, Billion Dollar Kiss) and watched a movie on my iPod.

The movie I chose was the thematically appropriate Car Wash, and what a wonderful discovery it was! Even on my tiny iPod screen, the film was bursting with life, good humour, and a vivid sense of time and place.

Of all the films whose approach to storytelling have been influenced by Robert Altman’s multicharacter comedy-dramas—everything from Crash to Me and You and Everyone We Know—Car Wash might actually be the truest to the Altman spirit. The use of a song score from a single source (in this case, a bunch of terrific bubblegum-funk tunes sung by Rose Royce and produced by Norman Whitfield) to comment on the action recalls the use of Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs. Miller; the “undesigned” set and costume design creates the same deliberately messy visual style that you see in Nashville; and even the closing credits, which are read out by the radio DJ we’ve been listening to throughout the movie, seem like a conscious homage to the closing credits of M*A*S*H.



The film also struck me as a lighthearted prototype for Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The two films share the same day-in-the-life structure, the action in both films centres around a white-owned business in a predominantly black neighbourhood, and both films end with a tense showdown at the white-owned business involving a hotheaded young black man with a Muslim name. (In Car Wash, the violence gets averted—largely, one suspects, because the white owner isn’t anywhere near the premises at the time.) There’s even a scene in both movies where a kid nearly gets run over by a car.

Car Wash is, of course, much less overtly political than Do the Right Thing—at heart, it’s just a good-time summer comedy. But there’s a nice message of tolerance running underneath its surface: it’s great to see a Native American character in the mix, for instance, and it’s even nicer that the movie doesn’t make a big deal of his ethnicity. I cringed a little at the introduction of Antonio Fargas’ character, the limp-wristed Lindy, who swishes into the ladies’ room accompanied by a radio news story full of gay double entendres (a politician named “Harry Twig” staging a filibuster at a recent caucus)—but I was pleasantly surprised to see the character more than holding his own amidst the taunts of his co-workers. “I’m more man than you’ll ever be and more woman than you’ll ever get!” Lindy tells Abdullah (Bill Duke, who’s barely aged a day in 30 years), a glowering Nation of Islam convert who disapproves of Lindy’s effeminate ways. In an era when gay characters were the butt of all sorts of demeaning jokes, it’s refreshing to see a proud, happy, unembarrassed gay man who never apologizes for his sexuality and who gains respect on his own terms. (The script is by Joel Schumacher, the openly gay future director.)

Schumacher would, of course, go on to direct one terrible, schlocky, campy movie after another, so it’s surprising that this script stays so grounded in reality and true to the rhythms of an actual workday. There’s a subplot about a “war of pranks” between two characters, and I was so grateful that the pranks were so humble—nothing more elaborate than surreptitiously pouring half a bottle of hot sauce into the other guy’s lunch. If this film were made today, I’m sure the pranks would be much more elaborate, and build to a much more graphic grossout “payoff.”

The only scene that puzzled me—and perhaps I’ll be betraying my cultural ignorance here—is Richard Pryor’s scene as a flashy evangelist named Daddy Rich. Why do all the characters (except for Abdullah) love this guy, who’s an unabashed con artist? What am I not getting here? Is the mere fact that he’s a black man who’s “made it” enough to qualify him as a role model, even though his success is based on picking his followers’ pockets?

Whatever. This movie put me in a good mood for the rest of the day. It reminded me in a weird way of George Pelecanos’ terrific crime novel King Suckerman, which has a wonderful running joke—all the characters, good and bad, black and white, are looking forward to seeing the same movie at the end of the day, a new blaxploitation flick about a pimp called King Suckerman. Car Wash felt like the kind of movie that when it came out in 1976, like King Suckerman, everyone in the city could have gone to see it and enjoyed it together.

Once I got my car back, I couldn’t resist: I took it to a car wash. It was nowhere near as much fun as the movie made it look.



RATING: 4.5/5


* * *
TELL NO ONE

Plot In A Nutshell
French thriller, based on a novel by Harlan Coben, about a man (François Cluzet) who thought his wife was killed years ago—until he begins getting video clips of her e-mailed to him.

Thoughts
I don’t have much to say about this one, a well-made, adult thriller with an intriguing setup but a fairly ho-hum resolution—except to say that a couple of things about it are really fantastic, and which seem inextricable from the film’s Frenchness, but which American thrillers could learn something from.

One is the way director Guillaume Canet doesn’t amplify the sounds of punches. There’s a scene where a woman gets brutally beaten—we don’t see her face, but the dull, smacking sounds of the fists hitting her flesh are truly gruesome. Ugh.

The other is the centrepiece action scene, in which François Cluzet (perhaps best known in North America as the young French jazz fan who befriends Dexter Gordon in Round Midnight) flees the police who have come to arrest him for a murder he didn’t commit. Cluzet is in good shape and he’s a speedy runner—but he’s no action hero, and Canet does a terrific job of creating a thrilling chase in which everything the hero does is completely plausible. Cluzet finally shakes the police by crossing a busy highway, gingerly making his way from lane to lane as the cars whizz past him at terrifying speeds. My hat goes off to Cluzet, Canet, editor Hervé de Luze, and what must have been a small squadron of stunt drivers—it’s one of the most convincing stunt scenes I’ve seen in a long time.

RATING: 3/5 (but well worth seeing just for the chase scene!)

The Musicgoer: The Watson Twins' Fire Songs

THE WATSON TWINS
Fire Songs
(Vanguard)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

“There’s those bruises you still have on your arm,” sing The Watson Twins on “Lady Love Me.” “They just build character/Make me wanna know you that much more.” All the songs on the Twins’ new disc Fire Songs are sung by bruised characters—lonely barflies, spurned lovers, restless travelers—but they wear their bruises lightly, hiding them under pretty vocal harmonies and gently twangy melodies.

But I can’t say that I wanted to get to know any of them much more; with the exception of the peppy, jukebox-friendly leadoff single “How Am I To Be” and an interesting cover of The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” the material on Fire Songs is just a little too languid, the lyrics too impersonal to connect with the listener. (It’s hard to imagine a more hand-me-down alt-country lyric than “Well, you’ve got angel eyes, but you’ve got devil’s blood,” the opening line of “Old Ways.”)

Coming on the heels of Rabbit Fur Coat, their excellent 2006 collaboration with Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, Fire Songs is a disappointment—contrary to its title, the best it can manage is a low smoulder.

It Takes A Nathan Of Fillions To Hold Him Back

Could this be the fastest money Joss Whedon has ever made?

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog—the web-only project that the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Firefly creator wrote and filmed during the writers’ strike for a little more then $100,000—is part superhero spoof, part Broadway musical, and part internet lark, but mostly it’s an illustration of how profitable Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” concept can be when it’s put into action. The entire three-part miniseries (which runs about 43 minutes in total) is available through iTunes for about $6, and with Whedon’s army of nerdy fanboys and nerdy-but-cute fangirls numbering in the millions, this thing could wind up being one of the most profitable film projects of 2008.

The hero of our story is Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), a would-be supervillain who brazenly announces his criminal plans on his website, but can barely choke out two words to Penny (The Guild’s Felicia Day), the cute girl he has a crush on at the laundromat. Then, during an attempt to steal a shipment of “wonderflonium”—the missing ingredient in his freeze ray—a terrible thing happens: not only does Dr. Horrible’s nemesis, the square-jawed Captain Hammer (Nathan Fillion), intervene, but he sweeps Penny off her feet and steals her heart before Dr. Horrible can even, like, ask her if she wants to have coffee together sometime.

The script has been constructed from 100% pure Whedonium: the irreverent take on genre conventions (the script refers to heroes and villains with names like Conflict Diamond, Fake Thomas Jefferson, and Bad Horse, “the thoroughbred of sin”); the pitch-perfect ear for the agonies of adolescent romance; the quirky comic dialogue that makes characters trailing off at the end of their sentences as funny as a punchline; the ability to turn on a dime from comedy to drama. Like, really shocking drama. I mean... not to give away the ending, but if Dr. Horrible’s musical numbers remind you of the arias from Sweeney Todd, the resemblance was probably not accidental.

Whedon has, of course, written a musical before: the “Once More, With Feeling” episode of Buffy, in which the residents of Sunnydale were afflicted with a curse that caused them to periodically break into song (songs that, just like in a Broadway musical, forced them to speak their innermost thoughts aloud), was arguably that series’ high point. If anything, the songs in Dr. Horrible are even catchier and cleverer, from Captain Hammer’s hilariously condescending tribute to ordinary citizens (“Everyone’s a hero in their own way/In their own, not-quite-heroic way!”), to the cheer-up song Penny sings to Dr. Horrible, not realizing his evil true identity, to Dr. Horrible’s ode to his freeze ray. Comparisons to Stephen Sondheim are apt—Whedon definitely piles up the internal rhymes, and Dr. Horrible’s climactic song of triumph even borrows a key melody from “Lesson 8,” from Sunday in the Park With George.

The on-the-cheap production values, if anything, only add to the series’ appeal—how refreshing it is, after the scene in The Dark Knight where Morgan Freeman lingers over the “titanium tri-weave alloy” of Christian Bale’s Batsuit, to watch something like Dr. Horrible, in which Nathan Fillion’s superhero costume consists of nothing more than a pair of vinyl gloves and a t-shirt with a hammer on it? Of course, Fillion does a superb job of selling the character—he bring just the right tone of self-satisfied boobery to lines like, “Do I know you from the gym? Oh wait—I don’t go to the gym! I’m naturally like this!”

Felicia Day, meanwhile, is a worthy addition to Whedon’s gallery of adorable nerdygirls, and Neil Patrick Harris gives the best performance of his career as Dr. Horrible—if at first the character looks like nothing more than a minor villain from The Tick, just stick around until that final shot and the cut to black.

Apparently a fourth episode and a DVD release (featuring a musical audio commentary called Commentary!) are all forthcoming, but I say don’t wait. You need something horrible in your life right this minute.

"This Film In No Way Advocates The Assassination Of Steven Spielberg"

Just a week after attending the opening-night screening of Mamma Mia!, I was witness to an even more jaw-dropping cinematic spectacle: What Is It?, the self-financed, self-distributed directorial debut of eccentric character actor Crispin Glover. Gone were the wall-to-wall ABBA songs, replaced by an eclectic soundtrack containing pieces by Richard Wagner, Charles Manson, and an appallingly racist vintage country tune by some guy billing himself as “Johnny Rebel.” And gone was the all-star marquee lineup of Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, and Stellan Skarsgård, replaced by a cast largely consisting of actors with Down’s syndrome.

Glover was here in person at Edmonton’s Metro Cinema to host the evening, which began with him reading excerpts from several of his handmade book projects—he buys obscure, out-of-print 19th-century textbooks, children’s books, and memoirs, and “repurposes” them by blacking out text, adding words of his own, and pasting photos and illustrations onto the pages. As Glover stood in a tight, red spotlight, reciting the text, slides of the pages were projected onto the screen behind him. This part of the night ran a little long (I would have been happy hearing just six stories instead of eight), and Glover frequently stumbled over his lines, but his books are genuinely intriguing objects. And the best of them—Rat Catching, for instance, or Round My House—Glover conjures up a wonderful Henry Darger-esque world of lonely, obsessive insanity. Literacy standards were so much higher back then; the lunatics of a century ago seem able to express their worldview with an articulateness and a grammatical precision that nowadays even sane people have trouble managing.

Next came the main attraction: What Is It?, a film that Glover talked about with such earnestness that I feel bad for not responding to it more enthusiastically. In theory, the film is Glover’s response to what he describes as the narrow constraints of corporately funded and distributed entertainment, and the way those films systematically eliminated anything that might disturb the audience or make them uncomfortable in any way. What Is It?, on the other hand, is a plotless smashed-taboo parade: people with Down’s syndrome kill each other with shovels; a man with cerebral palsy lies naked in a satin-lined clamshell while large-breasted women wearing monkey masks jerk him off; a man in blackface claims to be Michael Jackson; a painting of Shirley Temple standing in front of a swastika hangs on a wall; characters pour salt over snails and watch them bubble and die; an ear-splitting, bloodcurdling shriek (courtesy of Fairuza Balk) keeps ripping through the soundtrack; and did I mention that horrifying, racist Johnny Rebel song? Oh my God, what a disgusting piece of music.

The whole thing is shot in lurid 16mm colour, like an early John Waters film, and enlivened by appearances by Glover himself, decked out in a fur coat and long, flowing brown hair, playing a role identified in the credits as “Dueling Demi-God Auteur and the young man’s inner psyche”—he’s sort of a malevolent version of Bela Lugosi in Glen or Glenda?, monitoring the action of the film’s hero from a thronelike perch in some kind of alternate-dimension royal court.

It’s certainly never dull, and simply trying to figure out how the hell Glover ever convinced his actors’ guardians to let them be in such a bizarre, upsetting, completely-out-of-the-mainstream movie is more than enough to occupy your mind. But the choppy editing and the often-unintelligible dialogue keep the film from gathering any emotional momentum, and after a while, the button-pushing starts to seem rote. (You can’t help but laugh at the closing credit that proudly informs you that the organ solos were performed by Anton LaVey. Of course they were! Who else could it have been?)

But in the question-and-answer session following the film, Glover came off as the opposite of cynical. If anything, he was earnest to a fault (and constitutionally incapable of taking less than 15 minutes to answer a question)—he’s so careful not to have his intentions misunderstood that many of his answers felt like he could have been reading them off prepared statements. Eager to please, standing onstage in his black suit and tie, shifting his weight self-consciously from foot to foot—no chair, no podium—the 44-year-old Glover had a downright teenage demeanour to him, although his habit of overexplaining himself, qualifying his statements and then qualifying his qualifications, compulsively repeating academic phrases like “emotional catharsis” was more reminiscent of a nervous undergrad.

Glover was especially sincere when it came to the topic of his friend Steven C. Stewart, a man with cerebral palsy who acts in What Is It? and wrote and stars in the film’s semi-sequel, It Is Fine. EVERYTHING IS FINE, which Glover confidently says is the best film he’ll ever be involved with.

It was quite a night: by the time Glover took his final question and headed out to the lobby to sell copies of his books, you were almost left thinking that What Is It? was the work of a normal person. Come back soon, Crispin. Anyone with a middle name like "Hellion" is our kind of guy.

Name That Platoon

Has there ever been a better movie title than 1978’s Inglorious Bastards? Okay, actually, a glance at the other credits of the cast and crew reveals several strong contenders—actor Michael Pergolani once wrote a movie called No Thanks, Coffee Makes Me Nervous and director Enzo G. Castellari once made a movie called Go Kill Everybody and Come Back Alone.

But for simplicity and sheer blunt force, Inglorious Bastards is hard to beat, and it’s easy to see the appeal it holds for Quentin Tarantino, who’s borrowed it for the title of his upcoming World War II epic. (Am I the only one hoping that they use Tarantino’s spelling? In the script that got leaked to apparently every movie geek in North America earlier this month, the notoriously illiterate director writes it as Inglourious Basterds.)

I’m not connected enough to have scored a copy of the Basterds script, but judging from the reports I’ve read online and having just watched the 1978 original, Tarantino’s plotline veers off deeply into berserk territory all his own. The original is a hugely enjoyable variation on The Dirty Dozen about a group of antisocial, anti-authoritarian GIs who escape from custody on their way to a court martial and wander around the French countryside for a while before stumbling into a secret American mission to commandeer a German train and retrieve a stolen gyroscope. As I understand it, Tarantino adds a significant subplot about a young Jewish woman who runs a movie theatre in Paris, and takes even more delight in killing off Nazis than Castellari does. And Castellari loves killing Nazis—during the big battle scenes, he frequently kills off the same soldiers twice.

I do hope Tarantino preserves this movie’s spirit of adolescent fun. Getting arrested, escaping from the MPs, shooting down Nazis—in Inglorious Bastards, it’s all a lark. (Has any actor made lobbing grenades look more fun than Fred Williamson does in this movie?) Even in the final sequence, when most of our heroes die, the film lingers only momentarily over their deaths—or, really, over their acts of heroism. Triumph, tragedy... in this movie, it’s all just one damn thing after another. At least they all die happy—they were all going to be shot anyway, right?

I haven’t seen any of the spaghetti westerns and Italian gangster movies that make up the rest of Castellari’s résumé, and I get the feeling that he’s generally regarded as kind of a hack, but I really liked what he did with Inglorious Bastards—he never allows the pace to slacken (packing two hours’ worth of plot into a mere 95 minutes), but he also seems to have encouraged a loose acting style among the five leads. I especially loved Peter Hooten’s performance as the lanky, amoral Tony—in his entrance scene, swishing his hips as two soldiers escort him in handcuffs to a waiting truck, he’s almost shockingly fey. (You half-expect him to kiss one of the soldiers on the cheek.) He doesn’t camp it up at all in the rest of the movie, but the impact of that entrance colours the rest of his scenes—you never know what he’s going to do next. And I also loved Michael Pergolani in the comic-relief role of Nick, a petty thief with G. Gordon Liddy’s mustache and the bottomless coat pockets of Harpo Marx.

And as a matter of fact, the battle sequences in Inglorious Bastards are as ridiculous as anything in Duck Soup (although Groucho Marx has considerably better comic timing than Bo Svenson). After Saving Private Ryan, I don’t know if directors can ever go back to this kind of cheerfully bloodless battle scene, where no one really “dies”—they just wave their arms and fall over, or jump out of the frame with a scream when explosions go off under their feet. Perhaps Tarantino’s greatest challenge in his version of Inglorious Bastards will be figuring out how to blend these two styles, to put Private Ryan violence into a Sgt. Rock world.

And to figure out the spellcheck function on his word processor. Spelling it "inglourious" is okay—I'm Canadian, so seeing the occasional extra "u" pop up here and there doesn't bother me—but when you refer to the German dish as "wennersitnitzell," things start to look a little embarrassing.

The Musicgoer: White Noise

Here's a profile of alt-country singer/songwriter Jim White that I wrote for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton. It's not really film-related (although White was one of the creators of an interesting documentary called Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus), but this was such an enjoyable interview and White is such a fascinating guy that I thought I'd post it here anyway.

The piece is a little heavy on quotes from White, but his story about getting signed to Luaka Bop is so amazing that I decided to include it whole. Sadly, that didn't leave me room to include a lot of other great anecdotes of his—including a hilarious story about getting hired by Miramax as a sound designer on a Halloween sequel despite a complete lack of experience, and a lovely one about the time he came down with a bad case of writer's block and how it was cured thanks to a bus ride he took with Charlie Louvin in the seat next to him. We talked for 45 minutes in all, and I didn't even get a chance to lob him any questions about religion—a topic he undoubtedly could have gone on about for another hour.

If you want more information about White, check out his website—look on his recommendations page, and you'll see what excellent taste he has in music, books, and film. As a matter of fact, I finished our conversation by asking him what directors he'd love to write a score for. He mentioned Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier as filmmakers he admired, but didn't feel like he'd know how to do music that they'd want. Instead, he went with a brilliant, unexpected choice: Agnès Varda, whose wonderful documentary The Gleaners and I reveals a restless spirit that has a lot in common with White's.

"I think I could do a good job for her," White says, "if she wrote to me."

Agnès? Ball's in your court.

*****

“I’ve spent my whole life driving places,” says singer/songwriter Jim White. “I was conceived on a cross-country trip.” He spent most of his time between the ages of 16 and 25 knocking around the back roads of the American South, a period of his life that he revisited in the 2004 documentary Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus. He’s put in stints as a surfer and a standup comic. He went to film school at NYU and worked for a while as a New York cab driver. It would be easy to romanticize these experiences, but you’d have to be someone other than Jim White to do so.

“At the time I signed with Luaka Bop [the record label founded by David Byrne, which has released all five of White’s albums], I was a cabbie and had gone through five years of intense psychological distress,” he says. “I was suicidal. I literally thought dozens of times a day that I was going to kill myself. And then this call came from David Byrne’s record label saying they’d heard a weird homemade tape I’d made and they wanted to give me a record deal. I thought it was a practical joke! I thought one of my friends was messing with me.

“But I walked into their office,” he continues, “and during one of my big psychological crises, I’d ended up in Belgium. And one of my friends who was worried about me said, ‘Don’t stay in the house tonight—let’s go out and hear some new music.’ We heard this incredible band play, and when I went back to America, I thought what a shame it was that no one in America will ever hear this band. So I walked into Luaka Bop, and there they were—there was a giant poster of Zap Mama hanging there. When the secretary told me that they were on this label, I thought, ‘Okay. I’ve found a good place.’

“And then a moment later, David Byrne comes rushing out and shakes my hand like some stalker fan and goes, ‘Oh wow! It’s really nice to meet you! Wow! You’re such a great songwriter! Wow!!!’ I thought, ‘Man, this is one of the greatest inversions in the history of human physics. I’m a suicidal cabdriver and that’s David Byrne, and he’s doing to me what I should do to him.’”

White has come a long way since that crude cassette—literally, White says, a tape of him singing and banging on pots and pans in his kitchen—that improbably attracted Byrne’s attention. On albums like No Such Place, Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See, and his latest, 2007’s Transnormal Skiperoo, the 50-year-old White shows a willingness to experiment in the studio that you don’t normally associate with alt-country artists from his generation. His songs are vividly etched character studies, but with their layered electronic soundscapes, they’re like a Flannery O’Connor story crossed with Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born. (Paradoxically, though, White says that his music didn’t go over too well when he actually opened for Wilco. He did better when he toured with Lucinda Williams—her fans get him.)

“When I told the mother of my first child how I write songs, she struck me,” he says. “She literally struck me. Because, she said, ‘You’re not supposed to do it that way.’ I came up with this analogy years and years ago: if you were given the assignment of building a tree, most people would start with the roots, then build the trunk, then add the limbs and the twigs, then put on the leaves. I seem to be more comfortable with doing the leaves first and throwing them in the air, then figuring out some way to attach the twigs to the moving leaves and limbs to the moving twigs. Most of the trees I made when I was starting out fell apart because they had no structural integrity. But after 30 years of building them that way, I think I found a way to make them work.

“I have minimal skills lyrically,” he continues. “You ever listen to Joe Pernice? In a three-minute song, he can just tear an idea apart. But it takes me forever to get to my point—I wish I could be more succinct. I always take more of an Islamic approach to things—I have to get to Mecca and then circle the city seven times. But in circling the city seven times, I learn things along the way that people who go straight in don’t.”

Home Of The WOPR

Hi, radio fans.

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I've been doing a series of nostalgic segments for CBC Radio's Edmonton AM program called the "Summer Movie Time Machine." During the summer months, a lot of the employees go on vacation, which means a lot of people get reassigned to other roles, and as a result, tasks like posting my segments onto the CBC website sometimes fall between the cracks. I'm sure that will be fixed soon—but in the meantime, I've discovered that my first "Time Machine" segment, which sets up the series and covers the summer of 1983, is actually online on a different page from the one listed in the links on the right-hand side of this page.

So if you're interested in hearing my enlightening thoughts about WarGames and Staying Alive, click here and scroll down to the bottom of the screen. Sorry to be giving you these segments all out of order—just pretend you're watching Firefly, okay?

And hopefully the segment I did this morning, in which I tackled the summer of 1988 (Die Hard! Who Framed Roger Rabbit! Er... Crocodile Dundee 2!), will be online soon. Caution: 1988 segment may contain Rick Astley.

The Brothers McMoron

On the audio commentary for Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson is unrestrained in his love for John C. Reilly. “There’s no one who makes me break down crying, falling on the floor, thinking I’m going to throw up laughing [like him]. Every single thing he does makes me laugh. It’s kind of criminal. I just can’t see the forest for the trees with John Reilly. Maybe he sucks in this movie—I don’t know! Maybe he’ll suck in the next one, but it’s all good to me. I just can’t get enough of him. I could stare at that fucking face all day long.”

Wow—you and me both, P.T.! You and me both! With those beady little deep-set eyes, those jug ears, and that mop of receding curls... I mean, you couldn’t draw a funnier-looking guy if you tried. I don’t know who originally had the idea of pairing Reilly up with Will Ferrell—was it Judd Apatow? Director Adam McKay? Ferrell himself?—but whoever it was, it was a stroke of genius. Most comedy teams are a union of opposites, but with Reilly and Ferrell, part of the humour derives from how perfectly matched they are, these two flabby, dimwitted, overgrown, macho babies, both completely oblivious to how the world perceives them—naturally they’re best friends.

Of course, as Step Brothers opens, they’re sworn enemies. Ferrell is mama’s boy Brennan Huff, Reilly is underachieving would-be musician Dale Doback; both appear to have stalled emotionally around the age of 10, and neither of them has a job. And so when Ferrell’s mom (Mary Steenburgen) marries Reilly’s dad (Richard Jenkins), neither of them takes kindly to the idea of having strangers upsetting their coddled lifestyle. (“This wedding is horseshit!” screams Ferrell as he storms out of the reception.) But it doesn’t take long for the two men to realize how much they have in common—nonexistent career ambitions, a passion for Shark Week, a homoerotic desire to have sex with John Stamos—and become best buddies.

Step Brothers was produced by Judd Apatow, and the script (by Ferrell and Adam McKay) takes the standard Apatow “slacker manchild is forced to grow up” template and exaggerates it to an almost surreal extreme. Ferrell and Reilly aren’t just unambitious slackers like Seth Rogen in Knocked Up or Jason Segel in Forgetting Sarah Marshall; these two guys are selfish and juvenile to the point of sociopathy. As they lie together at night in their twin beds, they pass the time by whispering increasingly baroque death threats to each other. At one point, Ferrell literally tries to bury Reilly alive—and when Reilly climbs out of his grave and attacks him, Ferrell hilariously starts screaming, “Zombie! Zombie!” And once they actually become friends, they actually become more destructive—working in tandem, their minds start coming up with idiotic projects they never could have conceived individually.

Look—I know this is a stupid movie. But making a movie as blissfully stupid as this one is not as easy as it looks. It takes an inspired mind to come up with the scene where Ferrell and Reilly go out to the garage to “practice their karate” (which turns out to be code for “kick the shit out of a bunch of pumpkins”) or the bit where Ferrell and Reilly both sleepwalk downstairs and systematically destroy the kitchen, or just to come up with an exchange like Ferrell and Reilly’s apoplectic response when Jenkins suspends their TV privileges. “This house is a prison!” Ferrell shouts.

“On the planet Bullshit!” adds Reilly, to which Ferrell adds, “In the galaxy of This Sucks Camel Dicks!”

I can’t help it—I’m a sucker for this stuff. I’m such an easy Will Ferrell lay that I even gave a pass earlier this year to Semi-Pro. But you’ve gotta say this for Step Brothers: as in every movie they do, Ferrell and Reilly commit completely to their characters’ emotions. When the two stepbrothers turn their beds into bunk beds, Reilly gazes in wonder at their makeshift carpentry work, the upper bed held up with random, rickety planks of wood and a couple of hockey sticks, and when he says, “This looks like something you’d buy in a store!” you don’t doubt that he’s truly awestruck by his own handiwork.

The movie never really comes up with a good explanation for how these two guys got this way—well, Steenburgen is a bit of an enabler, but surely a hardass like Jenkins would have laid down the law to Reilly years earlier—and if you thought the female characters in Knocked Up were problematic, Step Brothers represents several large steps backwards.

Most Apatow productions end with their maladjusted heroes pulling up their socks and joining the grownup world, but not Step Brothers—here, interestingly, even though Ferrell and Reilly each have a brush with responsibility, the film ends with them happily fleeing the adult world, retreating instead to a treehouse well-stocked with pirate hats, Chewbacca masks, and plenty of back issues of Hustler. The image made me smile. Coming so soon after seeing Christian Bale in The Dark Knight, it was nice to see a couple of middle-aged guys actually getting some pleasure out of dressing up in silly costumes.

The Musicgoer: The Hold Steady's Stay Positive

THE HOLD STEADY
Stay Positive
(Vagrant)
**** (out of 5)

I’m sure plenty of kids growing up in small Midwestern mill towns die in car accidents, in bar fights, and maybe even in suicides, but I never heard of anyone literally getting crucified until I listened to Stay Positive, the new album by critical darling bar-band The Hold Steady. Song after song on the disc references this shadowy event—“Sequestered in Memphis” takes place at a police interrogation, “One for the Cutters” tells the story from the point of view of a thrill-seeking college girl who enjoys slumming with the townies, and “Both Crosses” retells the event in an even more hallucinatory fashion—and at a certain point, the event stops sounding like some lurid piece of summertime gossip and enters the realm of shared small-town myth.

Turning everyday tragedies and heartbreaks into myth: few bands do it better than The Hold Steady. Craig Finn has a novelist’s eye not just for detail but for character and narrative—a rarity in a songwriter—while his bandmates supply joyous wall-of-sound arrangements as wild and innocent as anything the E Street Band ever came up with. Four albums into their career, and The Hold Steady show no signs of wavering.

Moviegoer Diary: Mother of Tears, Hancock

MOTHER OF TEARS

Plot in a Nutshell
The final part of Dario Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy, in which Asia Argento plays an employee at a Rome museum who learns she alone may possess the power necessary to defeat a cruel but beautiful witch whose sisters were killed in Suspiria and Inferno.

Thoughts
Having seen only four Dario Argento movies before this one—Suspiria, Inferno, Deep Red, and The Stendhal Syndrome—my knowledge of his work doesn’t go much deeper than the conventional wisdom: a visual virtuoso, plot ain’t exactly his strong suit, hasn’t made a really good movie in a couple of decades.

But the jury appears to be out on Mother of Tears; as far as I can tell, the really avid horror fans consider it a small step up from Argento’s fairly dismal late-career output but still a huge disappointment compared to Suspiria and Inferno; meanwhile, a few of the more open-minded horror-dabbling mainstream critics were willing to cut it some slack out of a general fondness for Argento and respect for his status as one of the old masters of Italian horror. Mr. Peel, from the excellent blog Mr. Peel’s Sardine Liqueur, gave it a mild recommendation, saying he had a smile on his face pretty much the whole way through, and as someone who loved Suspiria and Inferno, that was enough to inspire me to find out how Argento brought the trilogy to a close.

Fairly artlessly, I’m afraid. I was hoping at least to have fun with this picture, but there’s a gratuitous brutality to the violence in Mother of Tears that made it a hard film to enjoy—gone was the visual stylishness I associate with Argento’s best films, the impeccably edited, operatic setpieces, replaced by flat, ugly scenes of skulls getting crushed in doorways and cleavers smashing into old men’s faces. At about the hour mark, a woman is killed in such an appalling, gratuitous, sadistic way that there was just no way for me to forgive it anymore, no way to enjoy the silly, campy ending, in which [SPOILER ALERT] Asia Argento defeats the beautiful, big-breasted evil witch by ripping her clothes off and throwing them into the fire. (By the way: I don’t know if it’s the language barrier or what, but Moran Atias, who plays the witch, manages to get through the entire film without delivering a single capable line reading. It’s really endearing.)

Unlike the first two films in the trilogy, which were structured around long suspense sequences set in specific buildings, Mother of Tears is more sprawling, with violence and chaos spreading through Rome (although Argento only had the budget to give us a tiny taste of it). And with one of Argento’s typically rambling plots, the film suffers as a result, lacking even the focus of a single physical setting. Argento’s only attempt at a visual coup is a long, elaborate Steadicam shot near the end, but while it covers an impressive amount of ground, it doesn’t amount to much in terms of suspense or storytelling.

There are a few loopy Argento conceits to liven things up: a homicidal monkey with a vendetta against Asia Argento; a professor of the occult who examines Asia Argento’s eye under a giant green magnifying glass in order to see if she’s actually who she says she is; a cameo by Udo Kier. It’s not enough to make a satisfying movie, but I didn’t have much emotion invested in Mother of Tears being good or not. I ain’t crying over it.

RATING: 2/5


HANCOCK

Plot in a Nutshell
Director Peter Berg’s underperforming summer blockbuster about a PR expert (Jason Bateman) who attempts to rehabilitate the public image of an alcoholic, antisocial, wildly unpopular superhero (Will Smith).

Thoughts
I read and listened to a lot of reviews of Hancock, all of which took pains not to reveal the “giant plot twist” that occurs halfway through—and, in many critics’ opinions—ruined the film completely. Taken alone, none of them spoiled the surprise, but taken in aggregate, they still contained enough information, however pussyfooted-around, for me to figure out what the twist was anyway. (I wonder if game theorists have a word for that phenomenon... where a piece of information can be revealed by people's very attempts to conceal it.)

And the critics were right: the twist does kind of ruin the movie. What a weird experience watching this movie was: I wasn’t really responding to the film so much as I was having a predigested opinion completely confirmed. And now that everyone has moved onto talking about The Dark Knight, it seems a little pointless to be offering my observations on Hancock, which the world seems to have already forgotten a mere three weeks into its run. But let’s see if I can add anything fresh to the debate.

The problem with Hancock’s big twist isn’t that it changes the film’s tone—up until that point (apart from the bizarre scene where Hancock literally shoves a man’s head up another man’s ass), it does a fairly decent job of blending superhero satire with some more dramatic elements.

No, the real problem is that the twist changes the film’s genre—I don’t want to get into specifics here, but it turns out [SPOILER ALERT #2] that Hancock isn’t exactly a superhero, but some kind of vaguely defined supernatural creature whose powers are affected by all sorts of laws that the script doesn’t do a very good job of explaining. And so what begins as an amusing spoof of superhero conventions (Who pays for all that damage to the roads and buildings that superheroes leave in their wake? Wouldn’t it be funny to see a superhero who isn’t in full command of his powers? What if having a superhero in your city turned out to be more trouble than it was worth?) suddenly tries to take on mythic dimensions. People close to Hancock are threatened with death, but the people trying to kill them are the victims of Hancock head-up-the-ass prank, now out for revenge.

It doesn’t work, and I’m not sure why the filmmakers thought the comic superhero/PR campaign plotline, with Hancock finding redemption while serving a jail sentence and attending anger management classes, wasn’t enough to fill an entire movie. Especially when one of the convicts in Hancock’s therapy group is played by Ralph Richeson, who was so fantastic as the ancient, antler-worshiping lackey at the Grand Central Hotel on TV’s Deadwood. The man looks ready to keel over any moment: let’s give him all the screen time we can while we’ve still got a chance!

RATING: 3/5

A Cut-And-Paste Masterpiece

There has never been another book like Graham Rawle’s novel Woman’s World.

I’ll let Rawle himself describe his feat: “Woman’s World has been collaged from individual fragments of text (around 40,000 in all) found in women’s magazines published in the early 1960s. It has taken five years to produce.”

Did you get that? This is a novel—one with a coherent, linear plot and a cast of characters as well-rounded as any you’d fine in a “conventional” story—that the author has assembled not with a pen, a typewriter, or a computer, but solely with a stack of old magazines, a pair of scissors and several pots of glue. It literally looks like a 450-page ransom note: every page is a riot of retro fonts in various sizes, with even the page numbers pasted onto the bottom corners by Rawle’s own hand.

Rawle’s incredibly labour-intensive compositional method means not only that every page of the book is literally a work of art, but also that every single sentence becomes unusually compelling—you can’t help but marvel at how cleverly he’ll take words and clauses from two, three, four, even five different sources and link them up into a brand-new sentence that makes grammatical and literary sense.

But what makes Woman’s World into more than a technical stunt is the fact that its form perfectly reflects its content. The book’s narrator is Norma Fontaine, a young single woman living in suburban London in the early 1960s with her brother Roy; obsessed with clothes and homemaking, she breathlessly parrots all the fashion and decorating advice she’s absorbed from popular literature—and since Rawle has used articles and advertisements from vintage women’s magazines as his raw material, Norma’s speech can’t help but be peppered with almost dementedly breathless descriptions of “simply wonderful Brillo soap pads” and “raucous red Boulevard court shoes with daintily styled baby doll toes for up-to-the-minute elegance.”

But the full extent of Rawle’s ingenuity becomes apparent a few chapters into the narrative, as we gradually become aware that Norma isn’t, in fact, a real person, but the alter ego of her “brother” Roy, a handsome young man whose job, love life, and reputation are all put in jeopardy by his irresistible compulsion to cross-dress. Suddenly, the style of the book makes more sense than ever—Norma’s feverish, hyper-feminine personality is something Roy has constructed for himself... something he’s literally assembled for himself from the pages of thousands of women’s magazines. Imagine a cross between Far From Heaven, Fight Club, and Edward D. Wood Jr.’s Glen or Glenda? and you’ll have something close to Woman’s World.

Just make sure you imagine something so smoothly written and containing so many delightful turns of phrase that if you simply heard it being read aloud, you’d never guess that each part of the sentence had been sewn together like a Frankenstein monster. Rawle has an especially adept way with similes: a metaphor is “as plain as a hard-boiled egg”; Roy’s face looks “white and strained like sauerkraut”; a skirt Norma tosses in the fireplace grate “blazes intensely out of control for a moment like a holiday romance with a girl from Hartlepool.”

It’s remarkable how a book assembled within such narrow strictures manages to create so many subtle effects: Rawle always keeps it clear what Roy is thinking even though he limits himself to telling the story from “Norma”’s perspective; and he also captures the poignancy of Roy’s situation, effectively playing off his genuine yearning to lose himself for a few hours within a whirl of feminine happiness against “Norma”’s serene but ridiculous confidence in her own glamour whenever she goes out in public in her lipstick, her wig, her favourite red pixie jacket, and her “powder-blue stud-fastened skirt by Alexon.”

I love thinking of all those magazines Rawle destroyed in order to create this book—all those glossy pages, with holes now cut into them where the best sentences used to be. To think that Norma used to live in those holes, scattered over thousands of pages. How lovely to know that Rawle has gathered up all those pieces of her soul and finally reunited them.

Natural Bjorn Killers

How do you solve a problem like Mamma Mia!?

By any objective standard, this film version of the ABBA-licious musical is terrible. The direction is graceless, the vocal performances are karaoke-level at best, the choreography is pedestrian, and the jokes—i-yi-yi, the jokes!—are the lamest, most shopworn, cornball stage shtick imaginable, aimed straight at the tourist-trade rubes from the Midwest who made this show such a smash on Broadway. And damned if the Friday-night audience I saw the film with didn’t lap it all up: Stellan Skarsgård walking away from the camera to reveal his bare bum, Meryl Streep falling through the ceiling onto an air mattress, her legs sticking up in the air, Christine Baranski making jokes about her fake boobs... whether the characters were falling into the water with their clothes on or being caught with their clothes off, all of it was greeted with gales, literally gales of laughter from the fifty- and sixtysomething couples who’d filled the theatre (while all the cool people were on the other side of the multiplex taking in The Dark Knight). Can a movie truly be called bad if it gives its audience this much pleasure?

Maybe I’ll have a better answer for that question next week, after I’ve finished picking my jaw up off the floor and “Chiquitita” has finally stopped echoing around in my brain. In the meantime, here’s my best stab at a reply.

Mamma Mia! may be terrible, but I’ve never seen a movie embrace its own terribleness as completely as this one does. I even think it might be terrible by design: every performance—the acting as well as the singing and dancing—is literally on the level that you’d find in any office talent show. Where most musicals try and wow you with the actors’ superhuman vocal talent and the astonishing athleticism and precision of the choreography—you know, with skill—Mamma Mia! goes the opposite route and gives you a musical where literally anybody in the audience could sing and dance just as well as anybody onscreen. (Pierce Brosnan cannot sing to save his life—and he gets two songs!) They could probably have replaced the director and choreographer too with no appreciable difference in the final product.

Everyone in the film hams it up in the most amateurish way—idiotically pantomiming the lyrics of the songs, striking self-consciously goofy “diva” poses as they sing into hairbrushes and reach for the high notes, dressing up in silly ’70s jumpsuits just to demonstrate what good-natured sports they are. Even Meryl Streep doesn’t register here as Meryl Streep, Greatest Actress Of Her Generation; she comes across as a 60-year-old mom acting in a community theatre production, having the time of her life, playing to her friends in the audience, overplaying every emotion, and not making the slightest pretense of inhabiting a character. When you see the actors bursting into song, you respond not to the quality of their performance, but simply to how game these real-life celebrities are to play along, to clown around like regular folks and risk looking a little foolish. If anyone in the film could actually sing or dance, if the slightest hint of wit or sophistication were to appear in the script, or if a single musical number were staged with anything remotely resembling visual flair or comic inventiveness, the whole enterprise would deflate like a punctured volleyball.

I haven’t mentioned the plot at all, because the plot hardly matters—for what it’s worth, it’s about a young bride-to-be (Big Love’s Amanda Seyfried, who spends the whole movie behaving as if she’s barely stifling a fit of the giggles) invites three of her mother’s old flames to her wedding in hopes of discovering which one is her father. What matters are those irresistible ABBA songs, confections as sugary and lightweight as cotton candy, which the actors keep launching into at the slightest provocation, with zero attempt to smooth the transition from speaking to singing.

And those songs just won’t stop coming at you. At the end of what seems like the final number, Streep peers into the audience and asks, “Do you want some more? Do you want us to do another one?!?” As the crowd roared that it did, I knew I was powerless to resist Mamma Mia!’s onslaught. This film-critic Napoleon had met his “Waterloo.”

Dirty Gotham Scoundrels

Michael Keaton tells a story about talking with Jack Nicholson between scenes during the filming of Tim Burton’s 1989 version of Batman. Supposedly, Keaton was fretting over how to play the scene, whereupon Nicholson smiled and told him, “Relax, kid. Let the suit do the acting.”

That may be the key difference between Nicholson’s performance as The Joker—a star turn that amounted to not much more than an outrageous wardrobe, a few hours in the makeup chair, and some well-worn trademark Nicholson tics—and Heath Ledger’s remarkable take on the character in The Dark Knight. Director/co-writer Christopher Nolan has conceived of The Joker as a total enigma, with no backstory (every time The Joker explains how he acquired the grotesque facial scars that have left him with a permanent ear-to-ear grin, he tells a different story), and no apparent motive for his crimes against Gotham City other than wreaking the maximum amount of havoc.

But Ledger’s performance doesn’t seem chaotic: even though The Joker behaves differently from scene to scene, and even uses different speech rhythms, everything he does feels like it emanates from the same, specific, unclean place. It’s a big, flamboyant performance that somehow avoids Pacinoesque self-parody; it’s a funny performance that never crosses over into camp; it’s a highly rigourous performance that nevertheless constantly surprises you. Who knew the tight-lipped cowboy of Brokeback Mountain had this performance in him? Every time Ledger comes onscreen, you can’t wait to see what he’s going to do next, and of course the tragedy is that now we’ll never know what he might have had in store for us in future films.

Indeed, one of the disappointments in The Dark Knight is that once Ledger’s final scene is over, we still have to spend 20 minutes with a bunch of much less interesting characters, including crusading district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), now transformed into the hideously deformed vigilante Two-Face, and whose internal moral battle is too pat and overly diagrammed to be dramatically interesting.

But then again, all the thematic conflicts in Nolan’s script (which he co-wrote with his brother Jonathan) are set out a little too baldly. How do we know The Joker represents chaos and Batman represents order? Because Nolan keeps giving The Joker all sorts of monologues in which he says that he represents chaos while Batman represents order. On the other hand, on a plot level, that same script is wonderfully complicated, densely populated with gangsters, politicians, and cops, and full of cleverly conceived setpieces, from the nastily funny opening bank heist to a Joker-devised ethical conundrum that plays out on a pair of ferries. But on the third hand, it would have been nice if some of the action sequences had been more coherently directed—the finale, with Batman searching for The Joker in an abandoned skyscraper while his right-hand man Lucius (Morgan Freeman) monitors his progress on a giant wall of sonar display screens, is a visual botch, nearly impossible to make sense of.

While I’m playing contrarian, here are a few more quibbles I had with The Dark Knight. I think the rumbly voice Christian Bale uses when he’s in his Batman guise sounds silly. The whole subplot about Lucius using cellphones to spy on every single person in Gotham City feels half-baked. Harvey Dent’s conversion from good to evil feels rushed. And even though the broadcast ends prematurely it seems impossible that Batman’s true identity could remain a secret when a weasely lawyer goes on live TV to reveal he’s actually Bruce Wayne.

I know, I know: I’m picking nits. But somebody has to: the last time I checked the IMDb, visitors to the site had rated The Dark Knight as the greatest movie ever made. Which is absurd, even though Nolan does many things phenomenally well. He paints his film on a big canvas—you really get the sense of how The Joker’s actions affect the psychology of an entire city, and his conception of Gotham City as a dark, unmanageable labyrinth of criminal impulses, both organized and inchoate, is wonderfully tactile.

I love that all the characters are adults grappling with adult questions and quandaries, as opposed to the arrested adolescents of Burton’s film. I love that the film feels incredibly dangerous and dark even though it contains no blood and no foul language. It’s a film of genuine scope and ambition... and if it’s a little emotionally remote, a superhero movie with too much on its mind is a welcome rarity. What can Nolan possibly do for an encore? Perhaps that’s a question only The Riddler can answer.

Where We're Going, We Don't Need Roads

Good news, everyone!

The CBC has added a couple of my "Summer Movie Time Machine" segments to my page on their website. (This is a 10-part series I'm doing for them over the next few months in which I revisit a different summer-movie season each week, from the hits to the flops.)

They currently have posted my segments about 1984 (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai) and 1985 (Back to the Future, Return to Oz). The first segment, in which I tackle 1983 (WarGames, Staying Alive), is still missing, but hopefully that will be remedied soon.

Anyway, I've really been getting a kick out of doing these pieces, and I hope you enjoy them too.

Mennonites Behaving Badly

Wow: sorry it's been so long between posts, guys. I was on vacation—I took a few days off to take a road trip across America. Yes, I saw the U.S.A. in my Chevrolet... or, more accurately, I saw the A.S.U. in my Subaru, a 1998 Outback wagon that I bought from my brilliant sister Kate, who moved this week from Massachusetts to Honolulu and was making the trip easier for herself by divesting herself of some of her bulkier possessions. It was an occasionally grueling trip—for a while there, it looked like Nebraska was simply going to go on forever—but an enjoyable one, especially since my previous American experiences consisted of brief visits to New York, Boston, and Las Vegas. Wyoming: you guys have an incredibly beautiful state... Brokeback Mountain didn't lie!

I've also been catching up with a lot of TV shows lately instead of movies—instead of hanging out at the cineplex, I've been watching the first seasons of Breaking Bad and In Treatment, and rewatching the first season of Mad Men, so I've had a dearth of movie-related stuff to comment on. Hopefully that will soon be fixed and I'll return to this blog's usual breathless pace. Also, on the very outside chance that you've been looking in vain for the "Summer Movie Time Machine" segments I've been doing for CBC Radio, hopefully they'll be posted to the CBC site very soon.

Now, let's get back into the movie-blogging swing of things with a deep dive into arthouse territory, and a review of Carlos Reygadas' festival favourite Silent Light...

***

Mexican cinema is experiencing a renaissance, so the conventional wisdom proclaims, and as proof, journalists (without apparently noticing the irony) point to the very directors who have crossed over most successfully into Hollywood, the so-called “Three Amigos”: Guillermo del Toro, whose Hellboy II is currently playing in theatres and who’ll be directing a couple of movies based on The Hobbit for producer Peter Jackson; Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu, who enlisted stars like Brad Pitt and Sean Penn to star in his Oscar-nominated films Babel and 21 Grams; and Alfonso Cuarón, whose Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is commonly regarded as the best of the Potter series.

I have no idea if Carlos Reygadas is an amigo of any of these guys or not, and I certainly can’t imagine a Hollywood studio entrusting him with their latest tentpole comic-book franchise (one glimpse of the graphic opening scene of Battle in Heaven, in which a young woman tearfully performs oral sex on a potbellied, unattractive middle-aged man, would definitely put the kibosh on any chances of Reygadas directing X-Men 4), but there’s a formal rigour and a remarkable visual beauty to Reygadas’ work that is more remarkable than all the latex beasties of Hellboy II put together.

Just take the two amazing sequences that open Reygadas’ latest film, Silent Light, for instance. In the first, Reygadas’ camera begins by gazing up at a pitch-black nighttime sky somewhere in rural Mexico. Slowly, stars emerge, while the camera pans down toward the horizon, the sky lightening just enough for us to make out a pair of trees. And as the camera slowly moves past the trees, still in the same unbroken shot, the blackness is replaced by the brilliant, breathtaking orange of the sunrise. In the second sequence, we watch a Mennonite family—part of a small enclave of German-speaking Mennonite farmers near Chihuahua—having breakfast in their immaculate kitchen; the scene would seem warm and contented if it weren’t for the austerity of Reygadas’ images and the incessant ticking of the clock, marking off every second. Soon, the wife and the children clear out, leaving the father, Johan, alone at the table. He sits there for a long while, and then breaks helplessly into a fit of tears.

We gradually learn the source of Johan’s unhappiness: despite his deep religious faith, he has been cheating on his wife Esther with another Mennonite woman named Marianne. Johan genuinely loves both women, and interestingly, no one in the community (where Johan’s situation is apparently something of an open secret), not even his father, seems to regard the split in his affections as a paradox or an impossibility. Johan may be committing a sin, but if he’s sinful, he’s fallen prey to the weakness that all humans are subject to—the question now becomes how he will reconcile his love for his wife with the desires of his heart.

It’s a challenging film—slow-paced, enigmatic, sometimes a little ponderous, and very sketchy on the details of what exactly it is that makes Johan say Marianne is a more compatible partner for him than Esther—but its combination of sexual passion (especially as embodied by the paunchy Cornelio Wall, who plays Johan) and Protestant sombreness feels entirely fresh and novel, especially when combined with the luminous widescreen cinematography of Alexis Zabe (previously best-known for his black-and-white photography on the wonderful low-budget Mexican comedy Duck Season). Zabe’s images have a remarkable clarity: the wide-open landscapes are drenched in sunlight, but not oppressively so—the sun seems impossible to hide from, but its warmth is comforting somehow, even forgiving.

And forgiveness turns out to be the film’s main theme: in the climactic scene, which takes place in a room as astonishingly clean and white as the prison from THX 1138, Reygadas gets the audience to believe in a miracle, and he achieves the effect in the simplest manner possible. In another movie, it might seem like hooey, but here I found myself hardly blinking an eye.

One final note: most of the reviews I’ve seen of this film from Cannes and the New York Film Festival make note of its “non-professional cast.” These reviews, most by American critics, seem unaware that Miriam Toews, who plays the pivotal role of Esther, is a celebrated, award-winning Canadian writer who has contributed pieces to the radio program This American Life. True, this is her first film role, but she’s hardly the simple, unsophisticated Mennonite woman plucked from obscurity that many critics seem to believe her to be. It makes me wonder whether Cornelio Wall also has a background in the arts. Not that this diminishes Reygadas’ achievement: on the contrary, it makes the film’s illusion of artlessness all the more impressive.