The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby

 

Finally, a Gatsby that gets it.  Film adaptations of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s venerable novel have a history of falling embarrassingly wide of the mark.  I’ve seen three before Baz Luhrman’s recent version: an undistinguished 1949 release with Alan Ladd badly miscast as Gatsby, the infamous 1974 flop with Robert Redford and Mia Farrow (both miscast, Farrow very badly), and a rather good TV version from 2000 with Mia Sorvino quite engaging as Daisy but Toby Stephens so reserved as Gatsby that, like the shy millionaire avoiding one of his own parties, he hardly makes his presence known. 

 

It’s crucial that Gatsby be cast well because character is paramount to the story—it’s the combustible interaction of personalities that drives the book, not a rip-roaring plot.  The story is simple, the people complex--and elusive, given that they are presented to us through the haunted memory of narrator Nick Carraway, whose brief friendship with Gatsby forms the heart of Fitzgerald’s tragic story.  It’s his version of events and people that we are supposed to see, not easily captured in a third-person medium like film.  In the novel, Nick’s finely contoured portraits of his friends are woven into a blistering satire of New York society at the height of the Roaring ‘20s, the infamous decade of reckless economic growth and even more reckless personal behavior.  Doing justice to Fitzgerald’s complex and unique vision is a challenge only someone of Gatsby-size optimism should take on.

 

Baz Luhrman (who co-wrote the script with Craig Pearce) doesn’t hesitate to dream big with his film projects.  The director of Moulin Rouge and Australia loves expressing himself through size and spectacle, and Gatsby gives him plenty of opportunities for both.  The novel lends itself easily to epic treatment because its legendary era is filled with gangsters, millionaires, flappers, and orgiastic parties, all driven by a spendthrift economy that ends in a spectacular Crash, the influence of which is still being felt today.  Hollywood has expended a lot of energy over the years--inventing whole genres even—to glamorize the easy wealth, bootleg booze, and no-holds-barred sex of the Roaring ‘20s.  A world spinning drunkenly out of control is strangely compelling, and temptingly photogenic.

 

Reportedly based on an earlier, darker draft of the novel than the one published in 1922, the film follows the coming-of-age story of Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire), a young man from the Midwest trying to make his fortune as a bonds salesman in New York City.  Experiencing independence for the first time, Nick is captivated by the energy and excitement he sees all around him, particularly at the neighboring mansion of enigmatic millionaire Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio), who throws lavish parties that everyone comes to but whom no one seems to know.  When they finally meet, Nick is fascinated by Gatsby’s earnest but seemingly innocent nature and quickly becomes his confidante and friend.  Gatsby longs to meet Nick’s cousin, the beautiful and capricious Daisy (Carey Mulligan), wife of polo-playing aristocrat Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton).  The tea that Nick arranges to bring them together turns into a tryst of sorts, for Gatsby and Daisy already know each other.  They met and fell in love years before during the war but were separated when Gatsby was shipped overseas.  Afterwards, Daisy married Tom, a society match, and the memory of Gatsby faded.  But Gatsby never forgot Daisy, and he plans now to rekindle their romance and win her back, fulfilling a dream that has sustained him through the intervening years.  Unhappily married to a philandering, hard-drinking husband, Daisy succumbs to his persistence and his charm and seems for a time to share his dream.  

 

It is short-lived.  Tom learns of the affair and digs into Gatsby’s past, uncovering the unsavory facts behind his fabulous wealth.  Gatsby’s business partners are known gamblers and bootleggers, and possibly stock swindlers.  His money is dirty, his gilded image a lie, a front for the criminal activity that underscores the money-making madness of the age.  A party in a New York hotel room turns ugly when Tom confronts Gatsby in front of Daisy, and Gatsby reacts violently.  As he and a shaken Daisy drive home, they are involved in a hit-and-run accident that kills Myrtle Wilson (Isla Fisher ), the wife of a roadside gas station owner (Jason Clarke).  Unknown to them both, the woman is Tom’s mistress, and when he learns whose car killed his lover, he tells the grief-stricken husband Gatsby’s name.  Betrayal and tragedy follow in a seemingly inexorable course of events, leaving Nick emotionally broken and disillusioned with his friends and the world around him.  He winds up in a sanatorium, recovering from alcoholism and depression, trying to piece both his story and his life back together, searching for a meaning that will give him the resolve to go on.

 

Despite his affinity for spectacle, Luhrman’s is the first film version of the novel to successfully engage the intimate dimension of its story-- the changeable inner lives of the characters and the intricate dynamics of their relationships.  It’s also the first to capture the book’s lyricism, the poetry of Fitzgerald’s language.  Gatsby is a very writerly novel, self-consciously eloquent in its analysis of events and characters and its meditation on the contradictions of the American experience.   Nick’s by turns rhapsodic and sardonic portrait of the world of wealth and class privilege in the America of the 1920s is a requiem to human folly and shattered ideals.  Fitzgerald’s highly colored prose sings and stings by turns, and Luhrman’s film, alternately extroverted and introspective, deftly translates both qualities into cinematic form.

 

The sanatorium is an invention—it does not appear in the published version of the book—but an inspired one.   Nick’s doctor suggests that Nick purge his inner demons by writing about them.  The narration of the film becomes the writing of the novel and Fitzgerald’s authorship is recast as Nick’s in seamless self-referentiality.  The implications are far-reaching.  What begins as a conventional framing device--the flashback structure--changes into something subtler, more evanescent: the act of impressing memory on film.  All that is “unfilmable”—memory, consciousness, writing--is woven into the visual fabric of the movie.  As images dissolve into one another, and Nick’s voice-over quietly pronounces some of Fitzgerald’s most celebrated sentences, fragments of them flash across the screen in handwritten form, as if appearing just as the author thinks and records them.  In those moments of literary unfolding, image and sound combine to create a complex and fluid subjectivity:  screen, page, and the author’s mind meld together, illuminated by the same ephemeral light.

 

In this inventive way, Luhrman’s film puts the book on display and within the spectator’s grasp without sacrificing its cinematic essence.  The “interiority” is wrapped in a dazzling exterior, a fantasmagoric background of near-Expressionistic set and costume design.  Luhrman is in full Moulin Rouge mode during the gaudy party scenes, highly choreographed set pieces that pour on the glam and pulse to the beat of rapper Jay Z’s modern take on the exuberance and abandon of 20s-style ragtime and jazz.  Contemporizing the music is one of Gatsby’s riskiest and most controversial choices, but it makes a fascinating kind of sense.  Rap shares outlaw status with the jazz of the 1920s, the aggressive infusion of black culture into white society.  The two cultures both revel in hedonistic lifestyles devoted to displaying the material trappings of success, the conspicuous consumption that makes bling-crazy “cribs” contemporaneous in spirit to Gatsby’s glittering mansion.  No mere reproduction, however imaginative, of crowds of jazz babies wildly dancing the Charleston would have the same impact or convey the brash and rebellious style of an anarchic party scene the way Luhrman’s anachronistic musical numbers do.  It would more than likely appear quaint and amusing instead of shocking to the sensibilities and sense of propriety that Gatsby’s riotous parties were to his guests from the staid world outside.  We are presented with a modern-day equivalent of that shock: convention is defied, expectations violated by the inappropriateness of a rap beat and nouveau Broadway glitz in the context of an era long past.  Ingeniously, the film allows the viewer to live through something of Nick’s experience, feeling the surprise and discomfort of his disorientation in a world whose rules are so different than the ones he’s used to and expected.

 

Gatsby is not, after all, a documentary but a stylized rendering of the past as it appears in a work of fiction.  Luhrman’s use of exaggeration and excess intensifies our experience of the story’s literariness as well as its cinematic-ness.  Crowd-pleasing thrills like 3D aside, Gatsby ensconces the viewer in a visual hyper-reality not just to make the haunts of the rich sumptuous looking but to capture the colorful, at times hallucinatory aspect of the book’s prose.  That prose’s written-ness is given its corollary in the film’s visual overabundance.   Luhrman takes the book’s famous images—the powdery gray landscape of the Valley of Ashes, the weathered billboard with the giant eyes inside a pair of glasses, the green dock light marking the end of Daisy’s property—and renders them as dream-like as Fitzgerald’s descriptions by showing them over and over from varying angles and distances and in different contexts, pushing them past literary symbols into the immediate experience of Fitzgerald’s vision: a world blind to its contradictions and verging on madness.

 

That madness finds its way into Gatsby’s driven and misguided character, and no film version before this one has seriously looked at the disordered soul inside his perfectly groomed and tailored figure.  Ladd and Redford were stoic, stalwart men of the world, too sane in manner to hint at either the naïve idealism or the emotional instability behind Gatsby’s impossible dream.  Thankfully, Luhrman and Di Caprio choose differently and give us—at long last--a complicated Gatsby.  A career of playing troubled youths and powerful but insecure men such as Howard Hughes and J. Edgar Hoover provides DiCaprio with an extraordinary resume for the part.  He perfectly embodies both sides of Gatsby’s charisma--the easy charm and GQ-style cool, and the aching vulnerability behind their protective wall.  More important, he makes the erosion of Gatsby’s confidence and composure more than just a lover’s disappointed hopes, but a slow-motion fall from grace.  Gatsby’s film fate is finally depicted as the tragedy Nick has all along been telling us it is.  Beyond his incisive words is the screen evidence of DiCaprio’s impassioned performance, which makes us feel at once both the elation Gatsby feels at the heights he attains and his heart-rending bewilderment and emotional collapse upon discovering their illusory nature.

 

When Nick first encounters his cousin Daisy in the novel, he writes “[she] began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice.  It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.  Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget; a singing compulsion, a whispered "Listen," a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.”  It would be hard for any actress to live up to that description, but it’s nice to see someone finally try.  Carey Mulligan’s winsome appeal falls a bit short of thrilling, but it does promise much.  Petite and pretty, she deftly provides many of the right grace notes for Daisy—lively and languid by turns, capricious, flirty, fragile--but somehow never captures her character’s most essential quality, her irresistibleness. Why would Gatsby sacrifice everything for her?  She’s an ideal but an ideal with flesh and blood behind it--Daisy has sex appeal, she promises “gay, exciting things.”  Mulligan is dressed for allure but never exudes it—she never asserts herself and takes command of the screen the way Daisy commands the attention of her admirers.  Much of the blame lies with Luhrman, who displays a rare timidity with regard to his film’s heroine.  He lovingly places Mulligan in the frame but never hands it over to her—he keeps her a shade to the side, an eye-catching but still subordinate part of the décor.  (In the scene where she and Gatsby are reunited, where she should absolutely shine, she is visually smothered by the flowers he’s comically overfilled the room with—playing straight man to a gag.)  The result is often lovely, but inconclusive—once again Daisy remains maddeningly out of reach, her promise unfulfilled. 

 

Good support is offered by a number of others, despite some slight casting miscues.   Tobey Maguire gives an earnest performance as Nick, although he’s too callow for the part, especially when contrasted to an overly vampish Elizabeth Debicki as his potential love interest, professional golfer Jordan Baker.   The film wisely downplays the romance Fitzgerald imagined for their two characters in favor of a more plausible friendship.   The biggest surprise of the movie is Joel Edgerton’s canny turn as the loutish Tom.  Brusque, humorless, and speaking in monotone for the first two thirds of the film, Edgerton’s performance dramatically shifts gears once Tom realizes Daisy has fallen for Gatsby.  His fierce and unexpectedly cunning response to this crisis in his home galvanizes the final part of the movie.  The scene in which he and Gatsby have it out in front of Daisy and the others blisters with tension.   No stock jealous husband bellowing his outrage, Edgerton’s Tom boldly takes the moral high ground with a conviction that’s hard to fault.  Gatsby and Daisy are stunned, and the viewer most likely is, too.  Like Tom, who appeared to have ceded his marriage to his rival, Edgerton has been holding back: suddenly the dramatic center of the film, he doesn’t just accept the spotlight, he yanks it away from the film’s better known stars.  

 

It’s an unlooked-for coup, and brilliantly illustrates another facet of the ingenuity which Luhrman and his creative team have adaptrf this book that, despite its 90 years, still feels very modern.   Not content just to dramatize the events of the story, they try to duplicate them in the viewer’s emotional experience.   We have not been prepared for the revelation of Tom’s other side—nothing in Edgerton’s performance has hinted at its existence up to this point.  As a consequence, we are forced to experience, along with Gatsby and the others, the shock of its sudden appearance and its devastating impact: Gatsby’s romantic status is diminished, Daisy’s connection to him strained, and the plot is sent spinning in another direction entirely.  For the audience, the surprise is compounded by a violent redirection of their identification from Gatsby to the heretofore unsympathetic Tom.  These twin disorientations, narrative and psychological, reflect and reinforce each other in powerful fashion.  We can’t help but feel Gatsby’s dismay--momentarily it’s ours, too.

 

That sense of dismay lies at the heart of why Gatsby still matters—dreams falling short of their promise remains a profoundly human tragedy, universally meaningful to us.  In both personal and cultural terms,  Gatsby presents the inversion of an archetype, a reverse fairy tale, an anti-myth: the hero fails not only to complete his quest but even to understand what it is to begin with.  From the outset, its object is an illusion, a fiction--his imagined heroine was never in need of rescue, his goal always unattainable because it was never necessary. 

 

Gatsby also marks a particular moment in the souring of the American Dream, a theme always timely to a people whose history depends on the continued belief in the promise of that Dream, despite innumerable disappointments and betrayals.  Ironically, the moment of disenchantment Gatsby depicts is overshadowed by the mythology of its historical era, an era so romanticized for its excitement and energy and brazen expression of individualism that its most lawless figures are among its most celebrated.  Gatsby both capitalized on and helped perpetuate this mythology, and much of the book’s continuing fascination for us has to do with the popular culture that developed around it--and which has now produced another telling of its story. 

 

The Great Gatsby is, ultimately, a quintessentially American story, and it keeps coming back to us because the stories that belong to us as a nation and a people always do.  Perhaps the next time the story will end the way we want it to, its promise fully realized at last.  Luhrman’s achievement renews one’s hope in that possibility.  Yes, his Gatsby is all right at the end.  Thank goodness the project was given the green light.

 

 

 

Thor

Here's something worth thinking about: if you could be any movie superhero, which one would you choose? Would you like to have actual super powers, such as Superman (alien living on earth), the X-Men (genetic mutation), or Spiderman (radioactivity, spider)? Or would you prefer to remain completely human and be aided by science and technology, like Batman or Iron Man? There's a third alternative, too--superherodom by way of being a god. The world's religions are filled with interesting deities, and the movies have a comfortable history with a few of them. Jesus has been a star of the screen since the silent era. Greek gods and goddesses have kept busy in supporting roles over the years (Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans). But for the rest of the almighty spirits out there, cinematic work has been hard to find--at least in Hollywood. Good news for them all, therefore, that Thor, the first of the summer's intended blockbusters, is a blockbuster.

Based on another of Marvel Comics' seemingly endless line of costumed crimefighters, Thor is the latest to make a splashy big screen debut in theaters (following closely on his heels, Captain America is set for a July release). Although we officially honor this god every Thursday, he really isn't very familiar to American viewers. A few Norse gods have had illustrious careers on the world's opera stages, thanks to Richard Wagner, but the God of Thunder makes only a brief appearance in The Ring of the Nibelung, and under a different name at that. Fortunately, Stan Lee and his associates at Marvel saw something Wagner didn't, and beginning in 1962 signed him to a long-term contract.

The story, according to the Gospel of Marvel Comics, tells of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), prince of Asgard--heavenly stronghold of the gods--and heir to the throne of his father, Odin (who else but Anthony Hopkins?). Thor is handsome and strong, but incredibly rash, a source of worry to his aged father, who is nearing the end of his life but hesitates to hand over power to his reckless son. To safeguard the cosmos, Odin must be sure that after his death peace will continue between the gods and their mortal enemies, the inhabitants of Bifrost, a forbidding world of ice and perpetual darkness. The malevolent Bifrostians are monstrous ice-men bent on destroying the gods and turning the entire universe into the same kind of frozen wasteland they inhabit, but they're held in check by Odin's authority. It's an uneasy truce, however, and when Thor defies his father and leads a raid on Bifrost, it threatens to result in all-out war. To preserve order in the universe, therefore, Odin banishes his beloved son to earth, where he loses his supernatural powers. Confused and heartbroken, Thor must adapt to a strange new world and learn to accept his fate.

Fortunately, he meets a girl--no less a one than beautiful astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), leader of a team studying the heavens in a remote part of New Mexico where Thor falls to earth, and literally into her life. Disoriented and raging like the angry god he is, Thor doesn't try to make friends with his rescuers, but Jane likes him anyway. Something about his tousled blond hair, granite jaw, and steely blue eyes, quite possibly. He may be mad, babbling about his powers and saying quaint things like "What realm is this?", but he's different, and brilliant but boyfriend-challenged Jane can't resist wondering if he holds the key to many things in her life, including her understanding of the universe (it involves space-time configurations called wormholes--more about them later). Her research partner and surrogate father, Erik (Stellan Skarsgard), warns her that Thor could be dangerous, but even so he helps him escape the police and find a mysterious crater in the desert that's crawling with operatives of a shadowy government agency called S.H.I.E.L.D. (Fans of the Marvel series have already encountered this agency in Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk.) They are investigating something that fell to earth around the same time Thor did--the great hammer of Odin, Mjollnir, Thor's weapon in his glory days in Asgard. Odin cast it out after him, perhaps to serve as a reminder of all he's lost. Now it lies partially buried in rock, where it resists the efforts of all who try to remove it. Thor is confident that once he holds the weapon in his hand again, he will regain his powers. But he also fails to free the hammer, and the realization that he is now a mere mortal nearly breaks his spirit.

To parallel Thor's suffering, events in Asgard take a serious turn for the worse. Banishing his favored son is too much for Odin's failing strength, and he falls into a coma, leaving a power vacuum around the throne. Filling it is Thor's half-brother Loki, an enigmatic figure whose true nature is only gradually revealed during the course of the film. While it should come as no surprise that Loki covets the kingship once meant for his older brother, the why and the how of it make the film's web of intrigue genuinely intriguing. Loki is no black-hearted villain but a frustrated younger son living in the shadow of a more popular sibling, one whose arrogance and irresponsible nature make him less qualified for the throne than Loki knows himself to be. His ambition grows from a tragic seed of justified grievance, watered with the poison of envy. But this is melodrama, not Shakespeare, and before too much plot goes by, Loki is doing and saying everything a superhero's nemesis ought to--we watch his soul grow dark in front of us. It's a predictable change, of course, but Tom Hiddleston's fine, shaded performance as Loki makes his inevitable transformation into baddie arresting enough to become the movie's most potent dramatic arc. Loki is not the first supervillain to usurp the hero's place in his own film.

The storyline is fleshed out with the expected elements: a love story, heroic sidekicks, a final showdown between hero and villain, and the promise of a sequel. It's the superhero action formula we've grown accustomed to, and obviously like, given the continued success of these movies. Thor doesn't vary it much, but a spirited tone, imaginative imagery, and appealing performances make it seem refreshing despite the familiarity. Hemsworth has the muscle tone of a displaced god, if not quite the awe-inspiring presence, but under Kenneth Branagh's attentive direction, he makes that presence felt when it counts, particularly during the energetic climax. Even better, Hemsworth's Thor, while appropriately humbled by his ordeal, retains just enough pride at the end to suggest that arrogance tempered with wisdom is the quality not just of a god but of a great leader. Portman--still decompressing from Black Swan, perhaps--gets to display her sense of humor as the smitten scientist, a welcome tonic to the implausibility of her character's romance with an ancient deity. "Awkward" and "nerdy" are not adjectives one usually associates with the chic actress, and fortunately Branagh doesn't ask her to push Jane too far in that direction, or the results would be harder to believe than Viking warriors walking down a 21st century street. But she gives Jane enough of those qualities to lend credence to her confusion around a hunky male, as well as a touch of sweetness to the growth of her shy attraction into love.

It must have been tempting for director Branagh to view this film chiefly through the wide angle lens of epic--Homeric, Shakespearian, Wagnerian, George Lucasian. It's filled with themes that epics love: good vs. evil, brother against brother, the intermingling of divine and mortal worlds, love crossing the barriers of space and time. The New Testament contributes a father god sending his son to earth in mortal form (perhaps Odin knows all along Thor will be humanity's salvation). Even Arthurian legend makes a cameo--the hammer in the rock that can't be moved until the Right One tries is a chivalrous nod to the Sword in the Stone.

But these aspirations to epic are wisely kept under control. Branagh's resume is rife with overblown versions of classics such as Hamlet and Frankenstein, so it's something of a marvel he's able to exercise restraint at the helm of this muscular hero tale. Much credit goes to the even-tempered screenplay by Ashley Miller, Zack Stentz, and Don Payne. Despite an angst-ridden background filled with family conflict and betrayal, there's a loose, often playful feel to the script, which packs a lot of material into 115 minutes so economically the film never feels crowded. Branagh's straightforward, uncluttered direction perfectly complements the writers' thrift, guiding the dual storylines at an animated but never hurried pace, and keeping things in sensible perspective: no scene is overdone, no moment overstuffed with emotion. As a consequence, the movement to the movie's climax feels effortless, which gives it a greater impact than a noisier, more deliberate build-up would have. Like the best of the recent spate of superhero flicks, Thor is a comic book made by and for adults.

The movie's knowledge of classical literature is matched by its skill in mixing film genres. Genre and myth are closely related anyway, but superhero movies bring them even closer together by merging the archetypal stoies of myth with the iconography of popular culture. When filmmakers display a command of both the cinematic geneology and the cultural roots of their pop stories, as they do in Thor, the combination strikes sparks. Thor's master plan is ambitious, crossing adventure epic with science fiction and fantasy--the hero's journey takes him across time and space, from 900 A.D. Asgard to the present-day American Southwest. The aforementioned wormholes allow Thor and his friends to travel almost instantly between two epochs and two distant corners of the universe, but this quasi-scientific explanation is given a mythological correlative in the film's most spectacular creation, the dazzling Rainbow Bridge of Asgard, which according to legend connects the gods to the far reaches of the cosmos--as well as ancient religious beliefs to contemporary scientific inquiry.

Just as successfully, Thor bridges the gap between action spectacle and intimate drama. Relationships are central to the dynamics of the story, not incidental, and the care with which the film treats the domestic and romantic entanglements of the characters makes their actions emotionally credible, despite their comic book origins. The warfare between the kingdoms of Asgard and Bifrost has epic scope but is viewed through the prism of family drama, lending it a touch of Greek tragedy. If this association seems a bit high-toned for action fare, the film earns it--it's not forced on us in any self-congratulatory kind of way, but rises unpretentiously from the logic of the story.

Though Thor is clearly not the type of male who enjoys bantering with the opposite sex, the film's romantic angle has enough deft touches to recall classic Hollywood romanti-comedy as well. This lifts the movie's spirits considerably. Portman plays the game nicely, as noted before, and when Thor finally tumbles to Jane's attraction to him, Hemsworth seems to be flexing his muscles a bit more self-consciously. But there's another model behind their mismatched courtship, a more deeply embedded narrative--the romance between two people of unequal class backgrounds, in this case between a wealthy or well-bred lady and an unsophisticated working man. The love-across-class-lines formula pops up everywhere: in classic romanti-comedies such as It Happened One Night (1934), westerns like The Virginian (1931) or My Darling Clementine (1946), even thrillers (Alfred Hitchcock's 1953 masterpiece, Rear Window). Tennessee Williams memorably enshrined it in the lethal flirtation between Blanche Du Bois and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. And Disney did it with dogs in The Lady and the Tramp (1955).

Thor borrows most heavily from one of the more unlikely tales in this collection: Tarzan. Like the legendary hero of the jungle, Thor is a Natural Man, an unspoiled alpha male from a "less civilized" world, whose unpolished manners and elementary outlook are in stark contrast to those of his more refined and articulate mate--who, interestingly enough, is also named Jane. The cult figure of Tarzan is a potent nexus of popular culture and classical mythology, as well as a movie franchise that is practically its own genre. In a way, nothing better reflects how mythology is created for consumption in America, which absorbs hero tales from all cultures and turns them into easily digestible cine-fables, stamped with the American brand, that are fed continuously to the world's entertainment markets.

We have the industrial and cultural machinery to do this, of course. The "Hollywood" film is a recognized commodity worldwide, and an important part of it right now is the Marvel brand with its successful product line of superhero sagas. Thor is just the latest to make the hero's journey to the heights of popular mythology by way of cinematic fame. And the latest, and of course not the last, to reflect the underlying irony of these resurrected hero tales. No simple throwbacks or odes to nostalgia, they are instead somewhat uneasy explorations of what we're nostalgic for. Good still battles evil, as of old, but now the struggle takes place in the ambiguous moral landscape shaped by our modern sensibility, which renders every outcome--and its meaning--a little less certain than it once seemed to be.

Morning Glory

It makes me feel a bit guilty to say unkind things about a film that wants to be liked as much as Morning Glory does. Just like its pretty, perky heroine, Becky Fuller (Rachel McAdams), this movie really, really wants you to like it. How can the viewer resist me? it seems to ask. I'm so cute, full of energy, and awkward in an adorable kind of way. No question, Morning will brighten your day at times, but ultimately there is little glory to be found in its eager to please but all too familar story.

It's set this time in the competitive world of morning television. Here's the scoop: Fuller is the enthusiastic assistant producer of a morning show in New Jersey, whose lifelong dream is to one day work for the Today Show. Budget cuts at the station force them to let her go, and she begins the frustrating search for a new job. After a stream of rejections, she interviews for the position of head producer at DayBreak, a ratings-starved counterpart to the Today Show and its more successful imitators, on the fictional IBS network. Improbably, she is hired on the spot by the doesn't-really-give-a-damn station manager (Jeff Goldblum), who employs the kind of logic that exists only in movies and decides that the show is so far gone he might as well take a chance on someone as unlikely as Becky (she comes across as both desperate and kooky in her interview). Why, making her head producer is such a crazy idea, it just might work... Oh sure, why not? Every journey down a familar road begins with a first cliche.

In order to begin saving the DayBreak, Becky needs to quickly prove herself to the demoralized crew, especially long-suffering co-anchor Colleen Peck (a good but underused Diane Keaton), whose years of frustration with the substandard working conditions have made her wary both of new producers and hope in general. Becky comes up with a bold idea--pair her with a renowned TV newsman who was recently relieved of his anchor position to make room for younger talent. Embittered by IBS's treatment of him, and contemptuous of morning television (and seemingly everything else, except his award-studded career in hard news), Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) is not exactly the ideal fit for DayBreak. But then, we wouldn't have much of a movie if he were. Egocentric and insulting, Pomeroy joins the morning news team under serious protest, sulking in his dressing room, refusing to banter on air with Keaton, and drinking heavily in his off hours. Becky has her hands full getting the spoiled, grumpy star to appear on camera, let alone do the job she hired him for. He lends the failing show no help, as is his intention, and the ratings fall even faster than before.

Faced with the threat of cancellation, Becky turns to desperate measures. What follows is the most entertaining part of the film, a loose montage of wacky stunts and on-air gaffes that begin to catch the public's attention and edge the ratings upward. Silly programming and the clashing egos of the stars, who begin to trade insults instead of the requested happy talk, finally do what "serious" programming couldn't--get people tuning in to see what's happening on DayBreak each day. A combination of inspired hunch and happy accident having reinvigorated the show, Becky is all at once the toast of the business. And, of course, she's approached by the Today Show, offering her the position she's dreamed of her whole life. Should she stay or should she go? Oh, the hard choices faced by beautiful, talented people in glamorous industries.

The film badly wants us to sympathize with Becky, so it drives home the point that the demands of her job have taken a toll on her love life, which at the start is a mess. An early scene illustrates the challenges she faces--she's forced to meet a blind date for dinner in the middle of the afternoon because she rises so early in the morning for work. But that might not be a problem if she weren't also endearingly odd--a compulsive talker and a hopeless workaholic, she chatters non-stop during the first few minutes of their meeting and tries, but of course fails, to ignore her cell phone, which rings every couple of minutes. The date beats an understandably hasty retreat.

Becky's clutziness and failure to attract a partner, despite her obvious charms, might have added an extra layer and a touch of poignancy to her story, if the film had pursued the theme seriously, but instead it quickly discards this opportunity for a little depth. Soon after joining DayBreak, Becky meets a dreamy ladies' man (Patrick Wilson), who conveniently works in another division of ISB. With only the mildest of courtship difficulties, they fall into bed, the results of which must be happy, although we're not treated to details. He's instantly Mr. Right, which just as instantly drains the romantic subplot of tension, as well as interest. With hardly any struggle, the script hands Becky a cute, sensitive guy--so, what was the problem before anyway? You just can't get a good date in New Jersey? Despite some nice interplay between McAdams and Wilson, their later scenes are for all purposes irrelevant, and after a promising beginning, Wilson is wasted in a dead-end role.

The setting of this film may be television journalism, but little in it is news. Part 70's sitcom (The Mary Tyler Moore Show, That Girl), part Broadcast News (with maybe a dash of Network), Morning Glory relies heavily on story ideas that have been pitched many times before. To a great extent, the movie is Broadcast News lite, following James Brooks's terrific 1989 film in its aim to situate the conflict between a professional woman's career and her personal life within the struggle between serious journalism and entertainment in the television news arena. We've already seen how Woman vs. Career fared. Serious Journalism vs. Entertainment gets better treatment, mainly because this is where the film's interest really lies.

The question of how an unpopular show captures an audience without abandoning all credibility is centered around Ford's character. More than centered--Pomeroy physically embodies it. The whole reason for his presence in the story is to provide a human battleground for the fight between hard news and the soft news format of morning television. Pomeroy, Hard News personified, does not want to give in, regarding everything around him--perhaps even the chair he sits in--with hostility. The work of the narrative is make his square peg fit into DayBreak's round hole without doing too much damage to either. As the film passes midpoint, the tug-of-war between Pomeroy and Becky over these issues takes center stage: screenwriter Aline McKenna reveals it to be the film's real subject, and theirs the story's critical relationship. What do you know? She buried the lead.

Although the relationship between Becky and Pomeroy isn't a romantic one, their story arc follows the prescribed steps of romanticomedy coupling: meeting "cute" (in an elevator, where Becky embarrasses herself by gushing over him), initial antagonism followed by a clumsy "courtship" rife with misunderstandings and setbacks, slowly developing affection and respect, and the critical moment of bonding that leads to a happy ending (the final shot of the movie actually has Becky and Pomeroy walking into the sunrise). The film's emotional climax comes when Pomeroy realizes his behavior may have led to her defection to the Today Show. Although the decision is hers, he's the one who effectively makes it. And Becky's journey is complete when Pomeroy finally understands that there are larger issues at stake than his own principles, or the memories he clings to of his glory years in the business.

McKenna was smart to personalize the debate between entertainment and news in television journalism because it's an old argument, reintroduced here with little reflection of today's climate. Where is an acknowledgment of the influence of politics on news coverage and the issue of bias, or the impact of 24-hour cable news programming? The media landscape has changed tremendously since Broadcast News, which came at the sunset of the Big Three networks' dominance of TV news. You wouldn't know it from watching Morning Glory. It's set in the same world as that earlier film, as if 20 years hadn't changed a thing, or perhaps even gone by. Not surprisingly, the conflict feels more than a little dated, as if drawn from an old script the filmmakers dusted off and were in too much of a hurry to revise. Becky even says to Pomeroy in the middle of one argument, "The debate between news and entertainment is over. We [entertainment] won." She's right, and the audience knows it.

So if there's no point in replaying a match whose outcome is known, what is the point? What is this movie about? Maybe those two words: we won. If Broadcast News showed us how the game ended, Glory is the victor's celebration in the locker room afterward. In Pomeroy, we witness the Old Guard's final holdout bowing to the new reality of TV news and taking his place in its ranks. But it's hardly a grim fate--don't forget that sunrise in the final shot. The filmmakers imagine the sun rising for Pomeroy, not going down. Broadcast News ended on a gray, cloudy day, its disillusioned charcters sheltering themselves from the rain.

Planting the film's central conflict inside a character's psyche may explain Pomeroy's mercurial temper and extreme reactions to his surroundings, but I'm not sure it can explain Ford's truly weird performance as the veteran newsman. He plays Pomeroy as a charmless, humorless, graceless boor, completely lacking in charisma or any semblance of real professional pride. On camera, he's simply awful, betraying no trace of style or hint of personality whatsoever. He doesn't smile, change his tone of voice, or, it seems, even blink his eyes. He reads every story like it's an obituary. With his droning delivery and inflexible mask of a face, he appears only marginally human. In the real world of TV news, there's no way this guy would have lasted as long as he has, let alone become a "legend." Not only would he not have been hired for his first job, his audition tape would have been burned.

There's a scene--ironically meant to establish his character's credibility--in which Ford is seated at a table with three real-life news figures: Chris Matthews, Morley Safer, and Bob Schieffer. Its effect is just the opposite, emphasizing how completely Glory fails to create the illusion that Ford is one of them. I found myself wistfully thinking how each of these men would have performed their DayBreak duties: Matthews with his acerbic wit, Safer with his voice dripping irony, Schieffer with the ever-present twinkle in his eye. Demotion to DayBreak would be a trial for each of them, but unlike Prima Pomeroy, they'd all act like professionals and do it with style. All that can be said for Ford's unbelievable characterization is that at least it keeps the film's treatment of him from being too harsh. Pomeroy is so insufferable that when he finally bends enough to accept his role of morning TV personality, it's not a moment of defeat for him. He doesn't surrender his dignity, rather he discovers it--and finally acts like an adult.

Despite its shortcomings, Morning Glory is enjoyable to watch, and that's chiefly due to McAdams. The picture is designed as a showcase for her, and she makes the most of this star-making opportunity. Candy-coating the nerdy, over-achieving side of her character with wholesome girl-next-door sexiness, she turns Becky Fuller into a goofy but irresistibly sincere charmer. She's way too good at it, in fact, and almost too attractive for the movie's romantic premise. The dating disaster scene at the film's open can't help but ring a false note. Who would really care about her volubility, cell phone addiction, or need to go to bed absurdly early? She's so pretty and appealing that it's hard to believe any guy wouldn't put up with these quirks for the chance of winding up there with her.

McAdams' charm is the film's strength, but also the source of its weakness. The movie is so enamored of her it really wants to do nothing more ambitious than display her cheery disposition and gaze at the effect it has on DayBreak (which turns out to be very simple: the show has no personality, so Becky gives it hers, and it becomes a success). The film's message to everyone, and especially Pomeroy, is lighten up. Stop already with the tortured examination of TV's soul: TV has no soul, and that's OK. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Becky Fuller is indeed the new face of television journalism. The victory of entertainment over information is embodied in her combination of rootless energy and flirty dedication. She is more conventionally attractive and personable than her Broadcast News counterpart, Holly Hunter, but also much less complex and interesting a character--driven but not compulsive, neurotic but not angst-ridden. And as goes the heroine, so goes the film as well--it's much less compelling than that earlier one. Of course, there's not nearly as much at stake in the story this time around: Glory is a diversion, a puff piece about morning TV, not an editorial on the death of television journalism's Golden Age, which Broadcast News memorably made both sad and funny. In contrast to that film, Glory's cynicism about the industry carries as much weight as the petals of a flower. No, the industry is all right, it reassures us throughout, as long as it produces, and is produced by, cuties like Becky Fuller. Her journey--and ours with her--heads straight toward the sunrise.

The only problem is it's a fake movie sunrise. And, I'm sorry to say, there's no happy ending to that story, Morning Glory.

The American

The American is a thriller with a different look and feel to it. Not flashy or particularly violent--not even very busy, plotwise--it's more interested in character than story, more focused on interaction than action on the screen. The film unfolds slowly and deliberately, relying on thoughtful development of incident and personality, and careful attention to detail, rather than fast pace and fireworks. Most thrillers use the latter to distract their audiences from the implausibilities of their twists and turns. The American is smarter than that, and more respectful of the viewer, and that's a nice surprise in a movie belonging to this overworked genre. As well as a sly irony in one named after a nation historically synonymous with showiness and speed.

The story is simplicity itself. "Jack," a professional assassin (George Clooney), hides out in a small Italian village after an assignment in Sweden ends badly and he becomes a target of killers out for revenge. His only ally is his superior (Johan Leysen), a mysterious figure on the other end of some rather testy phone calls, who arranges a place for him to stay and funds for him to live on until he can safely emerge from hiding. Posing as a photographer, Jack befriends a local priest with an understandable curiousity about the stranger in his village, and pays regular visits to a high-priced brothel in a neighboring town, where he becomes infatuated with a beautiful hooker named Clara (Violante Placido). In order to keep Jack busy while in exile, his superior puts him to work on a rifle for another of his agents, Ingrid (Irina Bjorklund), who needs a weapon with precise specifications for an upcoming job. In between assignations with Clara, who gradually begins to return his affection, and philosophical talks with Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli), Jack meets periodically with Ingrid. Their reltionship remains coolly professional, but her refusal to discuss her assignment arouses his curiousity. And then one night he's followed home by a shadowy figure whom he suspects of being one of the Swedes on his trail. His haven no longer safe, Jack realizes he must act decisively to preserve not only his own life but the lives of those he's come to care for.

What's remarkable about The American is its calculated unremarkability. It's not a film of big moments or gestures but of details and shadings, where a precisely placed look or movement of the hand can communicate more than ten minutes of dialogue in another movie. Much time is spent on watching Clooney simply go about his daily business. He rises early, does difficult-looking pushups, walks through the empty streets of the town, sits in a cafe moodily staring out the window with a glass of wine beside him. There's an existential sparseness to all of this--a film stripped down to its bare essentials, its lines clean and simple, its parts fitted together with the precision of a rifle. In fact, director Anton Corbijn's understated presentation of events effectively mimics Jack's cool, efficient approach to his own work, revealing the seriousness of purpose of one professional in the subtle artistry of another.

What's more, the story's lack of trimmings allows the film to go beneath the surface of events and unpretentiously examine some basic questions of human existence. Clooney's talks with the aged priest touch on matters of guilt and sin, and his relationship with Clara introduces the age-old theme of redemption through love. Jack also reveals his more contemplative side through an interest in butterflies, particularly a rare one that he discovers in the Italian countryside and later reveals to Clara. The butterfly, a recurring motif, grows richer in meaning with each appearance, metamorphosing from elegant image into the film's most important symbol.

Underlying everything is the movie's tragic awareness of the fallible nature of human kind and the inescapable aloneness of every individual. We struggle for connection, for ways to be available to others, to reveal ourselves and allow our vulnerabilities to show. But in Jack's world, vulnerability is the equivalent of death, swift and unforgiving. He not only hides away, he keeps his inner self hidden, locked up tight, along with his true name. It's not a coincidence that the two times he winds up in the sights of a killer's gun, he's with a woman he cares about. He's at his most exposed at those moments, and that puts him in danger of paying the ultimate price for vulnerability in his world.

True to its name, The American rarely strays from its protagonist's side: nearly every scene is from his point-of-view. As Jack grows less trusting of those around him, the film employs silence to convey his increasing sense of unease, and invests even the prettiest shots of the village square and the surrounding countryside with the feeling of imminent danger. What the movie shows is always heavy with the presence of what it doesn't show. Darkened streets and secluded spots in the woods express the usual kind of threat, but busy sidewalks and brightly lit restaurants add to the paranoid atmosphere in less conventional ways. The sparing use of violence artfully enhances this mood. What The American lacks in action, it makes up in tension--the film operates like a coiled spring. You watch it tighten little by little, waiting for it to snap. And when it finally does, it's quick and explosive, over almost before you know it, and shocking despite the fact that you were expecting it to happen.

The star power of George Clooney made this film bigger than it would have been otherwise. Without his presence, The American would have flown under the radar, but he made it a player at the box office. Unlike his character, who is out of place in the tiny community sheltering him, Clooney is perfectly at home in a picture of this modest size and means. The role of Jack is perfectly tailored to his intensity and smoldering good looks. It's essentially a silent part--Clooney does very little talking and rarely even smiles. Though known for his easy charm and gift with dialogue, he surprises by relying mostly on facial expression and posture to convey his character's burden of guilt and wariness of all around him. Grim-faced and brooding, this unusually introspective American gazes reluctantly inward, examining his violent identity with unwanted insight. Jack veils his eyes as a matter of professional caution, but he can't hide their haunted quality--when nothing is happening on the screen, that's when something is happening most profoundly in him. The drama is in Jack's face, a mask of disillusionment with himself and bitter mourning for the corrupt world he cannot leave, or change.

The other actors lend the star strong support. Bonacelli exudes a touching melancholy as the priest--a would-be confessor to Jack, his overtures to the quiet American make little headway and he ends instead by confessing the sins of his own past. Only Clara succeeds in penetrating the protective wall Jack has built around himself. Placido invests what could easily be dismissed as a cliched role--the beautiful prostitute with a heart of gold--with sensitivity and a sensuality that goes beyond conventional movie sexiness. Moreover, she and Clooney have good screen chemistry, enough to make both the charged sexuality and the growing affection between their two characters convincing, and at the film's conclusion, genuinely moving.

One of Corbijn's most impressive achievements with this somber, reticent film is the way it dusts off a number of other movie cliches--the sensitive, lonely gunman (familiar mostly from westerns like Gregory Peck's memorable The Gunfighter), the doomed romance between two social misfits, the irony of fate--and applies its simple, unadorned style to make them look, if not wholly fresh, at least more interesting than they would with fancier, more expensive treatment. The American uses these familiar tropes without apology or hint of irony, but introspectively, in a way that matches Jack's own melancholy musings. The result is a quiet, sober study of human imperfection, guilt, and the elusive nature of redemption, which evades one's uncertain grasp as easily as a butterfly.

Inception

Inception is a terrific idea for a movie. Actually, it's a terrific idea because it is a movie. It's a film whose story could exist only because cinema exists. If cinema hadn't been invented yet, it's doubtful that a novelist could have come up with the storyline or themes that writer-director Christopher Nolan explores in his latest work. Unfortunately, the idea alone doesn't guarantee a successful outcome. The film falls far short of its goal, which I interpret as the ambitious one of combining the logic of dreams and the logic of cinematic storytelling into a whole--or at least, into an experience in which the two wholly complement one another.

The premise is undeniably intriguing. Dom Cobb (Leonardo di Caprio) is the leader of a team of dream extractors, practitioners of one of those vaguely plausible fringe sciences invented to propel the plots of science fiction/fantasy tales. Extractors invade a person's dreams in order to remove information buried within the dreamer's unconscious mind. They do this for profit, working at the highest level of corporate espionage: one business rival wants to steal another's secrets, so he hires Cobb to hijack the rival and burglarize his/her brain. It's as illegal as actual stealing, which means extractors are essentially just sophisticated crooks. Cobb himself has legal problems apart from his nefarious work; he's an expatriate floating around Europe, unable to return to the U.S., for reasons which are only gradually revealed.

The beginning is ingenious, crafted around an audacious use of in medias res--the film actually opens inside one of the dreams Cobb and his crew have broken into. This opening gambit is quickly exposed as a deception, however. They have been hired by a Japanese magnate, Saito (Ken Watanabe), to ferret out a secret he has taken great pains to secure from discovery (in the world the film imagines, dream theft is a constant threat among the high and mighty). It's a test of his own internal security measures but also an elaborate audition, for the businessman wants to gauge the crew's skill before hiring them for the real job he has in mind--to enter a competitor's unconscious, not to steal an idea but to plant a new one, one which will benefit his own company's interests.

Around this slight premise, Nolan conjures a dark fantasy of revenge, guilt, and an uneasy sort of redemption. At its core, though, the film is a fanciful variation on an old genre--the heist/crime caper film. Cobb and his partner, Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are master thieves with the latest technology in their tool kits: they plan virtual robberies and steal imaginary loot. But their break-ins also involve elaborate deceptions and role-playing, so they're master con artists as well. The Sting meets Ocean's Eleven, in the realm of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

In accordance with genre rules, a fair amount of time is spent recruiting new members to the team, experts in different fields who possess special talents needed for the job at hand. Those scenes are often among the most enjoyable in heist films, and Inception proves no exception. Tom Hardy, in particular, is amusing as a wisecracking grifter with the ability to shapeshift into different identities to fit the changing scenarios of his victim's dreams. But most screen time is devoted to Cobb's wooing of the suggestively named Ariadne, a bright young architectural student played winningly, as always, by the wonderful Ellen Page. Page brings her trademark blend of sweetness and sass to what's basically a stock role--she's the neophyte in the group, the one who needs schooling in the ways of dream intervention. Her scenes are therefore padded with exposition as Cobb and others explain to her exactly what dream extractors do and what it all means. This makes her the audience's surrogate, its symbolized presence in the world of the film. As she struggles to make sense of the confusing images and events around her, and later begins to find answers on her own, so do we--though undoubtedly with less authority than Page musters.

Ariadne is not merely a sounding board for plot points, however. She brings a much needed talent to the team--the ability to design a world that, despite being imaginary, is credible enough to fool their mark into believing his dreams are reality. Extraction/inception works only during dreams vivid enough for the dreamers to experience them with the intensity of real life--so-called lucid dreaming. During their incursion into his sleep state, the extraction team brings a carefully scripted and illustrated series of dreams that they share with the victim, and each other, so that they all can interact in the same storyline (the extractors must be asleep as well). Since the setting in which they act out these fantasies needs to look believable for the process to work, the team requires an architect to first build it image by image, then sustain the illusion or change it as needed, while the plot unfolds. Performing this complex creative task makes Ariadne a surrogate for the filmmaker; since she's also the surrogate viewer, Nolan has created in her a character which functions in a complex relationship to the film, both embodying the connection between the artist and his work and providing the thread which binds it to its audience.

The set-up is fascinating, but once the caper finally begins, the film quickly, and quite surprisingly, becomes less so. Getting all the pieces in place for the robbery was good fun, but the robbery itself is a confusing, overlong, turgid affair. Cobb and his cohorts, accompanied by Saito, trap their victim, Fischer (Cillian Murphy), on an overseas flight; once all are asleep, they break into his dreams and go to work. This work occupies the whole second half of the movie, and it takes the picture down the wrong rabbit hole.

The main problem is that Nolan seems to lose interest in the underlying notion of his film: projecting oneself into another's dream suddenly is no longer cool enough for him, so he complicates matters by multiplying the number of dreams his protagonists have to infiltrate. Once inside Fischer's sleeping mind, Nolan's dream team must move to a second level--a dream within a dream--and then to a third dream inside that. And, unfortunately, it doesn't end there... With several different scenarios unfolding at once, the film furiously tracks Cobb and his partners fighting their way through elaborate defense mechanisms consisting of security guards and fortresses in simultaneous but separate dream systems, all to get to the place where they can successfully plant the notion that Saito believes will eliminate Fischer's company as his rival. It's a fairly simple goal--why does it seem like it takes forever to reach? And why couldn't this idea have been dropped somewhere in Fischer's first, or even second, level of dreaming? That's never adequately explained. Or maybe I fell asleep and missed that part.

Nolan likes writing stories that play with structure, and he's usually good at it. Memento (2000) memorably runs backwards, as the hero searches for the origin to his mysterious form of amnesia. The Prestige (2006) takes duality between characters to such an extreme that it passes beyond logic into a kind of dream state of its own. Even the more conventional Batman films (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) fracture story time and space so thoroughly that they exist in a kind of hyper-real universe--not the safely iconic comic book world of other superhero movies, but a broken, more dangerous version of our own.

Now comes Inception, in which Nolan is once again looking for the edge rather than undermining the middle. He's clearly out to create something unique to movie screens, a film story that composes itself in part from the complex layering logic of dreams: a cine-dream, perhaps. To this end, he discards the usual duality of dream vs. reality for that of dream vs. dream, which in theory is interesting. Unfortunately, execution is another matter. The film expends far too much energy constructing its maze of interlocking story parts--there's little left over to make it meaningful for the viewer. In this case, more is definitely less. With each successive layer of dreamwork it penetrates, the film becomes less interesting, since its tension is diffused over a greater area. The basic lesson of cutting between two different courses of action to create suspense is as old as D.W. Griffith, but jumping back and forth between four dream stories--especially when the connections between them are as tenuous as they are in this film--drastically reduces the dramatic impact of each. Inception suffers from narrational hyperventilation--it aims for a powerful emotional experience but produces mostly dizziness.

Nolan does try to add some gravitas to the proceedings by giving Cobb a back story laced with tragedy. The dreams the conspirators use for their undercover work are shared, and despite their attempts to plan them out beforehand, each individual's thoughts and fears can send them on unexpected detours at any moment during the operation. The one who poses the most danger to the enterprise is its leader, Cobb. His psyche is a mess, haunted by images of his dead wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), easily the film's most arresting figure. Wildly beautiful and completely mad, the appropriately named Mal lives vengefully within Cobb's guilt-burdened mind, popping up at the worst possible times to expose Cobb as an intruder to the dreamer-victim and force him and his team to abort their mission. Sometimes she even tries to kill him. Why Cobb should be harboring murderous visions of Mal in his unconscious is the film's central mystery; its solution gives Inception its provocative, bittersweet climax.

The role of Cobb is perfectly tailored to di Caprio, an actor of such effortless intensity he could probably make ordering from a menu seem like a cathartic experience. But the script actually gives him little to work with, and the character is tame compared to earlier Nolan protagonists--the tormented, tragic Bruce Wayne/Batman and the Apocalyptic visitation of Heath Ledger's Joker. The narrative tries to make up for Cobb's lack of depth by the way it's organized: by inserting one dream inside another, the film mimics a literal descent into Cobb's internal hell, one circle at a time. But it never feels right because Cobb's demons aren't really depth dwellers; they live close to the surface, where--had they been released earlier--they might have generated more heat.

Inception's ultimate undoing, however, is its lack of originality, which is ironic given its aspirations. Behind the cine-dream experimentation and the Matrix-like visuals--the slow motion, suspended-in-air combat ballets, the vaguely futuristic dream settings and cityscapes--is fairly standard action fare (car chases, gun battles), disappointing by Nolan's standards, who raised the bar for summer actioners with his dark, poetic, psychologically dense renderings of violence in the aforementioned Batman Begins and the extraordinary The Dark Knight. There's little here that feels as fresh and inventive as the set pieces in those films. And apart from one sequence in which Ariadne performs the mind-blowing feat of bending an entire city block over on itself--buildings, cars, people, everything--the pictorial style of Inception is not very exceptional.

Nolan's film may also be the victim of bad timing, coming in the wake of last year's blockbuster Avatar, which fashioned its now famous story around a different type of psychic projection. Inception's vision is muddled compared to that film, which worked hard to make the notion of dreaming one's way into an alternate state of being accessible to audiences. The difference between the two pictures runs much deeper, however. Avatar made its imagined technology into a metaphor for cinema itself. In the story, the "dreamer" projects his/her consciousness into the body of another being and lives inside it. In an analogous manner, the movie spectator projects his/her consciousness into the world of the film story, passing through the screen to "live inside" that world for as long as the film runs. One of the things Avatar is about, then, is what it's like to watch a movie, how it feels to experience it fully. In other words, it's about itself.

Inception, on the other hand, is about what it isn't--but could become. The film attempts to turn our experience of watching a movie--watching this particular movie, that is--into something like what our mind experiences while dreaming. By adapting dream logic to film narration, Inception tries to replicate the way the unconscious mind creates the "stories" that live inside us all. It's using cinema to go beyond cinema, into the realm of the greater human mystery.

Avatar is much more successful at what it does, but of course it has the easier task. It's much simpler to make a movie about being a movie than to make one that imitates the unconscious mind. I applaud Nolan for the attempt. What would the cinema be without dreamers like him?

Avatar

If you haven't heard of this film by now, you might actually live on Pandora instead of Earth. It cost a lot of money to make and it's made a lot, too. It's returned James Cameron, fresh from his now 13-year-old triumph, Titanic, to the headlines. He's king again. Some people think it's great, some people think it's hype, some people ackowledge that it's both. It's both. It also has a serious mediocre streak running down its middle. Let's agree on one thing right now: James Cameron can't write. How else could he have taken one of history's most compelling, haunting tragedies and turned it into an unwatchable potboiler? Yes, I'm talking about Titanic, which for my money was an insult to the victims of that disaster. Avatar's script is a rough draft, but its special effects and visual style are polished beyond anything I've seen before. I recommend watching it in 3-D. It needs all the dimensions the screen can give it in order for it to deliver its full impact. That impact so far has been considerable.


Avatar

James Cameron once famously declared himself King of the World. I imagine this is why, in his latest film, Avatar, he has created an entirely new world so that he could make himself king of it, too. To a large extent, he’s succeeded. His new movie seamlessly blends live action and computer imagery, and employs the most dynamic use of 3-D I’ve ever seen, to create a vision that is breathtaking, bold, and most important, alive. Unfortunately, the epic sweep of its visuals is not matched by its story, which, despite epic pretensions, lacks the requisite scope. It’s also depressingly unoriginal.

The action takes place in the future on a distant planet suggestively named Pandora. There, an occupying force of U.S. marines tries to keep order among the indigenous population, the Na’vi, creatures shaped like elongated humans with pointed ears and blue skin. The marines are there to run interference for an American company that is mining the planet for a rare mineral (“unobtainium”) found in deposits underneath the woodlands where the Na’vi live. The Na’vi are a proud hunter-warrior people, similar to many Native American tribes, and they offer fierce resistance to the military, whose aggression is held in check only by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), director of a project that’s studying the Na’vi in order to negotiate a peaceful way of co-existing with them.

Into this volatile mix comes Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine who is recruited to take part in Dr. Augustine’s study. Her program is an ingenious one: she mixes Na’vi DNA with that of a human individual to grow a hybrid in the lab, then projects the human consciousness into the Na’vi body (the “avatar”) to allow him, or her, to walk among the Na’vi as one of their own . Jake is eager to join for personal reasons—it gives him a chance to start his life over, to once again inhabit a body that has all of its motor functions intact. But he quickly finds his position in the project compromised by the marine commander, Col. Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who recruits Sully to spy on the Na’vi and report his findings to him instead of Dr. Augustine. Quaritch is eager to mount a full assault on the Na’vi and conquer them once and for all, and he figures any information he gets that doesn’t go through Augustine will help him accomplish this. Sully goes along because he is still a marine at heart. But his heart is about to undergo a radical change.

The movie has been called Dances with Wolves in outer space because of what happens to Sully once he “becomes” a Na’vi warrior. He likes it, of course—who wouldn’t? Especially when he's being tutored in his adopted people’s ways by the beautiful princess Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), between whom initial antagonism changes gradually—and predictably--into mutual liking, respect, and finally, love. In the scenes detailing his instruction, we watch Sully slowly transforming himself, finding not just wholeness in a new body but wholeness of a different kind as his soul grows into that body--and into the life he was obviously destined for. When, acting on the information he has provided Col. Quaritch, the troops begin their invasion of the forest to drive out the Na’vi, Sully realizes the terrible consequences of his betrayal and makes a fateful decision—he switches sides and fights for the Na’vi, eventually becoming the leader of their desperate struggle to remain free.

Taking up their cause is not without its consequences, however, and it is here that the narrative’s shortcomings are the most glaring. The film’s morality centers on doing the right and just thing, which in this case is presented as fighting for the oppressed against their oppressors. This is also the only emotionally plausible thing to do, since the story is dominated by Sully’s life among the Na’vi; his growing understanding of, and identification with, their values; and his romantic attachment to Neytiri. He never really has a choice, when it comes right down to it. The narrative relentlessly drives him in that direction from the moment he arrives on Pandora, and his conversion happens quickly and easily, without hesitation or inner turmoil over abandoning his human roots (Quaritch calls him a “traitor to his race”)--and therefore without dramatic effect. What should have been an emotionally wrenching moment in the story, imbued with tragic overtones, is treated matter-of-factly, like the forgone conclusion it is.

This has implications for the film’s politics, although undoubtedly not the kind Cameron intended. Much comment has already been directed at Avatar’s “liberalism,” which is to say it sides with aboriginal culture over industrialized society, with respect for nature over the worship of technology, with living in harmony with all forms of life instead of subjecting the natural world to human domination for purposes of gain. And it’s decidedly anti-military into the bargain. Oh, those Hollywood liberals--why do they hate America so? Actually, it’s hard to take Avatar’s “political stance” seriously, given the one-dimensionality of the conflict at its center and the predictability of its outcome. Even the least attentive member of the audience will have no trouble following the movie’s by-the-numbers scenario of Good vs. Evil: this is Melodrama for Dummies.

But Cameron courts controversy and contemporary relevance for his innocuous tale--he actually puts the phrase “shock and awe” into Quaritch’s mouth when he’s firing up his troops for the attack on the Na’vi. So Pandora is offered up as an analogue for Iraq as well as the American West, with Vietnam lurking in the images of warfare among lush tropical scenery: a roll call of American Imperialism’s greatest sins. Not enough guilt for you? Might as well throw in European Colonialism in Africa, the Middle East, India, etc. Cameron might think his targets are clear in all of this, but his aim is wild. The situation on Pandora is not like any of these historical ones because it has no solid context—the action takes place almost literally in a vacuum--so there is nothing to lend the would-be parallels weight. Pandora is not Iraq or the Great Plains--it’s a galaxy far, far away where a ragtag rebellion is fighting an evil empire that is superior both in numbers and technological sophistication but suffers from arrogance and overconfidence. When this saga unfolded on the screen in the first three Star Wars films, a savior arose from the ranks of the rebels to defy his father and his own past. Much the same happens here, with Sully defying his commanding officer/parental figure Col. Quaritch and turning his back on his marine, and his human, past to reinvent himself as the leader of the Na’vi.

Problematic in its politics, Avatar is far more successful in its introduction of religious themes. The Na’vis’ intimate connection with nature has been ridiculed by some critics as mere pandering to fashionable beliefs on the left, but in fact it’s an integral, and well developed, part of their conception as a race--and it plays the crucial role in determining their fate. The assault on their forest homeland is simply a strategic maneuver from the point-of-view of the culturally blind military: they need to drive the Na’vi out to get at the deposits of unobtainium buried beneath the trees. But in doing so, they unleash powerful forces they don’t understand and have no way to control. Some of the film’s most effective scenes explore the implications of the interconnectedness between the Na’vi people and the animal and plant life of their environment. Sully’s capture of the the Mountain Banshee (a winged, dragon-like creature that Na‘vi warriors tame in order to fly) is a thrilling action sequence but also a moving ceremony, a rite of passage for both as they form the bond that is the soul of all life on their planet. This bond finds its highest expression in the Tree of Souls, a rather banal name for the magnificent vision at the center of the Na’vis’ world, a gigantic tree glowing with the combined energy of all living things. Dr. Augustine discovers that it functions like a giant nervous system, providing a way for communication to flow back and forth between all forms of life on Pandora, and this proves to be Col. Quaritch’s downfall: when he orders his men to destroy the Tree to hasten the Na’vis’ defeat, the besieged natives are sent reinforcements by the planet itself.

Cameron effortlessly blends this animistic theology (shades of Star Wars’ famous “Force”) with some basic Christianity. One of several meanings of “avatar” is the incarnation of a deity, a god manifesting itself in human form. Sully’s consciousness is projected into the world of the Na’vi to inhabit one of their bodies and give it life, evoking Christianity's belief that God took the form of an earthly being in Jesus. Perhaps Cameron considered this allusion too obscure, for he pushes the analogy even further and has Sully make the ultimate sacrifice at film’s end, dying in his earthly (human) body so that his spirit can be reborn in the body of his Na’vi avatar—literally giving his life for the people he has chosen, or was chosen, to save. Deciphering the Christian allegory at play here is not exactly challenging.

But the real religion of the film is cinema itself. At this late date, does anyone doubt James Cameron’s total devotion to moviemaking as technology, art, and popular entertainment? If so, watch Avatar in 3-D in a crowded theater and you’ll see something that can truly be considered a modern spectacle. From the breathtaking vistas of Pandora’s mountains to the lush undergrowth and magnificent trees of the Home Forest, Avatar presents the spectator with a visually stunning and fully realized environment. In addition to these splendors, Cameron and his crew have advanced the technology of motion-capture filmmaking to the point where the animation is more than just smooth and supple--it has an almost tactile quality. The very process itself--recording a human actor’s movements, then transcribing them into the movements of a computer-animated figure--neatly doubles the technology of “avatarism” in the movie’s story, the process by which a person’s consciousness is transported into a Na’vi body and becomes its animating force.

But this “avatarizing” process is a metaphor for cinema also. In the film, the human subject lies down in a cylindrical chamber and goes to sleep, allowing her/his mind to “wander” off and merge with the avatar. In the act of going to the movies, we enter a darkened theater and allow our minds to wander as well, to be absorbed by the story playing out on the screen through the process of identification. That is, if the film is able to provide us with characters that can serve as conduits into its world. Although not a boldly drawn character—Worthington’s wooden performance doesn’t help—Sully is clearly designated such a “conduit” for the audience. A novice to the world of Pandora, as well as to the avatar program, he provides the film with an innocent, inexperienced point-of-view, much like that of the viewer—it is through his eyes that we learn about what is going on, that we are educated, at the same time he is, about the world we have entered. This is yet another version of the avatar relationship, of course: Sully is our avatar for “living in” Pandora. Through him, we are able to penetrate the cinematic realm projected upon--and in front of--the theater screen.

I suppose in a way Avatar is less of a movie than it is a phenomenon. It was designed to be that way, of course: designed to change the way movies are made, experienced, and thought about. But not to bear the weight of a morally complex universe. Cameron’s dedication to giving his audiences a new cinematic experience has all-too-obvious limits. Nothing else could account for why, in a film with seemingly boundless ambitions, the story has none. It stays snugly inside a comfort zone of borrowed plot elements and familiar tropes—a straight-line hero’s journey, a romance without real challenge, villains so wrong-headed they pose no meaningful threat. It’s basically a fairy tale, and while there’s nothing wrong with contemporary fairy tales in the movies (Penelope and Coraline are delightful recent examples), one that pretends to be savvy enough to preach to its viewers about geopolitical matters makes me nervous.

But it isn’t just an uninspired plot that plagues Avatar—there’s a certain laziness in its non-computer graphic details that undermines its overall impact. Cameron spent 300 million dollars on his movie and he couldn’t come up with a better name for the worth-dying-for mineral resource than “unobtainium”? How about “very-rarium”? When you’re dumbing down ideas, why stop halfway? “Na’vi“ is simply an abbreviated anagram of “native,” which is admirably economical but does not, in this case, prove that less is more. And although it’s a very talky film, Avatar’s dialogue is most definitely not in 3-D--it’s flat-out dull, and boasts not a single memorable line, unless you count the Na’vi way of acknowledging their regard for each other, “I see you.” When Sully in Na’vi guise says this to Neytiri during their long-awaited courtship scene, it’s probably a good Date Night moment, but beyond this, no one has anything important to say.

This laziness extends to character, as well. Sully’s blankness as a person may be calculated to make him more accessible to audience identification, but a handicapped ex-Marine who’s fighting against odds to win his life back ought to have a little more edge to him, a little more attitude, a touch of can-do bravado. Worthington gives us a decent guy who takes everything in stride, even his setbacks, like someone seriously into meditation. Col. Quaritch, on the other hand, is just what his name suggests: a hard-ass career soldier itchin’ for a quarrel. Lang delivers pretty much what you’d expect, strutting and snarling on cue, but he’s serving Patton Lite, and even some scripted character quirks can’t make him nearly as interesting as Robert Duvall’s similarly war-happy Col. Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979). Only Sigourney Weaver as the cranky, chain-smoking Dr. Augustine gives a performance with some spirit in it. Her presence is a tonic to the “meanwhile-back-at-the-base” scenes, which are mostly lackluster in conception and execution, since Cameron’s attention--along with ours--is elsewhere, caught up in the high-energy world of Pandora. Unfortunately, none of that energy is expended on making the Na’vi more than visually interesting. Zoe Saldana gives a sensitive reading as Neytiri, ensuring that her obligatory journey from suspicion to trust, from hostility to love, is at least believably done, but the character barely emerges from the clichés that make the Na’vi a rather bloodless creation, the latest version of industrial culture’s Noble Savage.

Avatar has been subjected to plenty of critical hits since its release, but it obviously can absorb them. It’s already made a gazillion dollars at the box office, so on some level--OK, several--Cameron knows what he’s doing. But does anyone, including himself, have a clear idea of what he’s done? Avatar is a movie about many things: heroism, love, community certainly, but also cinema and the spectator’s way of watching and experiencing it. The implications of this subject extend much farther, however, because the “avatarizing” process in the story actually gives us an interesting metaphor for the relationship between mind and reality as a whole—that is, for the interaction between mind and world that creates the reality we “know.” Sully’s consciousness enters another space and changes that space because of his presence and actions. It’s how all of us are in the world, of course--it’s just that he’s in it through another’s body instead of his own. The “avatarizing” technology is mirrored by the technology of the filmmaking process, in ways I indicated before—and both are mirrored in turn by the laws of perception that direct how we engage with the world and experience, or in Na'vi terms,"see" it.

Perhaps James Cameron is a master storyteller after all. For all the weaknesses of his movie’s internal tale, maybe the real story he’s telling is what his film represents as a technological achievement and how it relates to the way we experience reality in the first place. As an advance in filmmaking capacity, Avatar could conceivably be pointing the way to cinema's future. In watching a film, the spectator’s consciousness may be absorbed by the world beyond the screen, but the transfer is not a complete one—not yet, at any rate. Could the technologies of cinema and "virtual reality" merge one day into a single medium, making movies a truly interactive experience, and not just reflective of one? In the final analysis, that may be the story Cameron wants us to see while watching his film—see, and just possibly believe.

A Serious Man

I hope this film gets the recognition it deserves. I have been a fan of the Coen brothers ever since they burst upon the scene with Blood Simple. Several brilliant films, and only a very few duds, later, they have created what I think must be their most personal movie, and their affection for the subject matter shows. This one looks and feels a bit different than past films of theirs. Not always--it's smart-alecky at times, just as you'd want it if you're a Coen-head like me--but it also raises questions that haven't appeared in their previous work. Don't worry, they're not going soft. But they are looking around a little more, beyond the boundaries of genre and into themselves, perhaps.




A SERIOUS MAN

No one makes films quite like the Coen brothers. Since their attention-grabbing debut in 1984 with the neo-noir classic Blood Simple, the Coens have carved themselves a unique niche in American filmmaking. Creators of dark, cynical tales filled with violence and black humor, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn a map of the American Soul as a morass of greed, misguided passion, and uncomprehending desperation. Though many of their star-crossed characters come to bad ends, they’re usually too dim-brained or foolhardy to be considered victims of tragedy—it might be more accurate to call them victims of a fatal kind of bewilderment.

The Coens’ latest film, A Serious Man, has a different look and feel to it, however, which suggests they’ve got something else in mind this time. Eschewing their stock world of schemers, criminals, and people living on the margins of nowhere, the brothers take aim for once at the middle class--in this case, the Jewish-American middle class of the 1960s. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is a professor of mathematics at a small Minnesota college. He has a wife, two teenage children, a tract house in the suburbs, and aspirations to nothing higher than tenure and a modest career as a mid-level academic. But beneath its seemingly calm surface, Larry’s life is on the verge of falling apart. His wife is bored with their marriage and wants a divorce so she can marry another man. His daughter and son barely acknowledge his existence, except of course when they want something. His very odd brother, out of work and living with them over his family’s objections, has gambling problems and perhaps is soliciting sex from local school children. The college is receiving anonymous letters blackening his character, which has placed his tenure status in jeopardy. He has money troubles. And then a student of his offers him a bribe to change a failing grade…

All of this is revealed in the course of a few days in the life of this not particularly heroic hero, a nebbishy Everyman who tries not so much to solve his problems as to figure out why they are happening to him and what they all mean. Despite the increasing desperation he feels, Larry’s role in his own life remains essentially a passive one. He remonstrates with his wife about her decision to leave him, but meekly complies with her demand that he move to a motel, despite the fact that she’s the one having the affair. He helplessly watches his brother’s mysterious and disturbing presence in his home further alienate his wife and undermine his authority with his children. A sexy neighbor who sunbathes in the nude awakens his sleeping libido, but his timidity prevents him from making any headway with her. And although he tries to get tough with the student who’s tried to bribe him, he backs down when the student threatens to sue him for defamation of character, and stashes the money in his desk without ever reporting it to the proper authorities. In short, Larry has trouble taking action of any kind to improve his lot. He seems incapable of helping himself. He’s stuck.

Perhaps if he were in someone else’s movie, he’d have a chance to get unstuck and turn his life around, but the Brothers Coen don’t create characters to show them mercy, they create them to parade their sufferings across the screen in ways both cruel and hilarious. Larry’s life is an updated version of the Old Testatment story of Job, and like that famously tormented patriarch, he desperately wants to understand why, since he’s tried so hard to live his life as a good (i.e.“serious”) man, his once comfortable existence is vanishing before his very eyes. But in his tormentors’ hands--not just God this time, the Coens as well--Larry’s search for understanding becomes an ironic journey toward greater confusion and uncertainty instead of enlightenment. This is for two simple reasons: 1) even if there were someone who could explain his life to him (there isn’t), 2) Larry most likely wouldn’t be able to grasp it anyway. His passivity precludes the kind of imagination necessary to transform the mysteries of existence into spiritual insight. As a mathematician, he’s comfortable with abstractions that lend themselves to numerical representation, not those that lead to transcendent thinking.

Larry’s failure to achieve understanding—his anti-quest, in effect—is neatly summarized by his visits to three rabbis. Job was visited by three friends who counseled him about his troubles and his relationship with God; Larry makes appointments with three spiritual counselors looking for the same kind of guidance—and gets bupkis for his pains. It is in these sequences that the Coens’ flair for satire really makes itself felt. The eccentric, patronizing, and seriously unhelpful advice Larry gets from the rabbis shows just how unprepared organized religion is--any religion, not just Judaism--when called upon to deal with problems that fall outside its limited purview. Whether genuinely obtuse or just so bored from years of listening to complaints they can no longer recognize real distress, the rabbis offer Larry nothing but platitudes and awkward silence. He leaves each meeting more frustrated, more lost than ever.

A Serious Man marks a welcome return to form for the Coens. After the lazy plotting and smug sarcasm of their last film, Burn after Reading, it’s good to see their jaded perspective used to deepen and darken a comedy already rich in the ironies of human existence, instead of merely adding a wiseguy attitude to a pedestrian story. Man is an existential comedy on a par with some of Woody Allen’s most memorable films of the 1980s, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Coens’ philosophical ambitions are announced in their movie’s black-and-white opening, a droll staging of a Yiddish folk tale in which a peasant couple is visited one night by an old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (a troublesome ghost). As disturbing as his appearance in their home is, his abrupt departure is even more so, because it leaves them with a question: have they been cursed by the spirit’s presence or spared his wrath by the mercy of God? As viewers, we are left to decide for ourselves, and our dilemma mirrors not only the couple’s but Larry’s as well. Larry’s life, as it will begin to unfold onscreen moments later, is a series of such “visits” by events beyond his imagining or control—a succession of trials that stretch the shadow of this dark introductory fable across the length of the entire film.

As the hapless Larry, Stuhlbarg turns in a thoughtful, nicely shaded performance, comfortably occupying the focal point of the film’s conflicting emotions without becoming entrapped by any single one. Anger, disbelief, self-pity, indecision, and the mildest hint of rebellion all vie to be uppermost in his portrait of a man under siege, and Stuhlbarg performs the necessary balancing act between these varying responses with aplomb. The Coens do not ask for psychological insight from their cast of largely unknown actors, just that they keep their performances consistent with the mood of the film. If Larry seems to be repeating his confused reactions each time he receives a blow without making progress toward acceptance or a resolution of any kind, it’s because his makers don’t want him to grow or acquire depth as a person but simply to follow his preordained path to its end. This is the Coens’ modus operandi: even in a “philosophical” comedy, they’re more interested in external behavior than the inner life of people.

But there can be exceptions, and the one in this film is pretty remarkable. Richard Kind’s portrayal of Arthur, Larry’s deeply troubled brother, is so angst-ridden and intense it threatens to destabilize the film every time he appears. A bitter, tormented, dysfunctional personality, Arthur seems to exist mainly inside himself, emerging occasionally into the world only to wreak havoc: using his brilliance with numbers (he’s a mathematician also) to concoct elaborate gambling schemes, which gets him into trouble with a local bookie, or projecting his lonely sexual fantasies onto children. A peripheral presence in the story, Arthur accompanies Larry into exile at the motel, inseparable from him, like his doppelganger or darker half. By way of emphasizing this relationship, he is shown only in scenes that include Larry—never by himself or interacting independently with others—and photographed mostly in darkness, his sad figure framed in the background of shots or on the edges of the screen. It’s as if the shadow cast across A Serious Man by the opening sequence comes to rest in him: he is the movie’s actual dybbuk, a disturbing, unpredictable presence whose behavior cannot rationally be explained. Kind’s startling work in this small but crucial role makes the irrational frighteningly real.

And it does something else, too--it hints at the real emotions lying beneath the icy surface of the Coens’ sardonic attitude. It’s not much of a stretch to view this film as unusually personal for them. I read somewhere that Larry is based on the Coens’ father, himself a college professor, and they grew up in a suburb of Minneapolis, much like the setting of this film. Larry’s teenage son, Danny (Aaron Wolf), could be a stand-in for the brothers themselves, in this regard. From Danny’s vantage point, A Serious Man is a coming-of-age story, and this vantage point literally becomes the film’s during the sequence of his bar mitzvah, much of which is shot with the camera taking his point-of-view. The bar mitzvah provides the movie with its emotional climax, bringing together many of the characters and allowing them a quiet interlude of reconciliation and rest as the moving ceremony unfolds (even Larry and his estranged wife, Judith, share an almost tender moment). Danny’s journey toward manhood means he will eventually inherit the world from his father, a melancholy truth the film captures in its haunting final shot: Danny and his fellow students stand outside their Hebrew School, watching the sudden, surprising approach of a tornado. The image of a whirlwind and the turmoil it symbolizes is from The Book of Job; its ingenious inclusion here is from the book of Coen.

Is A Serious Man the Coens’ most “serious” film yet? It’s certainly one of their soberest, and could be their most introspective, given the roots of the story in their family’s experience. Its narrative style subtly underscores this shift in tone and purpose. For once they employ no gimmicks or artful twists in the plot; it’s straightforward story-telling the whole way, at a more relaxed pace than usual and with the volume turned down. The tragicomedy of existence has long been the Coens’ playground, but only with this film do they stop and do some genuine thinking about it—specifically, about the sad injustice of bad things happening to a good man. Despite lacing the movie with their trademark black humor and satire, the Coens are very serious about their protagonist and his life. Larry Gopnik’s downfall comes, unhappily, without insight or redemption, because it comes without his having committed a sin or crime to bring it about. He has done nothing to deserve his fate, except, ironically, not to resist it more--to accede too easily in becoming its victim. Only if timidity is a sin does his punishment make sense. But in the face of A Serious Man, I see only bewilderment.