DIRECTED BY: Darren Aronofsky

FEATURING: Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder

PLOT:  Nina, a goody two-shoes ballerina, wants to dance the lead role in a production of “Swan Lake,” but although she’s perfect for the role of the White Swan, she lacks the seductiveness to portray the Black Swan.  Lily, a sexy, irresponsible dancer newly arrived from a San Francisco troupe, becomes her primary competition for the part, but also helps her loosen up by talking her out on the town for a night of drinking and meeting guys.  Nina starts physically break down and hallucinate as the stress of preparing for the role takes its toll; by opening night, she can’t distinguish reality from the story she dances of the princess trapped in the body of a swan who takes her own life.

BACKGROUND:

• Natalie Portman danced many of her own parts, and actually dislocated a rib while dancing during the shoot.  More difficult moves were performed by professional ballerinas, and for two sequences Portman’s face was digitally superimposed on dancer Sarah Lane’s body.  There was a minor controversy over how much of the dancing Portman actually did herself and how much was performed by doubles; Aronofsky estimated that the actress executed more than 80% of the dance moves that appear onscreen.
• Portman won the 2010 Best Actress Oscar for her role as Nina.  The film was also nominated for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography and Editing.
• Aronofsky received “The Understudy,” the original script that became Black Swan, while he was making Requiem for a Dream (2000).  He described the script as Dostoevsky’s “The Double” meets All About Eve.  Aronofsky combined that script, which was set in an off-Broadway production, with an idea he had to shoot a movie in the New York ballet world to create Black Swan.
• Aronofsky and Portman had discussed doing a ballet movie together 8 years prior to shooting.
• Made on a relatively small budget of about $12 million, Black Swan has grossed more than $300 million worldwide as of this writing.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Nina’s “triumphant” onstage transformation into the Black Swan: as she pirouettes, feathers sprout from her arms, thickening with every swirl, until her limbs have been replaced by wings.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Up until opening night, Black Swan is a backstage melodrama

“Music Video” for Black Swan

about backstabbing ballerinas, with an exaggerated, lurid psychopathology that’s thrust even further over-the-top by lesbian love scenes, hints of horror, and mirrors, mirrors, mirrors.  When the curtain rises on the big night, we experience the performance through the subjective perspective of an overworked, paranoid, demented dancer, whose psychology has been shattered by the film’s sledgehammer symbolism.  No avant-grade choreographer could stage as disorienting a “Swan Lake” as the one she hallucinates for us through her obsessed eyes.

COMMENTS: Black Swan is the weirdest movie ever to win a major Academy Award (Natalie Portman’s Best Actress nod).  Swan also received a Best Picture nom, but that was in the recently-expanded field of ten nominees: we’ll never know if a movie where the protagonist hallucinates and metamorphoses into a bird could have made it in the historical field of five, but considering that now-revered classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Brazil have traditionally been considered too outré to be shortlisted, it seems doubtful.  (A Clockwork Orange did manage to get a Best Picture nomination in 1972, but that may have been the Academy’s make-up call for missing the boat so badly on 2001).  For the time being, Black Swan is weird cinema’s most recognized and decorated film, a fact which by itself is enough to make it a Must See feature in the genre.

How does a film where pictures on a wall literally laugh at the heroine, and major plot points may not even happen, worm its way into the ultra-conservative, ultra-literal, historical-epic favoring Academy Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ good graces?  Director Darren Aronofsky, who began his career with the punky, experimental and Certified Weird Pi, ingratiated himself with cinematic conservatives in 2008 with the (excellent) sports drama The Wrestler, proving to the mainstream that he could be “more” than just a technically proficient cult/arthouse director whose tastes ran dangerously close to the surreal.  Building on that success, Arnofsky assembled a classy cast, headlined by Portman, for his followup project.  It didn’t hurt the film’s prestige that it was to be set in the high-art strata of the New York City dance world and feature the music of Tchaikovsky; no one could doubt the film’s serious intent.

Buzz began to build around Black Swan, and particularly around Portman.  At 29, the Israeli-born actress/model was at the peak of her beauty and had already paid her dues in Hollywood, acquitting herself admirably in dozens of roles from the orphaned Lolita of Léon to the lone important female role in the Star Wars prequels without ever having sniffed a major acting award.  Observers noted that Portman studied ballet intensively for six months prior to shooting, becoming an athlete and exhibiting the sort of dedicated physical transformation that makes the Academy sit up and take note.  A more salacious sort of buzz began to form around the reported love scene with sexy co-star Kunis.  Portman, like ballerina Nina, had a perfectionist, goody-two shoes image: she had even put her acting career on hold for four years to pursue a psychology degree at Harvard.  The notion of the Crimson grad locked in a lipstick-lesbian tryst, while arousing interest in itself, had the further virtue of appearing to cast her against type (in fact, the role of prim, perfectionist Nina comported almost perfectly with Portman’s public image).

Portman was thus positioned for success, and the sensual but repressed performance she delivers as Nina is indeed worthy of the Oscar (though if I were voting in 2010, I would have cast my ballot for Jennifer Lawrence’s spunky teenage meth-orphan from Winter’s Bone).  Nina, who’s dedicated her life to dance, is a woman whose sexual development stalled at that precious stage when she first became infatuated with ballerinas, stuffed animals and the color pink.  Uncomfortably, she still calls her mother (a former dancer who now manages her daughter’s career and keeps her a virtual prisoner in their shared apartment) “mommy.”  She demurs questions about whether, in her late twenties, she’s still a virgin, and responds with breathy trepidation to a man’s, a woman’s, and even to her own intimate touch.  Physically, Portman inhabits the delicate but constantly bruised and busted body of a ballerina; she looks natural stretching out in sweats or a tutu, and when an attendant cracks her feet and depresses her strained diaphragm, you believe you’re watching trainer work over an athlete. Her dancing is impressive, not for the technique (which most people won’t be able to judge) but for the confidence she projects when she whirls her way onstage as the Black Swan, her eyes blazing under the dramatic black-feathered eyeshadow with a true performer’s passion.

There are two competing themes in Black Swan: a child-woman’s fear of growing up, and an artist’s need to supplement her technique with passion.  Both paths require sacrifice: she must kill the little girl inside to become a woman, and to reach perfection she must be willing to risk everything for her art. The point at which the two strains meet and harmonize is sex; Nina’s artistic and sexual maturity, while weaving separate melodies, climax together.  As an artist, it’s stressed (actually, it’s rammed down our throats) that Nina’s perfectionism inhibits her perfecting her art; she’s so concerned with proper technique that she’s always thinking about her next move and never able to abandon herself to passion.  Mila Kunis’ Lilly is the opposite; her movements are imprecise but full of natural allure.  It’s the ancient struggle between the rational Apollonian and chaotic Dionysian artistic impulses, between the right brain and the left brain, between the White Swan and the Black, both of which must be balanced and integrated together to produce a meaningful work of art (or a life).  Nina must learn to dance both the White and the Black Swan, and that will involve learning to surrender herself to an artistic passion; essentially, to sexual abandonment. Nina is not a woman; she’s a little girl trying to act pretty for her mother, trapped inside a body she’s yet to come to terms with.  Symbolically, Nina is on the cusp of womanhood; the bizarre and frightening changes her body undergoes, although they may take the form of gooseflesh and webbed toes instead of budding breasts, represent the onset of puberty.  Her sexual maturity and her artistic maturity occur together. Nina’s final act of artistic fulfillment, when she integrates the Black Swan into her personality and performance, occurs via an act of penetration.  The blood staining the lower abdomen of her virginal white tutu comes from her symbolically broken creative hymen.

Black Swan‘s popular and critical success is almost as mysterious as the film’s ambiguous resolution.  The movie seems too exploitative for arthouse crowd, yet nowhere near explicit enough for the grindhouse crowd.  It mixes genres promiscuously; it’s inspired by backstage melodramas, enlivened by horror movie conventions and topped with neo-surrealism.  The category it fits in most comfortably may be “psychological thriller,” yet though there are very few genuine thriller elements in it: unlike genre classics like Jacob’s Ladder or The Machinist, there’s no mystery to be solved by exploring the protagonist’s psychology.  Black Swan works instead as a character study of Nina’s subconscious, and there’s no event in the movie for which it makes much difference whether it takes place in reality or in her imagination.  The tone is deliberate melodrama, and the few critics who didn’t connect with the movie believed that it strayed over the line of exaggerated emotion into pure camp (there were even a few unkind comparisons to Showgirls).  Some found it trashy, although it’s only “trashy” in the tame sense Pauline Kael used the term; but anyone who uses the term “trashy” to insult this film reveals themselves as unqualified to judge great trash.  Black Swan mixes the “high” art of Tchaikovsky, the ballet, and modernist set design with the “low” art of lurid melodrama, horror movie conventions and gratuitous lesbian love scenes.  Like Nina dancing both the virginal White Swan and the seductive Black Swan, the film struts out both its high and low impulses, harmonizing the sublime beauty of art film and the pure passion of genre film into an artistic whole.  At the film’s close, Nina whispers “it’s perfect;” that’s no longer Nina’s, but Aronofsky’s voice we’re hearing.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…vivid and engrossing, teetering between trash and art, a sleek exploitation borrowing from (among others) Fight Club and The Fly, Mulholland Drive and Persona…. [yet i]n the end, for all its imagination and artistry, Aronofsky’s film achieves neither the pristine elegance of the white swan nor the hallucinatory depravity of the black. It fades, instead, to gray.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)

“Black and white, good and evil, ambition and obsession, delusion and reality are all blended together in this crazy, weird, compelling film, and it’s masterful, inventive storytelling, whether you like the end result or not.”–Kim Voynar, Movie City News (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Fox Searchlight – Black Swan – Official Site - A very nice site with numerous news items, concept art to download, and several short video featurettes

IMDB LINK: Black Swan (2010)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Interview: Darren Aronofsky On Music, Scares And Gender In Black Swan – This Aronofsky interview by Katey Rich of Cinema Blend is a lot more interesting than the director’s discussion with MTV, even though they don’t discuss the lesbian scene at all

Black Swan | Darren Aronofsky’s Dances with ‘Swan’ – Steve Zeitchik of the Los Angeles Times describes the genesis of Black Swan

Black Swan: The Exhibition: A Black Swan-inspired L.A. art exhibit curated by Dominic Sidhu (who created art used in the film)

Black Swan dance double controversy – Someone thought the hoo-ha over who did most of the dancing in the film was significant enough to deserve an entire Wikipedia article

Darkness and despair: that’s dance on screen – Anticipating the release of Black Swan, The Independent‘s Sarah Hughes runs down the top movies about ballet (even giving a nod to Suspiria)

List Candidate: Black Swan (2010) – Alex Kittle‘s initial take on Black Swan for 366 Weird Movies during its theatrical release

DVD INFO:  The Fox Searchlight DVD (buy) contains a 49-minute documentary featurette, “Black Swan Metamorphosis,” as the only extra (expect a Special Edition release down the road).  The Blu-ray release (buy) adds extra interviews with the actors and also includes the now ubiquitous “digital copy” of the film.  Some of these special features can be previewed at Black Swan‘s official site.

Note that the rental DVD version available from Netflix and other outlets does not contain any special features, unless you consider previews of other attractions “special.” This marketing strategy is increasingly being used by certain studios, notably Fox, in hopes of bolstering sagging DVD sales.

Russell pays Mahler homage in not succumbing to the type of pedestrian biopic cultists tend to favor. That type of bio treatment can be seen in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992), the kind of well-intentioned but hopelessly unimaginative film one expects from a “fan.” Julie Taymor‘s Across the Universe (2007) takes the opposite approach in her stubborn insistence that the Beatles are not sacred and, thus, aptly produced a film as experimental as were the Beatles themselves (she did Stravinsky and Shakespeare the same honors with Oedipus Rex in 1993 and Titus in 1999).

Ever the renegade spirit, Russell, like Taymor, digs into his highly personal interpretation of the artist’s core. Mahler (1974) opens to the first movement of the existential Third Symphony (conducted by Bernard Haitink) juxtaposed against the composer’s hut on a lake bursting into Promethean flames. Mahler’s mummified wife, Alma (the resplendent Georgina Hale) emerges from a cocoon on the beach and crawls on jagged rocks, struggling to free herself of her bindings. Atop a rock is a bust of her husband, which she embraces and kisses. This dream imagery is explained by a terminally ill Mahler to Alma, who is not amused and misinterprets the dream as symbolic of a marital power struggle. Mahler himself fatalistically interprets the dream as one signifying her birth, made possible by his inevitable, impending death. The entire film takes place on Mahler’s final train ride and is interwoven with dreams and flashbacks, piling one existential layer upon another.

Mahler is returning home to Vienna after a disastrous season in at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Mahler was ousted for his unorthodox ways by a Big Apple accustomed to the literalism of a conductor like Toscanini. Mahler, however,is not about to publicly go into the reasons for his return home, especially with a meddlesome reporter who takes the composer’s answers strictly at face value. “Why is everyone so literal these days?” Mahler retorts, dismissing the hack interviewer.

Instead of focusing on documentary points, Russell probes the visions and a past idiosyncratically filtered through Mahlerian hues which are, in turn, filtered through Russell’s equally eccentric interpretations.

Mahler espoused big ideas and when asked his religion, he answers defiantly, “Composer.” Indeed, Russell (himself a convert) probes Mahler’s sell-out conversion to Catholicism; clearly, this was strictly a career move on the composer’s part in a blatantly anti-Semitic society. Russell does not shy away from criticism in this sequence (filmed with silent film aesthetics). The cross of Christ and the star of David are placed with the Nazi swastika in an enshrined cave. Mahler bows before money, and Cosima Wagner (Antonia Ellis dressed as an S & M Nazi she-devil) who rewards his rejection of Judaism with a roasted (non-kosher) pig, which Mahler bites into with wild abandon. Predictably, Mahler proves to be as agitated a Christian as he was the agitated Jew.

No suffragist, Mahler has been as demanding on his wife as he is on orchestra, insisting that she forgo her own aspirations as a composer and slave in silent servitude to his art, himself, and their children (in that order). This is a hard thing for Alma to forgive; but she also feels her husband’s composition of “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Death of Children) is a case of unforgivably tempting fate that leads to the death of their beloved daughter. Alma is consistently tormented by the image of herself as pedestrian shadow of the genius Gustav. She is left at the bottom of the stairwell as fans adore her returning husband, emphasized by a funeral march movement straight out of Poe. Alma rewards Gustav for all this with an impassioned affair (one of many) and it is a feverishly ill, insecure, humiliated and desperate Mahler here who is trying to win back his wife. Powell and Hale are superb in their roles. Hale is delightfully fickle, icy, frustrated, wayward, and conveys every fiber of a woman loved by the artisans. Powell looks the very image of terminal sickness, especially in a symbolic vignette with the reaper facing him in the form of a female African passenger (in voodoo dress) who likens his music to a dance with death. In one sequence Mahler is depicted as a (Stan Laurel-like) clown, and Russell spares no one in the funeral nightmare, fittingly choreographed to what many consider Mahler’s most surreal work: the Seventh Symphony.

Russell’s film mirrors much in the Seventh. It is a five movement work which begins with an allegro that is part kitsch Viennese waltz, part grotesque military march, energetic and, finally, bittersweet. This opening is followed by the first night music: a child-like walk through the night, replete with cowbells, a giddy dance, and ending with silence. The third movement is the phantasmagoric scherzo; essentially, another night movement that is, by turns, amusing and frightening. A second, amorous night movement follows the scherzo. The Rondo finale is a psychedelic pageant which many critics feel dissipates into complete banality and can be a fitful assertion of life or a dance-til-your-death frenzy.

Naturally, Russell utilizes the scherzo for Mahler’s overheated funeral, brought on by the composer’s heart attack, but the elemental structure of the entire Seventh could be seen as kind of blue print for Russell’s film. Alma mockingly spreads her legs before her dead husband’s coffin and follows that with a nude, coarse grinding strip with Teutonic beefcakes. Her beau, Max (Richard Morant), represents all of her lovers, and he is decked from head to toe as a stormtrooper. Gustav has been buried alive, but this is of no concern to Alma who is lusted after and sensuously pawed over only now, after she has emerged from her husband’s domineering shadow. Mahler is cremated in an oven, but his eyes remain untouched to witness her having the time of her life after his demise, which climaxes with Alma having sex with a gramophone. High art, low camp, sex and death. How better to serve up Gustav Mahler? Mahler’s epic works can be tantalizing, self-absorbed, seemingly disparate mixes of banality and nobility, the profound and the asinine, the intimate and the boisterous, sincere seeking drenched with equally sincere cynicism, and, finally, insatiable curiosity permeated with a whiff of pathos, or, often, deadly bathos.

Composer Arnold Schoenberg hailed the Seventh as the death of romanticism, but he was only half correct. Mahler was still the romantic, and Russell is equally vivid in that depiction as well. Mahler truly loves his wife above all, and he casts a slight smile when he silently looks away from the train (as he often and tellingly does) to observe a couple deep in love at the terminal.

Despite our knowledge of Mahler’s imminent fate; his tumultuous relationship with his wife and his obsession with her many infidelities; his fear of his own mortality; his hallucinatory, self-indulgent expressions; his pathos-laden memories of the past; his insincere conversion; his child-like questioning of existential themes; and his fevered, zealous drive, it is the composer’s buoyant embrace of life that encapsulates Russell’s wonderfully symbolic, baroque vision of an undeniably great and influential artist.

This article was originally published in a slightly different form at Raging Bull Movie Reviews.

“I always wanted to make a Kenneth Anger movie, and I wanted to combine great theatrical tradition and British pop cinema of the 60s, which was very psychedelic, and at the same time, to make a movie about a man who creates his own mythology. It had to be surreal in order to pay off.”–Director Refn on Bronson

DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn

FEATURING: Tom Hardy

PLOT: Narrated from a theater inside his own mind by Michael Peterson (later to rechristen himself Charles Bronson, his “fighting name” ), the movie is an aggressively stylized account of the true story of Britain’s most notorious prisoner, who spent 30 years of his 34 year sentence in solitary confinement for his violent behavior.  Peterson knocks over a post office with a sawed-off shotgun and receives a seven year penitentiary sentence; inside, he finds he has a natural affinity for institutional life as he nurtures a burgeoning passion for taking hostages and picking fights with prison guards.  Shuffled from prison to prison, and serving a brief stint in a hospital for the criminally insane, Peterson is furloughed, becomes a bare-knuckle boxer and adopts the name Bronson, and lasts a few months in the outside world before finding himself reincarcerated, at home once more.

BACKGROUND:

• The movie stays true to the spirit of the real life Michael Peterson/Charlie Bronson, while omitting many facts and inventing others.  The real Charlie Bronson has won several awards in prison-sponsored contests for his artwork and poetry and has published several books, including a fitness guide and an autobiography titled “Loonyology.”  In one of his hostage-taking escapades, he demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom.
• Before incarceration Michael Peterson actually worked as a circus strongman, which may be where he developed his distinctive trademark handlebar mustache and shaved pate.
• Danish director Refn was previously best known for the gritty, documentary style Pusher trilogy, a look at the criminal drug dealing subculture in Copenhagen.
• Some of the paintings appearing in the film and in the animated sequences are actual drawings by the real life Bronson.  Examples of Bronson’s artwork can be found here.
• Actor Tom Hardy put on about 40 pounds of muscle for the role.  Previously best known as “Handsome Bob” in Guy Ricthie’s RocknRolla, Hardy is poised to become a breakout star, slated to replace Mel Gibson in the new “Mad Max” series.
• Cinematographer Larry Smith began his career with Stanley Kubrick, working as an electrician on Barry Lyndon and a gaffer on The Shining before graduating to  assistant cameraman for Eyes Wide Shut.
• At the film’s London premiere, a tape recording of Bronson’s voice was played, stating, “I’m proud of this film, because if I drop dead tonight, then I live on.  As long as my mother enjoys the film, I’m happy… I make no bones about it, I really was… a horrible, violent, nasty man.  I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it either, because every punch I’ve ever flung in my life I’ve taken 21 back.”  This incident caused the Prison Officers’ Association to complain, because it is illegal to record a prisoner in a British prison without authorization.  The Association also accused the film of “glorifying violence.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bronson turning himself and his art teacher into living paintings in the very strange finale.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Hyperstylized to the point of surreality, Bronson is biopic as

Original trailer for Bronson

mythology, an appropriate tack when dealing with a self-deluded, self-promoting subject.  The portrait that emerges is not so much of a fascinating but essentially unknowable real-life sociopath as it is a portrait of Bronson’s pseudo-artistic attempt to create a public image as an antihero, with notes of humanizing sympathy but also with plenty of knowing irony added to deglamorize its subject.

COMMENTS:  Tom Hardy’s performance in Bronson undercuts my theory of acting.  I believe actors are mere interpreters; their job is not to muck up the words of the writer or wreck the intent of the director.  Bad acting can ruin a promising movie, but the best acting in the world can’t save a dull script.  Acting should be competent and transparent, so as to invisibly channel the real creative forces; actors should be pleasant to look at, and not draw attention to themselves.  Workmanlike acting is usually just as good as excellent acting; if acting is really good, we should forget we’re watching an actor.  There are only a very few performances that break this general rule, where the actor actually adds something to the story that wouldn’t be there otherwise.  Hardy delivers one of those rare achievements here.

He’s onscreen for nearly the entire running length of the film, in a story that provides no opportunity character development: Charlie Bronson is incapable of, or uninterested in , learning any lesson.  He ends the movie with exactly the same deluded mindset as he begins it.  His motivations are incomprehensible to normal people.  He is willing to wait years for the perfect opportunity to ambush his guards, knowing that he will only be able to throw a half a dozen punches before he’s swarmed, beaten, and thrown into solitary confinement for months.  The script asks Hardy to somehow make this inscrutable character believable while raving like a madman, performing broad vaudeville, delivering long monologues, and engaging in a few quiet moments of real pathos.  Hardy is up to this impossible task, and makes Bronson, a bizarre character with one foot in a harsh prison drama and another in an otherwordly theater of his imagination, utterly real.

Bulking up with forty pounds of muscle so he could convincingly portray a (frequently nude) bare-knuckle boxer who dresses like a circus strongman was the least of Hardy’s achievements.  The actor adds a number of eccentric mannerisms that make Bronson come alive.  He invents a small vocabulary of grunts and grumblings that emerge from deep in Bronson’s throat; Bronson may be a man of few words, but he’s got an expansive sub-vocal language with which he expresses everything from sexual embarrassment to seething resentment.  Note the awkward way Hardy swings his arms as Bronson stiffly strides down a city street, as if years of push-ups in solitary confinement have thrown off his balance and made him forget how to walk like a normal person out for a stroll.  The detail highlights the fact that Bronson can’t fit in to normal society; even his simplest movements are over-masculine, outsized for civilized life.  Watch his expressions as he interacts with “normal” people at an (admittedly rather unusual) cocktail party, or as he’s being seduced by a beautiful woman sitting on his lap in her panties.  His expressions and movements are theatrical, but not expected or appropriate to the situation.  He smiles, frowns, purses his lips, juts his jaw, and answers questions with grunts, his responses seemingly random, not in harmony with the words addressed to him.  He doesn’t seem ill at ease, exactly; rather, he seems to be responding to his own thoughts instead of to his companions.  It’s never quite clear whether Bronson’s too stupid to carry on normal social intercourse, or whether he’s just supremely disinterested in any polite conversation that isn’t a prelude to a brawl.  At any rate, out in the “real” world, he’s not at all the supremely confident performer who stands in front of a packed opera crowd house in mime makeup and roars out boasts to thunderous applause.  Hardy’s Bronson only looks natural and comfortable when he’s in a rage, naked, greased up and throwing roundhouses.

Still, Hardy’s performance would mean nothing in a movie where Bronson didn’t get to do much except get pounded into submission with billy clubs.  What makes Bronson hum is the fortunate marriage of an actor working at peak form and a director taking artistic gambles, and watching them all pay off.  The story here is repetitive: Charlie Bronson hits society, society hits back harder, Bronson takes his punishment and bides his time until he can repeat the cycle.  To keep things interesting, Refn alternates his approach to telling the tale, working his way through various fractured realities.  Besides the expected and gritty prison drama scenes, we get Bronson performing his one man show for an imaginary audience, with several changes of makeup.  We’re treated to violent slideshows, and scenes that incorporate documentary footage of the real Bronson while Hardy postures theatrically in front of the projector.  We view tableaux mixing filmed footage with animated versions of the real Bronson’s own surreal prison sketches.  And we see many scenes that represent real incidents, but are told with incredible abstraction, as when the burly prisoner politely serves tea to a guard and an effeminate inmate, taking a macho pugilistic pose while the fop admires his physique with his prissy pinky sticking out from his teacup.  The uniformed cop stands stiffly and silently in the background like a guard at Buckingham Palace.

The most effective scenes have that mildly surreal, low-key Lynchian feel to them.  When Bronson (then still Peterson) is briefly furloughed, we find he doesn’t fit into the outside world anymore.  There is a constant tense feeling of social unease, coming from two directions: we always suspect Bronson could explode into brutality at any moment, but we also feel that at any moment he might be publicly humiliated.  There is a scene where he stumbles into a cocktail party at a brothel. He calmly sips on a drink with a paper umbrella in it while surrounded by harlots, transvestites and their gay pimp, all eyes focused on the Hercules in their midst.  The situation is bizarre, but it’s played straight so that the weirdness of it washes over you quietly.  More of the same subdued oddness ensues in his brief sojourn in society.  Refn takes care to always pose Bronson next to effete and overly civilized men, to exaggerate his raging masculinity and make him seem out of place.  But we are also aware that this tale is being told to us by Bronson, as unreliable a narrator as there ever was, and we suspect that the non-fighting male supporting characters may all come off as girly men simply because we are perceiving events through Bronson’s eyes.

When discussing the director’s achievements in Bronson, I have to point out that his use of music is superlative throughout.  Many of the key fight scenes are choreographed to bombastic pieces by Verdi or Wagner.  Throughout the film, even the shortest snippets of classical or techno-dance music perfectly accent the scenes they accompany.  Two brilliant musical sequences stand out in particular.  The first is an absurdist dance party where lunatics flail about spastically under bad mood lighting to the strains of the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s a Sin,” as a chemically lobotomized Bronson tries to stumble away from the action.  It’s like a nightmare version of the worst middle school dance you ever had the misfortune of attending.  The second notable scene is the climax, where Delibes ethereal “Flower Duet” provides an ironic and chilling commentary on Charlie’s final work of “art.”

Putting the content of Bronson (which you may or may not connect with) aside, this is a perfect film.  Taking it apart scene by scene and considering each in isolation, there is not one frame, not one artistic gambit, that I would quibble with or change.  It’s perfect in it’s small details, and really the only objection that can be raised against it is that it elevates style over substance.  But who cares, when the style is this exhilarating?  Bronson is a rare, almost miraculous case of everything coming together perfectly, of a director and an actor simultaneously clicking on all cylinders.

The movie could be considered empty.  It depicts Charles Bronson, or rather it depicts Charles Bronson’s depiction of himself, but it doesn’t explain him.  In the UK, where Bronson is a real local celebrity, some critics and viewers have sought to find social relevance, whether positive or negative, in the movie.  Some see it as apologizing for and even glorifying Bronson’s behavior.  I’m not sure that many outsiders, including its Danish director, see the film that way.  Surely there aren’t many teenagers who see the glamor in being walloped on by guards and thrown into the Hole.  And, watching Hardy’s consistently stubborn and antisocial behavior throughout the film, his sadistic attacks on innocents as well as prison guards, you would be hard-pressed to find many people who would see the movie as a call to free an unjustly imprisoned man.  Derek Malcolm of the London Evening Standard sees it as an indictment of the British prison system, but again, its hard to see non-Brits teasing that interpretation out of the film.  It was surely an injustice to move Bronson to a psychiatric hospital and drug him up to the point where he could hardly gather the strength to strangle his fellow patients, but that injustice is, sadly, made understandable in the film.  What else is there to do with a man whose only purpose in life is to beat on his neighbor, and who takes masochistic pride in the harshness of the punishment he receives?  A prisoner like Bronson is an unsolvable dilemma.  The British criminal justice system vainly tries to rehabilitate him, to channel his energy and creativity into drawing, but Bronson betrays them.  Neither ruthless punishment or humane rehabilitation has any effect on him, and the movie has no suggestion how any society could treat someone like Bronson any differently.

“I always wanted to be famous,” Bronson muses in his opening lines.  The final image shows Bronson standing in a cage too small to lie down in, bloodied and bruised, whimpering like a beaten animal.  It’s a scene that would evoke great sympathy, if not for the irony that the entire film has proven that this is Bronson’s choice: this is what he sought out, this is his reward, the validation of his dream to become Britain’s most violent prisoner.  Bronson doesn’t try to psychoanalyze its subject; it takes his words at face value.  Charles Bronson, in the film’s view, is a brute fact.  It doesn’t matter what we think of him—in his eyes, he remains our hero.  He’s keeping a private score in which he earns points each time he lands, and absorbs, a punch.  Even if he hadn’t spent 30 years in solitary confinement, he’d still be the world’s loneliest man. 

Bronson is a strange story of a strange man, and it begs to be told in a strange way.  It has been.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There’s no denying the film’s stylistic power: its stunning mix of surreal flashes, theatrical flourishes and impish camp. There’s just one thing missing from the Charles Bronson story: Charles Bronson… Refn refuses to address the Big Why: what has made this man the violent, masochistic creature he is?… That said, the performance of Tom Hardy… brings him to life in a weird, mythic way that has little to do with reality.”–Cosmo Landesman, The Sunday Times (London)

“…a weird and wonderful anti-biopic… a movie filled with startling, near-hallucinatory moments…”–Ali Catterall, Film 4

“Part literate black comedy, part surrealistic character study, part horror movie, ‘Bronson’ is a sophisticated confection, rich and dark, sprinkled with bitter little jokes.”–Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

OFFICIAL SITE: Bronson the Movie – Official Site – among the usual offerings such as cast and crew bios and the trailer, this site contains a streamable preview of the soundtrack

IMDB LINK: Bronson (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Lionising of a Monster – starting from the premise that the movie portrays Bronson as a victim, Geoffrey Wansell of the Daily Mail calls the film “tawdry, exploitative and indefensible”

Tom Hardy lifts the lid on Bronson – ITN clip on the movie’s release with quotes from star Tom Hardy

Nicolas Winding Refn on ‘Bronson’ – brief interview with the director from BlackBook.com

Jailhouse flick: Charles Bronson makes biopic from solitary – Report from the Times of London on Bronson’s involvement in the movie

Free Charles Bronson – “fansite” for the real life Charles Bronson; naturally, they provided extensive coverage of the movie, posting numerous reviews and interviews

DVD INFO: The Magnolia Home Entertainment DVD (buy) features a “making of” documentary; “Tom Hardy: Building a Body,” a featurette on the fitness regimen the star used to bulk up for the film; trailers and TV spots; an audio commentary of director Refn being interviewed by film critic Alan Jones; and a 16 minute audio introduction from Bronson himself (presumably, the same audio recording that caused a controversy at the London premiere). The film is also available in Blu-ray (buy) with the same features.

“Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”– Gene Fowler

DIRECTED BY: Joel Coen

FEATURING: John Turturro, John Goodman, Michael Lerner, Judy Davis, John Mahoney, Jon Polito, Steve Buscemi

PLOT: Barton Fink is a playwright whose first Broadway show, a play about the common man, is a smash success; his agent convinces him to sell while his stock is high and go to Hollywood to quickly make enough money to fund the rest of his writing career.  He arrives in Los Angeles, checks into the eerie art deco Hotel Earle, and is assigned to write a wrestling picture for Wallace Beery by the Capitol pictures studio head himself.  Suffering from writer’s block, Barton spends his days talking to the insurance salesman who lives in the room next door and seeking writing advice from alcoholic novelist W.P. Mayhew, until deadline day looms and very strange events begin to take center stage.

BACKGROUND:

• At the time, it was widely reported that the Coen brothers wrote the script for Barton Fink while suffering from a mean case of writer’s block trying to complete the screenplay to their third feature film, Miller’s Crossing.  The Coens themselves have since said that this description is an exaggeration, saying merely that their writing progress on the script had slowed and they felt they needed to get some distance from Miller’s Crossing by working on something else for a while.
• Barton Fink was the first and only film to win the Palme D’or, Best Director and Best Actor awards at the Cannes film festival; after this unprecedented success, Cannes initiated a rule that no film could win more than two awards.  Back home in the United States, Barton Fink was not even nominated for a Best Picture, Director or Actor Oscar. It did nab a Best Supporting Actor nom for Lerner.
• The character of Barton Fink was inspired by real life playwright Clifford Odets.  W.P. Mayhew was based in part on William Faulkner.  Jack Lipnick shares many characteristics, including a common birthplace, with 1940s MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer.
• Following a definite theme for the year, Judy Davis also played an author’s muse and lover in another surrealistic 1991 movie about a tortured writer, Naked Lunch.
• According to the Coens, the final scene with the pelican diving into the ocean was not planned, but was a happy accident.
• In interviews the Coens have steadfastly disavowed any intentional symbolic or allegorical reading of the final events of the film, saying”what isn’t crystal clear isn’t intended to become crystal clear, and it’s fine to leave it at that” and “the movie is intentionally ambiguous in ways they [critics] may not be used to seeing.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Barton Fink is full of mysterious images that speak beyond the frame.  The most popular and iconic picture is John Goodman wreathed in flame as the hallway of the Earle burns behind him.  Our pick would probably go to the final shot of the film, where a pelican suddenly and unexpectedly plummets into the ocean while a dazed Barton watches a girl on a beach assume the exact pose of a picture on his hotel wall.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A nightmarish, expressionistic, and self-satirizing evocation of

the difficulty of creation, Barton Fink pokes a sharpened stick into the deepest wounds of artistic self-doubt.  A pure mood piece, its amazing ending achieves the remarkable triumph of leaving us with nothing but unanswered questions, while simultaneously feeling complete and whole.

COMMENTS: The most accurate word to describe Barton Fink is “enigmatic.”  It’s a work of many contradictions: it’s an intricately written script about a scriptwriter who can’t write; it mercilessly mocks its hero, and at the same time deeply empathizes with his torment; it’s a movie without an ending, which turns out to be the perfect ending.  Constructed around the idea of writer’s block, it’s one of the most original and inspired movies ever made.

Barton Fink should be understood as an expressionist work, a movie where portraying the mental state of the protagonist is more important than the actual details of the plot.  The script deliberately puts the viewer into a misleading mindset by playing out its first half as a straightforward Hollywood satire, then turns the tables on the audience when one character’s unexplained death seemingly turns the film into a mystery.  And a mystery it is, though not the sort of mystery with a solution that moviegoers intentionally flock to theaters to see.  The mystery here is, for lack of a more precise term, metaphysical.  What happened to Audrey?  Who is Charlie?  What is in the box?  Viewers who demand definite and certain answers to these questions will have to look to their own imaginations.  They will not get help from the Coens’ movie.

The movie does proffer a likely answer to all three of those questions, and that answer is: “something horrible.”  Does it matter what?  Does knowing the exact height and weight of the boogeyman in the closet make it any less scary?  Although the mysterious events of the denouement are sometimes impossible, and always unresolved, they are perfectly externalized reflections of Barton’s mind.  He is mired in a nightmare of his own lack-of-making: he can’t create, he’s consumed with doubts and thinks that he may be a hack, that maybe he only had one story in him and it’s out.  His self-identity as a writer is threatened, and he senses doom coming with his approaching deadline.  He has locked himself inside, as he says, the “life of the mind,” and “there’s no road map for that territory, and exploring it can be painful.”  These words are spoken early in his writing career, and Barton’s being pretentious and grandiose when he preaches about the necessity of pain to the artist, but the suffering he romanticizes will be made less ridiculous when it materializes as a nightmare inside the creepy Hotel Earle.

Approaching Barton Fink as an allegory, while too tempting for many to resist, doesn’t work either, although that won’t stop those who aren’t used to seeing intentional ambiguity in a movie from imposing an unnecessary rationalism on the script.  Broad symbolism is apparent, and important, but it only tells a small part of the tale.  The most obvious symbol is Charlie, Barton’s next door neighbor at the Hotel Earle, who represents “the common man.”  Barton, who pictures himself as the champion of the working stiff and wants to create a “theater of the common man,” is actually a stuffy intellectual who has almost nothing in common with the class he hopes to uplift.  At the triumphant wrap party for his proletarian play “Bare Ruined Choirs,” Barton celebrates only with other people in dressed in tuxes and evening gowns.  He’s initially disdainful of the idea of working for Hollywood, never seeming to consider that it’s the big screen, not the Broadway stage, where common man gets most of his stories.  When a real-life common man barges into his room in the fleshy person of Charlie (a masterful John Goodman) and offers him a drink, Barton feels only a mixture of fight and annoyance.  Eventually he warms up to Charlie, after the insurance salesman pays him a few patronizing compliments, but he’s not interested in listening to this common man.  Three times in their initial conversation Charlie offers to “tell him some stories”; each time Barton interrupts the salesman to continue his lecture on how he’s striving to create stories that will explore the life of average, everyday people just struggling to make it in this world.

Barton’s pompous defense of the common man in theory, coupled with his condescension to the common man who’s sitting on his own bed, is funny and ironic.  It demonstrates dramatically how he’s cut off from his own inspiration.  It also feeds into a viable interpretation of the movie as a parable about the failure of leftist/socialist intellectuals, who theorized about the proletariat more than understood them, to stop the rise of fascism in Germany.  There are several references to World War II and the approaching Holocaust in the film, which begins in 1941 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.  At the end of the movie, studio mogul Lipnik is drafted to fight the “little yellow bastards.”  Two detectives have names which evoke the Axis powers.  Most tellingly, one character incongruously mutters the phrase, “heil Hitler.”  Barton, the wimpy intellectual, is impotent to stop the madness growing around him.

That interpretation is sustainable and ripe for the plucking, but it hardly addresses the heart of what’s tormenting Barton—that blank piece of paper in his Underwood typewriter staring back at him.  And it almost certainly doesn’t address the heart of what bothers the Coens, either.  If the conflict between Barton and Charlie symbolizes the ascension of the Nazis, then I suspect its equally true that, to the Coens, the rise of fascism itself represents something else, something more personal.

Unlike Barton, the Coens aren’t much interested in the class struggle or in using their art as a political platform; they aren’t enslaved to realism, social or otherwise, and discard it as an unwanted restriction whenever it gets in the way of the story they want to tell.  In fact, the movie could be read more as an aesthetic, rather than a political, indictment of the Finks of the world.  Barton grandstands that his art is important because it’s political and because it helps his fellow man, while avoiding plumbing the painful and messy depths of the human soul.  W.P. Mayhew, the writer Barton originally admires but comes to despise, is equally creatively constipated as the novice; the difference seems to be that the older writer’s alcoholism arises out of a real, rather than a theoretical, torment.

The Coens tightly pack lots of elements into the box that is Barton Fink.  The movie is almost impossibly stuffed full of recurring details to seize upon.  There’s the eerie atmosphere of the Hotel Earle, with its cataleptic elevator operator and ominously deserted hallways.  There’s hints of Barton’s sexual repression, seen in the spermlike paste which leaks off the peeling hotel wallpaper and the way he grimaces when Charlie shows him the naked lady on the underside of his tie.  There’s the broad comic relief of the Hollywood satire, with paunchy movie moguls talking out of both sides of their motormouths.  There are the indications that the Hotel Earle is hell itself.  There’s the fact that the little that we hear of the script Barton finally manages to write in a burst of inspiration, which he calls his best work, seems to repeat the wording of his play almost verbatim.  There’s the mystery of the significance of the picture of the girl reclining by the ocean Barton keeps staring it.  There’s the curious fact that the script inevitably refers to the movies as “pictures,” never by any other word.  There’s the fun of counting the number of times characters say the word “head.”  There’s that mysterious box Charlie gives Barton to hold onto when he leaves town.

“What’s in the box?,” Barton is asked at the end of the film.  Were this any other film, we could trust the hints that we had been given, and say that we know with certainty what’s in that box.  In this movie, we can’t quite be sure.  Like Barton, I don’t know what’s in the box.  Like Barton, I’m not so sure I want to know.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird, it is the kind of movie critics can soak up thousands of words analyzing and cinephiles can soak up at least three espressos arguing their way through… [the Coens] dreamlike realization of their script, though often imagistically striking, deliberately subverts their message and all too often alienates the viewer.”–Richard Schickel, Time (contemporaneous)

“…a middling ability to ape the moods and stylistic mannerisms of Roman Polanski, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch…  basically a midnight-movie gross-out in Sunday-afternoon art-house clothing.”–Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

“The surrealistic writer’s block scenes, in which Barton silently watches wallpaper peel and its paste ooze, are particularly memorable–imagine ERASERHEAD in color. Ultimately, however, the look, sound and feel of this macabre comedy fail to support any coherent theme.”–TV Guide

IMDB LINK: Barton Fink (1991)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

At the Movies – Siskel and Ebert’s contemporaneous “two thumbs up” review from their television show

000_Barton Fink – fascinating multimedia presentation of Barton Fink, which draws connections between various motifs in the film and raises more questions than answers

Barton Fink at “You Know, For Kids” – basic information and trivia on the film from a Coen brothers fansite; poke around under the categories “scripts,” “multimedia,” and “reviews” for more Barton Fink goodies

“Barton Fink” – excellent excerpt from “Nietzsche: The Darkness of Life,” the Barton Fink chapter of Jorn K. Bramann’s “Educating Rita and Other Philosophical Movies,” suggesting that the movie reflects the irrational nature of art described in Friedrich Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy”

Coen Brothers Want John Turturro to Get Old for “Barton Fink” Sequel, “Old Fink” – Adam Rosenberg of MTV reports on the possibility of a Fink II

DVD INFO: Barton Fink took a shamefully long time to arrive on DVD, but in 2003 20th Century corrected the oversight with a one disc edition (buy). Extras are sparse: there are only trailers, a stills gallery, and eight inconsequential deleted scenes (the Coens don’t do commentaries, and in fact appear to be philosophically opposed to them).

An excellent way to acquire the movie is to spend a few dollars more to get the five-disc “The Coen Brothers Movie Collection” set (buy), which also includes Blood Simple, the nearly weird comedy Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, and Fargo. All are excellent movies.

[(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Deacon Lowdown.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)]

FEATURING: Daniel Day-Lewis, Stacy Ferguson (“Fergie”), Penélope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren

PLOT: Celebrity director Guido Contini finds he can’t get started on his latest movie

script because the women he’s romantically entangled with keep bursting into song whenever he’s around.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Musicals, by their very nature, are a little weird, because in everyday life people very rarely ask you for the time in the key of A flat minor.  The musical genre traditionally atones for the sin of departing from reality by doubling over backwards to be reassuringly conventional in narrative and thoughtlessly blithe in message.  Nine is no exception to the general rule; we only cover it here because it was inspired loosely by the great weird film 8 1/2 and it’s fascinating director, Federico Fellini.

COMMENTS:  First things first: Nine, while inspired by Fellini’s 8 1/2, is obviously aimed at those who never saw the original film, or who saw it but didn’t like it much.  Keeping that in mind off the bat makes the film feel much less like an insult to the maestro’s memory, and much more like what it is: a highly fictionalized puff piece that aims solely to entertain, while presenting the artist’s struggle to create as just another two-dimensional backdrop for the song-and-dance spectaculars.  Except that these songs and dances are not really spectacular, so much as acceptable.  The tableaux—which range from minimalist tinker-toy girders to a sequined Folies Bergère nightclub to a fashion runway strobe-lit by paparazzi flashes (the irony!)—are all flashy, pretty and eye-catching enough.  The problem is that it would be, for the most part, an act of charity to describe the melodies as memorable, so that most of the numbers come across as all sparkle and no spark.  The one exception is provided by Stacy Ferguson (better known as Fergie).  Putting the only professional singer in the cast together with the movie’s only hummable melody (“Be Italian”) is an eggs-in-all-one-basket strategy that gives audiences something to remember, but also highlights the mediocrity of the rest of the musical performances.  As for the rest of the star-studded female cast, none can really sing or dance, and there is an unrelenting sameness to their lyrics (which are mostly about how each dame would rather be sleeping with Daniel Day-Lewis than doing whatever she’s doing now).  At some point the musical numbers become numbing interruptions that make the melodrama interesting by comparison.  Day-Lewis’ Italian accent is passable and he does invest his Guido with a charming childlike quality that almost makes his irresistibility to women believable; but, though he’s game enough, he just can’t carry a tune, and having him half-sing/half-talk through the climactic songs is no solution.  Still, the razzle-dazzle of the production numbers, numerous cameos (i.e., Sophia Loren) and Fellini references, Fergie’s musical triumph, and a vampy song by Cruz—whose lingerie-clad tramp around a mirrored floor while wrapping pink ropes around her willowy frame is sultry enough to make her song and dance talents irrelevant—are enough to transform Nine into passable, if forgettable, entertainment.  Plus, it features more corsets and fishnet stockings per minute than you’ll see outside of a fetish video, which can hardly be considered a bad thing.

Nine isn’t really inspired so much by 8 1/2 as it’s inspired by the most famous scene of 8 1/2, the harem/lion tamer sequence, where Guido famously envisions himself as being adored, then harried, by the various females in his life.  The fact that the movie’s psychology ignores all other aspects of the director’s creativity and inner artistic torments in favor of the reductionist “it’s all because he’s conflicted about his unrealistic image of women” is disappointing, but hardly surprising considering this is squarely middlebrow Hollywood stuff.  After all, what else would you expect from a movie whose title announces its intentions by rounding up an inconveniently weird partial number to a nice, easily digestible integer?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The challenge for Marshall, following his Oscar-winning Chicago, was to bring another hallucinatory musical to the screen without repeating himself or dimming the material’s blazing, untamed theatricality. By my score card, Marshall hits more than he misses.”–Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

DIRECTED BY: Charlie Kaufman

FEATURING: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener

PLOT: Caden is a community theater director in Schenectady, New York, whose marriage and health are crumbling.  When things seem their lowest—his wife abandons him, and he believes that he’s dying—he inexplicably receives a MacArthur Genius grant.  He uses the money to create a meticulous recreation of New York City inside a warehouse, filled with actors playing characters from his own life, including one playing Caden the director himself.

BACKGROUND:

• Synecdoche is the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, who has been the screenwriter behind most of Hollywood’s big-budget weird films in the past decade.  His scripting credits include Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
• Kaufman began the script for Synecdoche as a horror film to be directed by frequent collaborator Spike Jonze.  Over two years the script evolved into its current tragicomedy form, and, as Jonze was busy with other projects, it was agreed that Kaufman would direct, with Jonze co-producing.
• Synecdoche, New York won the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best first feature.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Synecdoche is a movie that weirds us out more through the concepts and dramatic situations than through the visuals, but there is a lovely image of a tattooed rose that physically sheds a real dead petal as its owner expires.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Charlie Kaufman.  More to the point, Charlie Kaufman unleashed; unlike Being John Malkovich or Adaptation, where weird and puzzling events are given a rational (if obscure) answer by the end, the weirdness of Synecdoche deliberately frustrates all attempts at a logical solution.  Hazel’s house, which burns and smokes for decades without being consumed, is shamelessly absurd.  The movie is an exploration of dream logic, a life journey that fractures time, space and coherence, where individual events do not add up piece by piece on a plot level, but resolve themselves on an emotional level.

Original trailer for Synecdoche, New York

COMMENTS: “There is a secret something at play under the surface, growing like an invisible virus of thought.”  This might sound like a soundbite from a pretentious review of Synecdoche, New York, but it’s actually a snippet of the soundtrack of a children’s cartoon that’s overheard in the early moments of the movie.  Long before Hazel moves into her burning house with its extremely motivated seller, little clues like this have been scattered throughout to tell us that Caden Cotard’s strange world is very far away indeed from ours.

There are so many tiny bizarre details spread throughout the movie that it demands a second and third viewing to catch most of them.  Most people will not notice the fact that, according to newspapers and dates on milk cartons, several months pass on that first day.  As the movie progresses, it becomes more and more undeniable that we’re trapped in a bewildering land indeed.  A four year old child prodigy writes a novel about a virulent anti-Semite (later turned into a feature film), and kills himself at five.  Caden is pressured into buying a self-help book written by his therapist, and before cracking it open he looks it up on the Internet to find that an animated icon of himself is already shilling it: “It will change my life!”  For no reason that’s ever explained, a stalker follows him everywhere for years on end, which later qualifies him to be cast in the role of Caden Cotard in the play put on by Caden Cotard.

A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part is used to represent the whole (or less commonly, the whole is used to represent a part).  An example is speaking of a “head” of cattle when we mean the entire cow, saying “all hands on deck” when we mean the entire crew (not just their hands), or using the term “the big screen” to represent the entire movie industry.  In a way, every serious work of dramatic art is an attempt at synecdoche, because every story intends to say something universal about some aspect of human experience and existence by using particular characters in a particular situation as an illustration.  “Macbeth” is about unchecked ambition, with the fatally ambitious Scot playing the part that represents the deadly whole.

Synecdoche is also pronounced almost exactly like “Schenectady,” the New York town where Caden lives at the beginning of the movie.  The synecdoche/Schenectady confusion/similarity doesn’t stand alone: a number of homonyms and sound-alike word pairs reverberate throughout the script.  When Caden wakes his sleepy wife to tell her he has blood in his stool, she thinks he’s talking about his work stool.  When a doctor refers him to an ophthalmologist, Caden mishears and thinks he’s being referred to a neurologist; then, when the ophthalmologist in turn refers him to a neurologist, he thinks he’s being sent to a urologist.  Caden suffers from sycosis, a skin disease that’s giving him unsightly facial boils, but he takes pains to explains to his uncomprehending four year old daughter that he’s not suffering from psychosis–although we in the audience may disagree.  Throughout the film, words constantly slip, failing to correctly convey the thing they’re supposed to refer to.

Caden’s great project, the simulacrum of the city of New York staged inside a giant warehouse, also inevitably fails to recreate the reality of what it intends to represent.  Seeking truth, determined to be completely accurate in his depiction of the city, he finds he is facing an insoluble problem.  The city he is trying to capture with total, unflinching realism contains a warehouse in which a director is trying to create a lifelike representation of New York City.  So, to be true to life, he must create another warehouse inside his warehouse.  And, there is also a director inside the warehouse, so he must cast an actor in that role; but now there is an actor playing the role of a director inside the warehouse, so he must find someone to play that part too.  Soon, there are doubles and triples of each character running around and warehouses nested inside warehouses, and it becomes obvious that it will be impossible to literally create the totally uncompromising and true to life project Caden seems to need to give his life meaning.

On this level, the theme of the movie resembles the 1946 Jorge Luis Borges short story “On Exactitude in Science,” in which royal cartographers can only make a totally accurate map of an empire by making it on a scale of one mile to one mile, so that the map ends up being exactly as large as the kingdom itself.  Writers have been exploring these ideas of recursion and infinite regress of thought and language–the concept that it’s impossible to express everything, because once we make our expression, we now must express that expression too, and so on to infinity–for years.  Kaufman is the first screenwriter to successfully explore this idea in movies.  The implication of the philosophical concept of recursion is that it’s impossible to truly know everything.  “Why is the sky blue?” Because the atmosphere scatters light at that precise wavelength.  “Why does the atmosphere scatter light?”  Following this line of thinking, we quickly realize that we cannot ever get to the bottom of things; our minds aren’t equipped and designed to comprehend ultimate reality.  For every answer we get, we can always ask one more “why?”  Trying to think our way to the ultimate truth, we find ourselves in a situation just like Caden with his infinite warehouses.

Caden tries to understand his bewildering and irrational world through his art, but he finds it’s impossible to do what he’s set out to do: to understand everything, to reflect everything.  His situation is absurd, but he persists.  As he obsessively sets his mind to the task, he grows from a spineless jellyfish who gets dumped on and abandoned by his first wife to someone who exudes confidence and control–at least on the set.  His personal life remains a sad mess.  As we watch him we grow to respect the fact that, although the task he’s set for himself is impossible, he presses on.  And his quest, although futile and halted by death, does actually give his life meaning, and gives him the strength to push forward through the disappointments of life.

And these disappointments are many; Kaufman is particularly cruel to Caden.  The director’s first wife, Adele, doesn’t respect his theatrical work and abandons him to become a famous artist herself.  He blows his chance at love with box office cutie Hazel. He ruins his relationship with a second wife by remaining obsessed with his former family and with his work.  Most painfully, his daughter Olive is taken from him, turned into a tattooist’s canvas by Adele’s lesbian lover, and lied to and told that her father has abandoned her.  Caden finds her, finally, as she’s dying.  In absurdly specific terms, she asks him to confess that he abandoned her for his homosexual lover so she can forgive him before she dies.  Reluctantly, he confesses to the lie; but she finds she still can’t forgive him, and expires.

The scene is completely impossible, from the improbability of Olive’s abduction to the headsets that magically translate her German speech to the dead rose petal that falls off her infected tattoo.  But the emotional reality of the situation is real, and gut-wrenching.  That’s the secret of Synecdoche.  Although we can’t make literal sense of the incidents that make up Caden’s life, by the end of the movie, we nonetheless know him, pity him, and admire him.  As one of the crew members observed on the DVD documentary, “it’s not about the way the plot adds up, but it’s about the way the feelings add up.”  Life may be bewildering, confusing, and frustrate our intellectual and artistic attempts to understand it; but the one thing we can do is recognize each other and our shared humanity.

Synechdoche the movie is so huge, and raises so many fascinating ideas, that it is impossible to do it justice in a short essay.  I have not mentioned the nearly flawless, mostly female, ensemble acting.  I haven’t mentioned Cotard’s Syndrome, or the hints in the movie that Caden may have committed suicide.  I have only hinted at the movie’s great sense of humor: the exchanges between Caden and his passively hostile host of specialist physicians are small masterpieces of sharp verbal comedy.  And I haven’t mentioned that this movie’s greatest flaw is that it’s fantastic sense of absurdist humor, which makes the first three-fourths of the movie so exhilarating despite the humiliations Caden suffers, deserts it in the dour and depressing final half hour as the director’s life runs out.  If I haven’t discussed these and other points in the detail they deserve, then such is the impossibility of describing a movie that’s so sprawling, jumbled, and intensely detailed.

Synecdoche, New York is an immense, over-ambitious work that attempts to be “about everything–dating, birth, death, life, family, all that.”  Such a project is obviously impossible and doomed to failure.  But, the film is also about the doomed impossibility of creating and immense, over-ambitious work of art about everything, about the regret that accompanies that futility, and about the necessity of continuing on regardless.  Caden’s play staged in the warehouse is an attempted synecdoche of his life, a part standing for the whole.  A single life, such as Caden’s, is also a synecdoche for all human life. And Synecdoche, New York, this confused and confusing thing, is a synecdoche of itself, and a synecdoche of us.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…just when you think it’s safe to go back to the movies, the plunger sucks up something from a clogged drain like the unspeakable, unpronounceable Synecdoche, New York, and you’re forced to take back every prematurely made prophecy about ‘the worst movie ever made.’ Because no matter how bad you think the worst movie ever made ever was, you have not seen Synecdoche, New York. It sinks to the ultimate bottom of the landfill, and the smell threatens to linger from here to infinity.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

“…a portrait of a creative mind in artistic and emotional crisis, painted as a vast mural that encompasses 30-plus years, slips from mundane reality into nightmare fantasy…No film with an ambition this large, and achievement this impressive, can be anything but exhilarating… a miracle movie.”–Richard Corliss, Time (contemporaneous)

“With Charlie Kaufman… one expects something weird and wonderful. So it will come as no surprise that ‘weird’ is an apt descriptor for Synecdoche, New York... But ‘wonderful?’ Not really. This is the kind of maddening, overstuffed, overambitious, self-indulgent motion picture that will divide critics and viewers (those few who see it)… less a movie than a series of disjointed meditations on art, death, and the connection between the two. Viewers who love to ascribe meaning to the cryptic will have a field day. To me, it seems more like weirdness for weirdness’ sake.”–James Beradinelli, Reelviews (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Synecdoche, New York – Sony Pictures.  Fans will want to download the press kit available here, which contains detailed bios of everyone involved in the film as well as ruminations on the intent behind the film from Kaufman and others.

IMDB LINK:  Synecdoche, New York (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s New Film – montage of clips and soundbites from Hoffman, Kaufman and Catherine Keener on the film, produced by CBS television

Life Is a Dress Rehearsal: Charlie Kaufman’s Great Warehouse Experiment – Penetrating essay/review by Leo Robson of The London Times putting Synecdoche in the context of Kaufman’s entire body of work

Twitch – Synecdoche, New York – Interview with Charlie Kaufman – Interview with Kaufman centering around the dream logic of the film–although the interviewer, an expert on Jungian dream theory, spends more time elucidating his own interpretations of the film than Kaufman does supplying insights

DVD INFO:  The Sony Pictures DVD (buy) is almost reverential, packed with extras: a 19 minute documentary on the production; a 12 minute documentary starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman discussing Caden’s character; a 36 minute “bloggers roundtable” with five smart web-based reviewers discussing the movie; full-length versions of the three disturbing, surreal cartoons that are visible in the background of the movie; and footage of a 27 minute interview with Charlie Kaufman at a “The Script Factory” seminar where he discusses each of his scripts in chronological order, ending with Synecdoche (which is only very briefly discussed).  Also available on Blu-ray (buy).

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Zeldon.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: David Cronenberg

FEATURING:  Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Julian Sands

PLOT:  Bill Lee is a writer/exterminator in New York City whose wife begins mainlining the bug powder he uses to kill roaches, and convinces him to try it as well.  He becomes addicted to the powder, and one night shoots his wife dead while playing “William Tell.”  Lee goes on the lam and lands in Interzone, an exotic free zone reminiscent of Tangier or Casablanca (but which may exist only in his mind), where he begins taking ever more powerful drugs and typing out “reports” partially dictated to him by his living, insectoid typewriter.

BACKGROUND:

• William S. Burroughs’s original novel Naked Lunch was selected as one of the 100 best English language novels written after 1923 by Time magazine.
• The novel was held not to be obscene by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966.  This was the final obscenity prosecution of a literary work in the United States; there would be no subsequent censorship of the written word (standing alone).
• Several directors had considered filming the novel before David Cronenberg got the project.  Avant-garde director Anthony Balch wanted to adapt it as a musical (with Burroughs’s blessing), and actually got as far as storyboarding the project and getting a commitment from Mick Jagger (who later backed out) to star.  Among others briefly interested in adapting the novel in some form were Terry Southern, John Huston, Frank Zappa, and Terry Gilliam.
• Because the novel was essentially a plotless series of hallucinatory vignettes (what Burroughs called “routines’), David Cronenberg chose to make the movie a thinly veiled tale about Burroughs’s writing of the novel, incorporating only a few of the actual characters and incidents from the book.  Actors in the film portray real-life writers and Burroughs associates Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Paul and Jane Bowles.
• The episode in the film where Lee accidentally shoots his wife while performing the “William Tell routine” is taken from Burroughs real life: he actually shot his common law wife while performing a similar trick in a Mexican bar.  Burroughs felt tremendous guilt through his life for the accident and has said “I would have never become a writer but for Joan’s death.”
• Naked Lunch won seven awards at the Genie Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Oscars), including Best Movie and Best Director.
• Producer Jeremy Thomas has somewhat specialized in bringing weird and unusual fare to the largest possible audience, producing not only Naked Lunch but also Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) and Tideland (2005).
• Following a definite theme for the year, Judy Davis also played an author’s muse and lover in another surrealistic 1991 movie about a tortured writer, Barton Fink.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Clark Nova, Lee’s territorial, talking typewriter, who alternately guides and torments the writer.  He’s a beetle who has somehow evolved a QWERTY keyboard as an organ. When he speaks, he lifts his wings to reveal a sphincter through which he dictates his directives.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  It begins with an exterminator who does his rounds wearing a

Original trailer for Naked Lunch

three piece suit and fedora.  His philosophy is to “exterminate all rational thought.”  His wife steals his insecticide and injects it into her breast to get high, and gets him hooked on the bug power, too.  A pair of cops question him on suspicion of possessing dangerous narcotics, and leave him alone in the interrogation room with a huge talking “caseworker” bug who explains that his wife is an agent of Interzone, Incorporated, and is not even human.  And this is just the setup, before the film turns really weird.

COMMENTS:  Make no mistake: Naked Lunch is clearly David Cronenberg’s movie, not William S. Burroughs’.  The original novel, while well-written in splotches, was more notorious for its obscurity and its stylistic and thematic taboo-breaking than it was celebrated for its literary quality.  And the novel’s ultimate importance comes not from its internal experimentalism (an evolutionary dead end which failed to bear literary progeny), but from the external symbolism that arose when it became a cause celebre in the battle for free speech and free thought in the early 1960s.  Naked Lunch, with its homosexual rape fantasies wrapped in a shroud of lyrical prose, triumphed in court over the censors’ last-ditch attempts to control what Americans could put into their minds.  It became one of those novels that is much more read about than read, and Burroughs—junky, manslaughterer, and wild prose stylist—became the ultimate symbol of the literary outlaw.

Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch isn’t an adaptation of the novel, although it incorporates a few of Burroughs’s “routines.” Instead, it’s about the process of writing the novel, an exaggerated account of the agonizing pangs of pushing a creative work out of the author’s womb.  Abstracted, Cronenberg’s plot is simple: Bill Lee (an obvious stand-in for Burroughs) accidentally shoots his wife, is tormented by the act and falls into a paranoid drug and sex addiction, all the while writing a novel trying to sort out his feelings about the incident.  (Viewers who complained Cronenberg’s plot was incomprehensible had best stay far away from the source novel).

Given that this basically simple story is told through the hallucinatory haze of constant intoxication and paranoia, the incidents that make up the majority of the film are virtually arbitrary, important only insofar as they convey Lee’s internal state of guilt, torment and confusion. There is at least one scene which makes this abundantly clear: Ian Holmes (portraying expatriate author Tom Frost) mentions that he heard Lee murdered his wife, and casually confesses that he is slowly killing his own wife with drugs and witchcraft.  Lee, alarmed, asks him how he can be discussing this, and Frost answers, “This is all happening telepathically, non-consciously.  If you look carefully at my lips, you’ll see I’m actually talking about something else.”  And he is: his lips movements do not match his words.

Within certain parameters, anything can happen inside the story of Naked Lunch: typewriters can speak through their anuses, characters can turn into each other or metamorphose into sexually ravenous centipedes, sexual desire can materialize into an amorphous living blob and be chased out of the room by a maid dressed as a dominatrix.  But there are a few inflexible boundaries in Interzone, the Moroccan fantasyland Lee flees to to complete his “report,” that are built from Lee’s psychological preoccupations:

Lee will always be stoned.  Opiate addiction was the most central fact in Burroughs’s day-to-day existence during the time he was writing Naked Lunch, and it’s Bill’s core reality, as well.  Lee samples a fantastical pharmacopeia of exotic drugs—bug powder, the ground meat of the black centipede, and “Mugwump jism”—whose effects and power to alter reality are unlimited.  He supplements this diet of fictional intoxicants with mahjoun (a Moroccan hashish concoction) and alcohol.  The constant flow of psychotropic substances in his bloodstream provides the explanation for the hallucinatory vignettes, and also indicates the depth of his need to flee reality.

Lee will remain sexually ambivalent. Burroughs was himself a bisexual, and used his writing to nonjudgementally explore his homosexual urges and fantasies to their absurd limits.  Bill Lee is more sexually ambiguous; he seems to be encountering his own repressed homosexuality as the film goes on.  This aspect of the script is not fully explored, but it adds another undercurrent of mystery and ambiguity to Lee’s search for his self through his writing.

Lee will always write.  Cronenberg’s choice to anthropomorphize the typewriters in Naked Lunch was a stroke of genius.  The idea of a writer sitting down in front of a blank page and struggling with himself over what to type on it is inherently uncinematic.  The director solved this problem by having the typewriter talk back, debating with its owner and occasionally pulling him down psychological roads he would rather not trod.  Lee’s relationship with his Clark Nova typewriter is his most intimate bond.

Lee will always feel guilty.  The idea that guilt from the slaying of his wife was the impetus for Burroughs’s writing career is not a unique one; the author frankly stated as much.  Cronenberg keeps the motivation constantly in the background.  Bill’s mind resurrects the dead Joan Lee in Interzone as the living Joan Frost, and Bill once again romances her, and this time tries to rescue her.  Joan figures prominently in the last scene of the film, when Bill is leaving Interzone for Annexia and presumably returning to the normal world, in a conclusion that makes it crystal clear that her death is the central pivot of the movie.

Lee will always receive communiques and dispatches from mysterious creatures.  From the caseworker bug who tells him Joan is an alien agent and must die to the Mugwump that tells him to write a report on the killing (“with all the tasty details”) and provides him his ticket to Interzone to the Clark Nova typewriter who advises him that “homosexuality is the best cover an agent can have,” Bill constantly imagines himself as manipulated by entities which speak to him alone.  The content of the missions and assignments that these insectoid and alien overlords send Lee on are irrelevant.  They exist to explore Burroughs’s preoccupation with the idea of control: the control of the drug over the addict’ of the sexual impulse over the person; and the ego as the censor of the subconscious, the parts of the psyche we would rather not acknowledge but which the artist must explore.

These five elements–intoxication, sex, writing, guilt, and paranoia–form the walls within which the seemingly incoherent and undisciplined drama of Naked Lunch plays out.  Peter Weller’s deadpan performance further grounds us within this psychologically teeming nightmare world.  Fedora tightly screwed on, he strides among these horrors tight-lipped and poker-faced.  He acts like a 1940s private eye; he has the composure to quip about crabs when cops bring him in for questioning on drug possession, and he reacts to the horrific appearance of a hallucinated talking cockroach with the same suave coolness as Sam Spade confronted by a pistol-packing palooka.  His public demeanor is controlled, but when he’s trapped inside his shabby Interzone apartment with the D.T.s and only his typewriter to talk to, his impassive face cracks and his haunted agony bleeds through.

Cronenberg also creates a consistent visual and aural landscape to keep his world from totally spinning out of control.  The film is shot in a rich brown color scheme that subtly suggests a fecal theme.  Interzone is an exotic Arabic creation of the mind, but look very closely to see how the director subliminally blends features of New York City into the landscape to suggest that in reality Lee has never left the city at all.  The soundtrack (available on available on Milan Records), featuring the free-jazz wailing of saxophone legend Ornette Coleman layered over the exotic and sinister orchestration of Howard Shore, is truly a thing of wonder.  The contrast between Coleman’s wildly imaginative and unconstrained phrasings nestled within Shore’s carefully studied and atmospheric harmonies suggest the collaboration between Cronenberg and Burroughs in the film: just as Shore’s score grounds and contains Ornette’s free-form improvisation without destroying or betraying it, Cronenberg’s film world creates a space that can be decorated by Burroughs’ wild spirit.

What Cronenberg ultimately achieves in Naked Lunch is to tap into the iconography of William S. Burroughs.  Burroughs’s greatest creation was not any of his writings, but himself.  This drug-addicted author became the modern romantic archetype of the artist: tortured, but completely free of social convention, a psychic seeker traveling deep into realms of human greatness and depravity and returning with forbidden wisdom.  That the ending provides no real wisdom, but rather leads into a circular paradox, is immaterial.  Like Interzone itself, it’s the illusion that is the reality.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“By the time it reaches a repellent fever pitch…  ’Naked Lunch’ has become too stomach-turning and gone too far over the top to regain its initial aplomb. Yet for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“What ‘Naked Lunch’ jettisons are the narrative signposts that usually anchor Cronenberg’s films. Without them, the movie engrosses or bores on the strength of each sequence, and not all of it fascinates equally. A fever dream told in a chilly, controlled style, it is irrational in a matter-of-fact, deliberate way. Obviously this is not everybody’s cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it’s one clammily compelling movie.”–David Ansen, Newsweek (contemporaneous)

“It’s a movie about a writer’s relationship to his work — and, as such, perhaps one of the most penetrating examinations of a writer’s processes ever made. Certainly it’s one of the strangest and most disturbing… There’s a synergistic overlap here between Cronenberg’s own particular brand of weirdness and Burroughs’s; they’re both twisted in ways that complement each other nicely.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK:  Naked Lunch (1991)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Naked Lunch (1991): The Criterion Collection:  More details on the DVD release, links to two essays on Burroughs and the film, and a discussion board.

“Naked Lunch”: Behind the Scenes:  Contemporaneous Entertainment Weekly article with quotes from Cronenberg and Burroughs

DVD INFO:  The Criterion Collection edition (buy) is the definitive release.  The two-disc set features a new digital transfer, intercut commentaries by director Cronenberg and star Weller, a 45 minute “making of” documentary, an extensive collection of segments from the novel read by Burroughs himself, a collection of stills from the movie, rare pictures of Burroughs from the collection of Allen Ginsberg, trailers, and a small booklet containing essays on the film.

An out-of-print single-disc version of the film for the budget minded can also be found (buy).  Extras are unknown.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Rui.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze

FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Columbus

PLOT:  Adaptation tells two stories: in one, a “New Yorker” journalist (Meryl

Streep) becomes obsessed with the subject of her nonfiction book, a trashy but passionate collector of orchids (Chris Cooper); in the other, a depressed screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) struggles to adapt her book “The Orchid Thief” into a movie, while fending off his chipper and vapid twin brother (also played by Cage), himself an ersatz screenwriter.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Adaptation is a metamovie, the filmed equivalent of metafiction (a literary style where the real subject of the work is not the ostensible plot, but the process of creating of the work itself).  In Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) inserts a fictionalized version of himself into the script, writing and rewriting the story as the movie progresses.  Adaptation may appear unusual, and even weird to those who aren’t used to this kind of recursive style, but it’s a purely intellectual exercise about the creative process, and the mysteries presented in the movie have a purely logical explanation when considered in their literary context.

COMMENTS:  Adaptation sports perhaps the smartest script written in this young millennium, a story which twists and turns back upon itself with sly wit and playful intelligence.  (The screenplay was nominated by the Academy for “Best Adapted Screenplay”; maybe it would have won if it had been properly nominated in the “Best Original Screenplay” category).  In addition, the acting by the three principals—toothless and trashy Chris Cooper as the orchid thief, Meryl Streep as a jaded, intellectual journalist drained of passion, and Nick Cage as the twins, Charlie and Donald Kaufman—shows three veterans at the very peak of their games.   All three were nominated for Oscars, and Cooper won for “Best Supporting Actor.”   As good as Cooper was, it’s Cage’s magical performance as the writer paralyzed by artistic ambition and self-doubt, and also as his clueless doppelganger with a maddening Midas touch, that carries the film.  This is easily Cage’s best performance in an uneven career.

Despite the superlative script and performances, Adaptation falls just short of being an unqualified classic.  The problem is that the secondary plot—despite such welcome spectacles as Meryl Streep trying to imitate a dial tone while tripping balls—pales beside the more intriguing internal struggle of poor Charlie Kaufman.  When Streep and Cooper are on screen, we are always anxious to get back to Cage throwing barbs at himself.  Adaptation is geared towards a specialized audience—mainly writers, movie reviewers and other highly creative types—but will also appeal to fanatical film fans and industry insiders and would-be insiders who want to have a good wicked laugh at the cutthroat compromises required to bring a screenplay to life in Hollywood.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an occasionally maddening and sometimes brilliant motion picture that varies between being insightfully sharp and insufferably self-indulgent…  I can’t imagine Adaptation having much mainstream appeal, but, for those who look for something genuinely off-the-wall in a motion picture, this will unquestionably strike a nerve.”  -James Berardinelli, Reel Views