Somewhere: A time and space for us

One is characterized by decadence and girlhood, the other by austerity and manhood, but both are fun and dryly funny, both remarkably tender, and both orbit a system of privilege and unapologetically acknowledge the ennui can afflict its stars. Perhaps the important difference concerns the nature of these films’ central relationships. Between making Marie Antoinette and Somewhere Sofia Coppola had a child, and somewhere in the interim the latter became less about a male movie star whose soul has evaporated under the limelight than a father who attempts to breach the distance between he and his daughter with the utmost gentleness, as though the slightest hint of exertion might throw off the whole gambit. The hero of Somewhere almost never looks like he’s working hard, and neither does its director. That’s the charm of Coppola’s filmmaking, and it takes some kind of miserly grouch to dismiss her work for its buoyancy. Okay, miserly and impatient. Somewhere is a lovely, witty, touching film, but it’s not going anywhere fast.

It opens with Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) driving his Ferrari in high-speed circles, a closed circuit that flatly summarizes the current course of his existence, drifting between parties, press junkets and award ceremonies. He’s driving on autopilot, as is most hilariously evident in a scene where he goes to bed with a stranger and falls asleep in her vagina. He breaks his arm in a party accident, and holes up at the Chateau Marmont, where he runs into Benicio Del Toro in the lift. More for consolation than arousal, we see Johnny hire a private pole-dancing performance from blonde twins preparing for their exam. Soon afterward we see Johnny watch 11-year-old Cleo (Elle Fanning) rehearse a figure skating routine, and while there’s a detectable similarity in Johnny’s response, a calm, paternal, indiscriminate sort of encouragement, we’re never meant to confuse Johnny’s affection for seducible young women with his quietly anxious adoration for his daughter. That would be a sleazier, easier film than the one Coppola’s crafted here. What follows is simple enough—Johnny, normally a strictly short-term parent, finding himself the guardian of a tween over an extended period—yet what happens under the surface of Johnny and Elle’s time together is anything but. As father and daughter hang out and travel together, mostly in familial harmony, emotional contracts are discreetly redrawn. Something changes for both characters, though these changes are only suggested by Coppola’s use of sequence, music, and image (her shooter is the great Harris Savides).

And, of course, by the actors. Dorff is brilliantly cast. If he were an A-list celebrity his tabloid status might have interfered with the Coppola’s focus on intimate relationships, with the film world residing always in the background. More importantly, Dorff’s smiles retain something of his co-star’s adolescent lightness, while in other scenes he exhibits the weight of his years through an exhausted slouch. His comic timing’s inspired. In a bit where he gets a text message that reads, Why are you such an asshole?, it’s Dorff’s utterly nonplussed response that constitutes the scene’s punchline. Fanning meanwhile is radiant and touchingly real, natural without any self-consciousness, the ideal product of an acting clan in that she bears none of the ingratiating qualities of many child actors yet seems completely at ease before the cameras. Her role inevitably prompts us to seek parallels between Cleo’s childhood and the director’s, but I suspect Francis Ford Coppola’s life was awfully messier and more fraught with business crises than Johnny’s. My feeling is that autobiography is the film’s seasoning, not its meat. Somewhere is finally very much in keeping with Coppola’s ongoing concerns, particularly those of Lost in Translation, with which it shares some similar turning points. But it’s also a step forward from that earlier film’s portrait of life as permanent transit. By the time we’ve reached the end of this entry into the cinema of dislocation, there’s the sense that perhaps Somewhere truly does find a place for us.

Navigating the Milky way: the fertile tension between Gus Van Sant and the gay mainstream

Gus Van Sant and Harvey Milk were always destined to seem either an ideal hook-up or a sort of studio-contrived shotgun wedding. That the most famed and acclaimed openly gay filmmaker in the US should helm the long-in-development biopic about the first openly gay man to herald the gay cause in US politics seems obvious until you start to consider the complicated nature of Van Sant’s previous contributions to gay cinema.

I more or less grew up with Van Sant’s early features, enthralled by their visual poetics and oddball humour, their nipple-twisted Americana and palpable affection for all the world’s lost boys. By the time of My Own Private Idaho Van Sant’s rendering of Portland’s runaway male hustler scene—centered as it was around the tenderly compelling and, it would appear, not so gay River Phoenix—practically made me want to be gay. Van Sant’s gay boys were antiheroes, outlaws, non-conformists, vulnerable adventurers, their sexuality tied directly to their outsider status. I found them cool beyond measure.

But what, by contrast, really matters in the story of Harvey Milk? Today more than ever, the core of Milk’s accomplishment is the very antithesis of Van Sant’s outsider chic. Milk’s bold and perilous first steps as San Francisco city supervisor, his nationally recognized efforts to stake out an unabashedly gay presence in the era of Anita Bryant reactionism, were designed to lead the community into the light of the mainstream, and the recent defeat of gay marriage in California feels like a direct attack on that legacy. To have same-sex partnership legally recognized should be a fundamental right, but such an ethos of normalization should not be confused with the sort of romance or shadow side of gay culture so beguilingly evoked in Mala Noche, Van Sant’s debut, or Idaho.

This tension between sensibilities may explain why, rather than aligning itself to his more experimentally-minded, equally death-haunted quartet of Gerry, Elephant, Last Days and Paranoid Park, Milk feels more akin to Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, Van Sant’s earlier stabs at multiplex acceptance. Yet I think this is finally a more effective movie than either. Milk needed to be made for the biggest possible audience—to do otherwise would be to miss the entire point of this story—and Van Sant deserves credit for recognizing this. His flexibility as a filmmaker is in my books something to admire.

Written by Dustin Lance Black, the movie is structured around audio recordings Milk made when he began to fear for his life—threats of assassination had been made for some time. It’s a useful convention, allowing us to cut to the chase more often than not, and allowing the voice of Sean Penn, in pleasingly nasal-fey Noo-Yawk, to invitingly guide us in. The movie’s concerned solely with the final eight years or so of Milk’s life, the period that begins with his picking up of the attractive, much younger Scott Smith (James Franco) in an NYC subway station on the night of Milk’s 40th birthday.

Falling love with Smith was the catalyst that allowed Milk to give up his semi-closeted financial sector existence and go west to a rainbow wonderland waiting to erupt from under a blanket of stale conservatism. A Republican and late-blooming hippy of sorts, Milk goes from suited to shaggy, sees opportunities for gay consumers to gain foothold in his new community, and opens a little camera shop on Castro Street. This section of the movie ends with a magnificent crane shot of Milk and Smith necking in broad daylight. It’s glorious, the first crest of a wave of enthrallment over new hopes. It also features a telling detail: as in the subway pick-up scene, Milk is conspicuously positioned below Smith. His affection for his boyfriends tends toward the adulatory.

Smith doesn’t stick around, leaving Milk to exercise his generally poor judgment with regards to lovers, culminating in a disastrous partnership with a needy Chicano played by Diego Luna. But buoyed by San Fran’s brimming gay underground, Milk is already well on his way to triumph and that fateful retribution. His ascent into municipal politics is highly fraught and makes for superb drama. He’s trying always to bond gays together, controversially declaring privacy, ie: the closet, an antiquated luxury in times of violent bigotry. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” was his clever rallying cry. And his charisma is awesome, his arguments persuasive, his sense of populism shrewd—he gained his supervisor position as much through the promise of legislating against abandoned dog shit as through gay rights.

Van Sant collaborates again here with cinematographer Harris Savides, who previously wrought San Francisco in the 70s to great effect in Zodiac. Milk’s dynamic use of archival footage serves it well, making the spirit of the times come alive. But the decisive force in this project, what will make or break it for audiences, are the performances, and Penn is on fire here. The role of Milk grants the volatile actor and activist permission to express his moral fervor in a fresh, invigorating context. He mimics Milk’s peculiar fist shaking with a goofy sort of grace, milking it, so to speak, with great aplomb. He speechifies with great emotional dexterity, yet brings a wonderfully conspiratorial glee to quieter scenes of political negotiation. He’s also very funny. Josh Brolin’s Dan White challenges him with the tired old theological arguments against homosexuality. “Can two men reproduce?” White asks. “No,” Milk replies, with the warmest and slyest of smiles. “But god knows we keep trying.”

In a superlative and teeming supporting cast that includes lovingly realized turns from Franco, very sexy and subtle in his grudging support, and from Emile Hirsch and Alison Pill, Brolin demands special mention. His embodiment of profoundly conflicted homophobia swings from sympathetic to repulsive with an absolute minimum of fuss. In a grim, sobering way he grounds the picture. Which is to say he represents an element that doubtlessly still lingers in Milk’s audience, a prejudice and resentment that can’t be quelled by the comforts of increasing familiarity with gay culture alone. And it’s because of this that I sincerely hope the Dan Whites of the world see this movie.

The case file as art: Zodiac on DVD

Watching Zodiac in its director’s cut nearly a year after the original version’s theatrical release, it feels that much more remarkable, that much more singular, this film so haunted by the unknowable, so unapologetically embracing of tracing the intricacies of laboring toward uncertainty. While seeing the film in the theatre with a captive audience unsure as to what to expect was for me at least an exhilarating happening, Warner/Paramount’s new two-disc special edition somehow completes the Zodiac experience: presenting a movie driven by obsession in a package so brimming with commentary, supplementary data and contradictory opinions, invites the viewer to obsess right along with Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal), the cartoonist-turned one-man investigatory team whose exhaustive books on the unsolved Zodiac murders provide the story’s foundation.

The material added by director David Fincher only fortifies the film’s slow building of character, period and engagingly banal procedural detail –not to mention humour. The scene in which Captain Lee (Dermot Mulroney) and Inspectors Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Toschi (Mark Ruffalo) lay out their grounds for a search warrant not to a living person but a tiny speakerphone simultaneously mounts anticipation of a new break in the case and feels vaguely like borrowed shtick from Charlie’s Angels.

Yet it’s the same details you saw the first time around that really deepen the chilling evocation of these otherwise disparate events linked only by shared trauma: the brief exchanges, alluding to complicated, intimate relationship histories, and even an unexplained sense of imminent danger, between the Zodiac’s victims at Blue Rock Springs and Lake Barryessa; the frequency with which we see Toschi eat, this man who’s life becomes consumed by Zodiac in turn seeking to comfort himself through consumption; the hysterical woman who claims to have been abducted by Zodiac (Ione Skye), hiding her baby in some bushes off the side of the highway at night; the sheer amount of time that passes while memories fade and research accumulates and gets filed away, sucked into multi-jurisdictional limbo. Just as no single member of the tremendous ensemble cast passes through Zodiac without making some distinct impression, everything in the film becomes equally absorbing, boggling the mind with the promise of some grand interconnectedness that may not truly exist.

Fincher’s commentary track is illuminating both technically (he seems, perhaps to a fault, a perfectionist of the first order) and with regards to the director’s own emotional involvement with the film, tied to his growing up in San Francisco during the Zodiac’s heyday. It’s fascinating how a project that mightn’t seem all that personal can finally become a filmmaker’s richest, finest, most idiosyncratic and humane work, and it’s revealing to hear how Fincher himself made a concentrated effort to avoid any kind of formal flourish that would detract from the clearest possible observance of character and action. This lack of flash becomes a vision in itself, and renders everything else in Fincher’s oeuvre, from the genuinely creepy if over-adorned Seven to the rather tedious Panic Room, a mere warm-up for the more serious filmmaking displayed here.

A second commentary track trades off between a laid-back Gyllenhaal and Robert Downey Jr., who are consistently amusing if not especially insightful (and Gyllenhaal kind of embarrasses himself by going on this long spiel about Raymond Carver when I’m pretty sure he means Raymond Chandler), and the power team of screenwriter James Vanderbilt, producer Brad Fischer and, most welcome of all, novelist James Ellroy. In sly deadpan, Ellroy boldly introduces himself as “James Ellroy, King of American crime fiction… acknowledging that this film is one of the half-dozen greatest American crime films.” Now that’s how you kick-off a commentary! (Makes you wonder what the other five films are.) Vanderbilt and Fischer speak eloquently about all the varied choices that sprung from their resolve not to show anything that didn’t have a surviving eyewitness. They also discuss the sheer weirdness of the possibility that Zodiac murdered cabbie Paul Stine, then stole his glasses, put them on his face and walked away from the crime as though disguised as his victim. Ellroy meanwhile interjects with articulate reverie over the film and some terrific non-sequiturs, such as his bizarre anecdote that illustrates why he hates Donovan or what he considers to be the moral of Moby Dick.

The second disc features a nicely put-together making-of featurette that provides a sense of the strange balance between fact-based minutia and pure creativity that went into every aspect of the production. There’s also an extended documentary on each of the murders and all the particulars surrounding them, and, maybe best of all, a shorter doc solely about Arthur Leigh Allen, the deeply enigmatic prime suspect who died just before he was to meet with police one last time back in 1992. New interviews with the pivotal Don Cheney and several others who knew Allen alternate between strengthening the case against him and poking still more holes in it. Criminology experts make a convincing plea for a practice of fitting the evidence to a suspect instead of trying to fit a suspect to the evidence, yet even if certain aspects don’t fit the profile for Zodiac, Allen remains a compelling scapegoat even in death. His long, ovular face stares at us from a handful of obscure photographs, giving away precious little, ready to have whatever foul notions projected upon it, still the centre of a mystery that’s been arduously compacted into what is finally one of the great films of our age.

Queasy, Cruel, Comic: Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding is a movie that, above all else, turns on the delicious discomforts of recognition. Recognition of self in family, family in self, and, just as importantly, the lack of any recognition altogether. Discomfort is of course rarely all that delicious in real life, but when sculpted into taut, tense, witty scenarios by writer/director Noah Baumbach, and embodied by the superlative casts he and Douglas Aibel assemble, it can frequently reach queasy, effervescent heights of comic wonder.

The movie begins with successful novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman) wiggling through a corridor on a train leaving her comfort zone of New York City for some island near Long Island. That our titular heroine starts her story in a state of disequilibrium is made complete by the rather ingenious way in which she’s introduced to us: mistaking him for her own teenage son Claude (Zane Pais), she sits beside a complete stranger. Her failure to recognize the hapless, approval-seeking Claude speaks volumes about Margot’s difficulties with and resistance to motherhood, as it does about the sort of humour that Margot at the Wedding runs on. As with Baumbach’s break-out hit The Squid & the Whale, laughs escape from our recognizing the dynamics of dysfunctional families, if not, crucially for the sake of comic surprise, the particularities of the family in question, confirming Tolstoy’s famous line about how all unhappy families are different.

A defining factor in Baumbach’s dissection of family is his emphatic interest in giving his adults very adult stories and his kids stories focused around their eager ambition to penetrate the banal mysteries of adult life. Adults and kids intermingle without having to compromise the overall tone of the movie, which hums along, fuelled by need, injury and the distribution of emotional collateral. With child in tow, though conspicuously sans husband, Margot ostensibly arrives on the quiet island to attend and support the marriage of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to tubby, nervy ex-rocker Malcolm (Jack Black), who she met only recently. Once enveloped by the affluent, small community Margot and Claude are confronted with scenes of sexual and fraternal manipulation and expectation, and in these scenes their disparate age groups become irrelevant. Insecurity becomes an equal opportunity threat to all involved.

Squaring off against sea, shrubs, childhood mementos and a lonely, bare tree, under overcast east coast light rendered with muted beauty by ace cinematographer Harris Savides, Margot and Pauline’s interaction forms a consistent centre to this movie that handles story in the loosest terms it can get away with. Things don’t progress a whole lot in Margot at the Wedding, but the static nature of the drama is engagingly offset by how terrifically funny it all is –and its funny because we keep discovering more and more about how these wildly antagonistic sisters operate. And its hard to imagine this relationship playing as well as it does without one of the most inspired strokes of casting in recent memory.

Kidman and Leigh as sisters still strikes me as an utterly bizarre, unlikely choice, the former actor distinguished by her elegance, taste and understatement, the latter by her ballsy, go-for-broke, sometimes deeply mannered performances. My first thought was: this movie’s not big enough for the two of them. My second was: that’s goddamned brilliant! They’re both so good, so mutually attuned to Baumbach’s style while coming to it from very different sensibilities, that they dangle side by side from this family tree with inspired incongruity: Margot the privately grotesque star of the family, Pauline the more sympathetic, if hopelessly lost black sheep. And when you throw the added wild card of Black into the mix, playing a character that no one, his fiancée included, seems entirely comfortable with, you’ve pretty much sealed the deal as far as comic tension is concerned.

The cruelty that constitutes the stock in trade of Margot never really gets shaken off. Thankfully. But that Margot is such a compulsive bitch most of the time makes her role in the family all the more compelling to work through. Its not just this movie that needs Margot to function, her family needs her too, as a way to reflect back their own weaknesses and conflicted feelings with success as defined by the outside world. And, as jarring as the final gesture made in Margot at the Wedding is, it displays a remarkable flicker of optimism in this mostly nasty, mostly pleasingly shapeless world Baumbach’s created. Out of nowhere, the movie seems to be telling us that we never know when our deeper moral impulses might just leap out, yank us by the lapels, and force us to live up to something better than our conditions promise.