The Ides of March: All primary colours; no shades to be found

Based on Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which was loosely based on the 2004 Democratic primary campaign of Howard Dean, The Ides of March concerns a young press secretary’s education in the sort of compromise, corruption and throat-cutting that the weary sages tell us is essential to getting ahead in politics. But Stephen Meyers (Ryan Gosling) has it both ways—he’s simultaneously idealistic and shrewd—so when push comes to shove his fangs push their way out of his baby gums and he proves to be the all-too apt pupil of his immediate superior (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the opposition’s poacher (Paul Giamatti), the manipulative journalist (Marisa Tomei) he thought was his pal and, of course, the charismatic candidate he works for, Pennsylvania Governor Mike Morris (director and co-scripter George Clooney), who mostly stays in the film’s margins until its final act, until then entering the foreground only for a highly conspicuous, strategically placed scene of intimacy between he and his true-blue wife.

Much of the pleasure to be had in The Ides of March emerges from the initial buzz of the promise of victory emanating from Morris’ camp, of which Meyers is the behind-the-scenes star. A couple of beautifully realized scenes find Meyers flirting with a smart, lovely intern named Molly (Evan Rachel Wood). Clooney has assembled a magnificent cast and, with the help of cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, he crafts some superb flights of ping-pong dialogue in carefully composed close-ups. For much of the first half, there’s a slightly exposition-heavy quality to the dialogue that feels weirdly stagey yet gradually makes sense as you start to glean just how much of what we’re hearing and seeing is illusory or fundamentally full of shit. And herein lies the film’s weakness: it is precisely as cynical as you’d expect a movie about US politics from Clooney and his regular producer/collaborator Grant Heslov to be, while lacking in any specific or especially poignant revelations. Everything is tweaked to play neatly into the narrative schema, including an unexpected death that constitutes the limpest sort of plot twist (the reason it’s unexpected is because there’s no good reason to expect it). Clooney is a fine directorial talent, but the material—occasionally clever but never wise—is finally more shallow than it clearly wants to be. Still, worth checking out if you’re curious.

Church and state of uncertainty

If, like me, you’ve never seen John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, you may want to avoid learning too much about Doubt, the new film version adapted and directed by Shanley himself. Set strictly within the confines of a Bronx Catholic School in 1964, it’s a dramatic meditation on the dichotomy of ambiguity and faith, or as two characters put it, proof and certainty. There’s pleasure to be had in watching the events unfold blind, learning the facts to be debated only as they arise, piece by carefully doled-out piece.

Having said that, many of you will catch on to where this is heading from the outset, in a scene where each of the central players are present and the conflict, in its way, is spelled right out for us. Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) gives a sermon on the theme of doubt and how it might bring us together rather than leave us in lonely despair. As Flynn gives examples of internal sources of unease, little things “no one knows” about us, Shanley cuts to individuals in the congregation, listening with rapt attention and recognition. It’s as though Flynn’s speaking directly to them, as though he’s somehow looked into their souls and diagnosed their unspoken suffering. But when Flynn offers his last example of secret turmoil—“No one knows I’ve done something wrong”—the camera rests firmly on Flynn himself. The moment is not exactly subtle, but it is elegant.

The evidence against Flynn, in a superbly amiable, layered performance from Hoffman, racks up swiftly. Flynn smiles a lot, and offers physical affection to his kids. He takes an unseemly amount of sugar in his tea, makes unseemly jokes with his fellow priests. He likes his nails kinda long. He keeps little flowers in his Bible. Most importantly, he singles out Donald Miller (Joseph Foster, perfect), the school’s only black student, and an alter boy, for special attention. He becomes, in the words of one character, Donald’s “protector.” When Sister James (Amy Adams) eventually sees something that suggests an “unhealthy” bond being forged between Flynn and Donald, she brings the issue to the attention of Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep), the fearsome, ultra-stern school principal half-jokingly referred to by Flynn as a dragon. Very quietly and methodically, a campaign’s undertaken to get rid of Father Flynn, preferably following a full confession.

Much has been made about Shanley’s tip-toeing around the truth with regards to what unfolds behind closed doors in Doubt, but in all honestly I think the truth’s pretty damned clear, though more time with Donald, who’s conspicuously absent for much of the movie, might have shifted our reading of the scenario either way. The exact actions Flynn is guilty of are not so important to the story as the disturbing polarities of entitlement and genuine compassion he exudes. Admittedly, my reading probably says as much about my regard for the priesthood as it does Shanley’s intended subtext.

Personally, I’m more than fine with ambiguity—hell, Rashomon’s one of my favourite movies—if it yields something resonant or provocative about the subject being considered, and Doubt is absolutely engaging in this sense, thick with portent, psychological struggle, dynamic characterizations, uncomfortable questions. Yet, if anything, Shanley’s directorial style isn’t ambiguous enough. His is a strained sort of classicism, with ostentatiously skewed angles in moments fraught with paranoia. (A chamber drama about spiritual unease and all-too earthly temptations that relies on tight shots of faces negotiating how much can or cannot be reveled: we are very much in Ingmar Bergman territory here, and there were moments while watching Doubt that I really missed the late master.) Shanley’s approach is an odd mix of conservatism and flamboyance, and feels neither here not here. Still, the dialogues really grab you, the silences chill you, the photography, courtesy of Roger Deakins, is crisp, contained and magnificent. And the actors are most often brilliantly nuanced, even if one in particular, for better of for worse, really stands out from the others.

Streep’s is a fussed-over performance, featuring the broadest accent and most severe facial mask of the ensemble, a pale pinched pout under red-rimmed eyes that peers out from under that black bonnet in a way that renders Aloysius a spinster sucking on some holy lemon that she proudly refuses to reject. Yet I don’t think Streep’s detractors are going to convince anyone who’s actually seen this movie that her performance is anything less than riveting, driving every scene right to its precipice of tension—you can call her affected, but every affectation is loaded with purpose, and nothing is wasted.

The sole moment where Streep genuinely falters would have to be the film’s final one, a brief, sudden emotional thaw pitched to function as the sort of transcendental release perfected by Robert Bresson in Pickpocket (1959), and emulated in numerous movies since, most notably, and most effectively, in American Gigolo (80) and L’Enfant (05). But I think Shanley should probably be the one to ultimately take the heat for this limpid finale. Where he could have left us with a devastating whisper and fade, with another disarming close-up, he’s opted for weepy collapse, rising music and crane shot. Instead of drawing us in he casts out of the emotion, giving us no room to feel anything on our own. He may argue that he’s simply giving the audience the sort of big closing uplift they need, but what can I say? I have my doubts.

Imitation of Life: Synecdoche, New York

His body is doing strange things, any of which may cradle some indefinable kernel of death waiting to metastasize. He is attacked by his own sink. His wife is becoming distant, dissatisfied and resentful. He aspires toward some startling innovation for the stage, yet he’s directing Death of a Salesman at an amateur theatre for small town blue-hairs, the incongruently young actors and deluge of lighting cues being his meager concessions to formalist provocation. His lead actress and the sultry box office attendant both make advances, yet he’s too paralyzed and conflicted to respond. His daughter’s poo is green. As mystery ailments mount and relationships collapse, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) develops an acute case of Sisyphus syndrome. Everything seems to bear down on him. So when out of the blue he becomes the unlikely recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, he does the only logical thing: he makes a play about everything. Or everything as can be conveyed through the very peculiar, very funny and very sad experiences of Caden Cotard. He lives in Schenectady, New York, but he’s about to move somewhere you won’t find on a map.

Synecdoche, New York is not as ambitious as Caden’s play. We can say this for the simple reason that the movie was finished—or, if you’d rather, abandoned—whereas the play stays in rehearsal for decades. But screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut is nonetheless mightily impressive, and, at the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it’s genuinely like nothing you’ve seen. It teems with metaphor, is sprawling in scope, dense with so many kinds of heartache and is playfully, boundlessly alive with the absurd. It should be far too much for any one movie to hold, but here it is nonetheless, running two hours, and fronted, all too appropriately, by one of the most imminently melancholic and corpulent actors working in interesting movies. Hoffman does Kaufman, thankfully. I’m not sure anyone else could.

After Philip K. Dick, who never made a movie but probably spawned more of them than any late-20th century American writer, Charlie Kaufman must surely be the most influential author of neurological disorder-driven storytelling in current pop culture. What other body of work, from Being John Malkovich to Adaptation to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, has so directly, imaginatively and often perversely addressed the puzzle nature of identity? Selfhood is ever fluid, restless and delightfully insubordinate in Kaufman’s stories, diasporic in its tendencies, spreading out amidst the individual bearer’s surroundings until what you consider uniquely “you” is either infiltrated by another—or many others, if you happen to be John Malkovich—or appropriated by another, ie: the two Kaufmans of Adaptation. Bizarre as it may be, Synecdoche, New York is, in hindsight at least, the inevitable product of the Kaufman project thus far.

While the impossibility of lasting connection between people looms over the film, everything in it thematically connects to everything else. Caden’s wife (Catherine Keener), in a direct reversal of Caden’s attempt to create something massive, makes highly nuanced paintings the size of postage stamps, while his daughter grows up to be literally art-damaged, the confused victim of her parents’ reckless expression. Those closest to Caden exist in some permanent state of metaphor-manifest, most notably Hazel (Samantha Morton, especially wonderful), who, in one of the film’s most inspired conceits, lives in a house that’s perpetually on fire. Caden’s therapist (Hope Davis) writes books that literally speak directly to him. And all of this demands to be woven into Caden’s play. Countless actors are employed. Eventually new actors are hired to play the original actors, because the original actors become part of the story, even threatening to take it over. Vast sets are constructed to contain it all. The whole thing is finally infinite, Borgesian. It’s an attempt to generate authenticity through artifice, to address life through art until art is all that’s left. And perhaps this is why the ending’s so damned blue. The thrill of art is always in the making; the result finally just a eulogy for a process.

Betrayal, rot, fake moustaches: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

In recent years, we’ve become accustomed to celebrating our finest octogenarian filmmakers for their diversity (Alain Resnais), their grace and good humour (Robert Altman), or their steady commitment to a singular path (Ingmar Bergman, Chris Marker). But when we turn out gaze to the latest work from Hollywood veteran Sidney Lumet, 83 as of last June, what’s finally most impressive, maybe astounding, is its sheer visceral, even ruthless vitality.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead marks a full half-century of filmmaking for Lumet, who debuted with 12 Angry Men before going onto helm a dizzying smorgasbord of features that includes The Pawnbroker (1964), Dog Day Afternoon (75), Network (76), Prince of the City (81), Running on Empty (88) and Q&A (90). That’s a sort of quickie greatest hits list, but there’s been plenty of stinkers too, the latest chain of them having started with A Stranger Among Us (92).

Taken at a glance, the catalogue seems to indicate longevity and restlessness above all, but a closer look reveals an ongoing interest in –and unusually deft hand with– themes of doomed ambition, perverse betrayal, and the underlying rot in modern American life. Concerning the plight of Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hank (Ethan Hawke), two very different but mutually desperate brothers who collaborate on a robbery that goes horribly, grotesquely wrong, Before the Devil forges a new peak in Lumet’s oeuvre not only because it exudes the rigor of an artist half Lumet’s age, but because it is so very satisfying as a nasty, nasty, nasty little movie.

Working from Kelly Masterson’s script, which is narratively frazzled –there are more than a couple of plot holes, the consistent sleaziness feels rather overly schematic, and the finale arguably bites off more than it can chew– yet never less than riveting, Lumet has crafted a film that’s fascinatingly fractured on every level. Before the Devil features a family plagued by primal intentions only slightly better than the bad timing that undoes it. Formally, morally, thematically, the film’s fissures proliferate: the story darts elliptically through the chronological plot by use of disruptive flash cuts, while the compositions often isolate a body part in some evocative way, as with the hand of Gina (Marisa Tomei, excellent) in the opening post-coital scenes. The final result is a film that keeps us watching by continually jarring us.

Andy watches the bodies of he and his wife as they make love in a mirror, his expression quizzical, as though he can’t quite believe they belong to them. The body of a small-time hold-up artist flies through a plate-glass door while a laughably disguised Hank, his fake moustache a poor stab at manly authority, looks on in despair from the front seat of the getaway car. Lumet and his superb cast imbue scene after scene with alienating, often raw physicality, and Lumet suitably screw with the whole process by returning to certain key moments and filming them from a reverse angle, causing us to stop and think we’ve seen this one before… or have we?

I mentioned the frazzled nature of Masterson’s script: its fairly effective at diverting us from its inconsistencies, though at times it only manages this by prompting the characters into near hysterics. Thankfully, a hysterical Hoffman is far from the worst thing you could come across in a movie. His Andy is a ticking bomb that gets incrementally louder as things unravel. Hoffman builds the tension through a balance of Mephistophelian disaffection and hot-breathed indignation. He’s picky about when he boils over. Hawke, meanwhile, makes a satisfying counterpart, the designated baby of the family, he’s miserably naïve, always convincingly one fateful step behind his brother in his attempts to fend off disaster. Granted, these guys don’t look much like brothers, but they get the sick spirit of it all just right.

And maybe they get a helping hand from Albert Finney, who plays the initially unassuming role of their father Charles, who’s never privy to their conniving but makes it his business to understand it and act swiftly, all the while somehow embodying traits of both Hawk and Hoffman in his compellingly heavy, overheated performance. A little closer in age to Lumet himself, Finney is ultimately revealed as the grimy core of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, a patriarch that moves from supreme grief to blistering wrath. And like Lumet, Finney might go a little over the top in his efforts to get this nihilistic little tale from one end to the other, but the point is he gets us there, on waves of cinematic adrenaline.