Terri: You're a big boy now

Terri’s eponymous hero is a rotund teen living in some warm, semi-rural place with only an uncle who tends to wander around in a medicinal fog for a guardian. With his wavy locks and formidable neck, Terri cuts something of a Wildean profile, but whatever air of sophistication such qualities might generate is undercut by his calm refusal to engage in social or academic life. He wears Crocs and socks and old school pajamas everywhere—less out of resignation, he claims, than for sheer comfort. He’s exiled from the school gymnasium for declining to participate. He observes other teens going about their activities with the same anthropological distance and wonder he brings to his new habit of murdering mice so as to witness the feeding habits of local birds of prey. He’s also regularly late or absent for class, a casual transgression that inadvertently becomes a route out of his troublesome solitude, because cutting class means going to the principal’s office, and Terri’s principal, Mr. Fitzgerald, takes a special interest in Terri.

Fitzgerald is a middle-aged married man, but both his stagey manner of asserting authority and his calculated attempts to “reach out”—by aiding and abetting Terri’s class cutting through regular appointments; by offering snacks and high-fives and peppering their consultations with an earnestly intoned “Dude...”—render him less a teacher or father figure than an overgrown peer or passive-aggressively needy big brother. Fitzgerald is played by John C. Reilly, and if you start watching Terri and find yourself feeling unsure whether or not it’s supposed to be a comedy, Reilly doesn’t seem to have any such doubts. He’s understatedly goofy, unflatteringly lit and very funny, as well as oddly sweet and lived-in. Reilly is often cast in the supporting bit as that guy that the central character slowly becomes friends with. It’s because it’s hard not to want to become friends with John C. Reilly.

Terri is played by Jacob Wysocki, a young actor with obvious talent but, equally important in a character study such as this, he simply has a marvelously expressive face and body that, however outsized, conveys inner depths even when doing almost nothing. Walking through the woods in his PJs, Wysocki’s Terri could almost be walking through a dream, and there are moments where director Azazel Jacobs’ keen eye for low-key, ordinary strangeness pleasingly heightens that feeling. But as it goes along it becomes clear that Terri, scripted by Patrick Dewitt from a story by Dewitt and Jacobs, is firmly grounded in reality, its depiction of idiotic bullying, misguided cries for help, exploratory sadism, peculiar alliances between unlikely friends, horny fumblings in home economics, and nights spent in the shed getting wasted on stolen whiskey and uncle’s meds and making awkward attempts as sexual posturing all resonate deeply with my experience of high school at least. This is a film that’s attuned to the pains of alienation without wallowing in despair—yet neither does it offer bullshit uplift. It merely suggests that, if we stay alert, there is almost always some chance for each and every one of us to connect.

Two movies about old guys: O'Horten, Is Anybody There?

Every one of us is charged with finding our own private balance between staying on track and surrendering to the call of diversion. When we look back, which of these things will have ruled us? Which granted us that thing that we ultimately lived for? The thing about Odd Horten (Bård Owe), the thing that makes him such a wonderful character for a charming little film like the one named after him, is that he actually took as his vocation a commitment to traversing the same route over and over, taking pride in sliding back and forth with maximum efficiency and minimum discomfort. He was a railway engineer, cultivating the Oslo-Bergen line for 40 years. When we meet him he’s retiring at the age of 67. They give him a party and a little commemorative train as a parting gift. A bachelor, he seems to have nothing to do now save the maintenance of his simple pleasures, his pipe and his beer. But without explicitly indicating some inner urge toward adventure—our hero is a man of few words—he’ll use his retirement to quietly cede his destiny to the dictates of chance.

O’Horten is the third feature from Norwegian writer/director Bent Hamer. Like his period piece Kitchen Stories, in which social scientists examined the habits of bachelors, and Factotum, the melancholy comedy of dreary day jobs and career drinking based on Charles Bukowski’s novel of the same name, O’Horten moves to its own quirky and subtle sense of comic propulsion. I enjoyed the film very much. Still, after watching it I caught myself and wondered if it maybe wasn’t all a bit too slight—but that’s a self-conscious film critic talking. Hamer’s style is unassuming. His story seems threaded so loosely as to tear with the slightest force. Yet upon scrutinizing my memories of O’Horten some weeks later, I found that so many individual moments were still with me and giving me pleasure, moments that remain vivid, curious, warm, rich in detail, and finally adding up to a lot more than it might first seem. A quieter variation on About Schmidt, it’s a portrait of life a little frayed and gray but still chugging ahead, still being explored however one can still manage. And it conveys an optimism that’s pretty rare in movies this personal or this artful.

Shot by John Christian Rosenlund, who also shot Factotum as well as The Bothersome Man, another, even more peculiar Norwegian comedy, O’Horten is filled with wintry cold nights that feel strangely warm, especially in sequences like that where Odd exits a favoured watering hole to find people sliding home down newly iced-over streets. The nearly silent nights imbue Odd’s wanderings—into a strange child’s bedroom where he’s forced to spend the night, into the home of an eccentric old tippler, into a car with a blindfolded driver—with a pointed sense of possibility. Things do get precariously absurd, yet Owe, with his soft, handsome blue eyes and that mouth that burrows into moustached, rumpled cheeks whenever he smiles, makes it all seems more or less reasonable. Maybe this is how you get after four decades of train travel and dutiful service, perfectly calm and composed, and ready to go completely off the rails.

***

Are all only children this endearingly morbid? The kid lives with his folks in their run-down family-run old folks home somewhere in rural England, circa 1987. Surrounded by so many souls ambling around death’s threshold, he gets the idea to set up a tape recorder to try and capture the nocturnal rattle and hum of ghosts who haven’t quite found the way out. So 10-year-old Edward (Bill Milner) sets out one morning with his headphones on, hoping to hear transmissions from the land of the dead. He nearly gets his wish when the Amazing Clarence (Michael Caine) narrowly avoids running him over with his magic van.

The encounter constitutes a cross-generational meet-cute between a precocious oddball fixated on spiritualism and this ornery widower, an aging philanderer and retired stage magician driven to suicide by guilt and loneliness. It doesn’t take a psychic to see that this pair will become ostensibly unlikely pals over the course of Is Anybody There? Edward’s bored and desperate for some paranormal action—who ya gonna call? Clarence needs someone to help redeem his tainted memories and confirm his talents, and nothing fits the bill like a young innocent easily impressed by card tricks or a phony séance. (Clarence also needs someone to give him a reason for grooming. Unshaven and under-slept, Caine looks like a werewolf suffering from hair loss.) It’s obvious these two were made for each other.

Edward’s parents however are another story. His mum (Anne-Marie Duff) works her fingers to the bone to keep their place in running order, while dad (David Morrissey) becomes increasingly negligent thanks to early onset of midlife crisis. He comes home one day with a designer mullet to help perfect his I’m-the-next-drummer-for-Maiden look. He’s aching to win the affection of their teenage employee but mostly just manages to embarrass himself and everyone else.

There’s a lot going on in Is Anybody There? though rest assured everything fits all too neatly into the thematic thrust of Peter Harness’ script, which tries to balance the macabre with saccharine whimsy, though the latter wins out by a long shot. It’s cheerier territory for Boy A director John Crowley, but his approach simply feels more generic. The saving grace is the cast, and Caine’s elderly Alfie does have his moments, such as the lovely little scene where the old atheist whispers his dead wife’s name in the mirror with the sad flicker of a hope that she might answer. Milner’s not excessively ingratiating, yet he’s saddled with a character whose journey isn’t as compelling as his starting point, which is simply to say he was more interesting when he was just a troubled tyke and not the prop of an over-eager screenwriter. (And really, what kind of a name for a little kid is Bill Milner?) Both Duff and Morrissey shine in their surprisingly well-drawn supporting characters, yet here too, their happy ending feels annoyingly pushy. Only the quirky collection of aged residents is overwhelmingly tough to bear, though even here I blame the material over the actors. The sort of dottiness and sentimentality on display in their scenes careens between flabby farce and the sort of sap you’d expect from religious programming.

Glimpsing Christ on the mean streets of Abel Ferrara's New York: Bad Lieutenant returns

There are films—we sometimes call them character studies—we’re best advised to watch and re-watch without concern for continuity or sweep, suspense or forward-motion. We marvel at, or are at least compelled by, the individual moments that hover somewhere in the haze of the whole, suspended like some fleeting exhibit. I hadn’t seen Abel Ferrara’s cult film Bad Lieutenant (1992) in at least a decade, and I returned to it with one wave of fascinated, slightly nauseated familiarity after another. It concerns a haggard, brazenly corrupt middle aged cop (Harvey Keitel) and his tentative, confused emergence from what seems a very long tour—going back as far, perhaps, as Taxi Driver (76)—through the special internal inferno that awaits god’s lonely men when dwelling in the crowded, sordid Petri dish that is, or was, New York City. To my surprise the film resonated more with me now that when I was younger and inclined to feel impressed by anything affecting a post-Scorsese, gritty, skuzzy, rock and roll verisimilitude. Bad Lieutenant is audacious, somewhat pretentious, perhaps excessive. It’s also harrowing, genuinely crazy in its construction, slyer than it at first seems, and facilitates one of the great raw, only partially comprehensible, out-on-a-limb star performances.

Some of those moments: Keitel’s unnamed Lieutenant stumbling, stoned out of his mind, listening to Johnny Ace croon ‘Pledging My Love’ in some strange woman’s apartment, eyes shut, his bulldog torso naked, his arms extended in some Christ-like pose or perhaps an attempt to fly, emitting this weird whimpering sound like my dog used to make when he wanted something and knew he wouldn’t get it if he barked; Keitel hunched over the driver’s side window of a car, two big haired sisters from Jersey in the front seat, a misty rain rendering the three of them seemingly isolated in the night, while he gets one of them to expose her ass and the other to perform a pantomime fellatio; Keitel, already buzzing with the possibility of his own redemption, getting high with two already severely incapacitated crackhead rapists on a crack house couch. Save the last of these, you might have to work to remember where such scenes fall in the course of the narrative. But you’re unlikely to forget the scenes themselves. They stain your brain, like those traces of certain drugs that we’re told never really go away.

There are so many beautifully selected details in Bad Lieutenant: the Jesus blanket and plastic cover on the sofa of the polite Puerto Rican dealer’s apartment; the door that always gets stuck in the tiny, wallpapered apartment of Keitel’s pretty, intermittently articulate junky pal Zoë (played the film’s co-writer, the late Zoë Lund); the gum that Keitel asks the Jersey girl to spit into his hand. Yet the choice of ‘Pledging My Love’ is especially inspired. Johnny Ace killed himself back in ’54 playing Russian roulette, and such recklessness is perfectly aligned to what’s presented as the status quo for the Keitel character. Within the first 15 minutes we’ve seen him drinking, snorting, screwing, stealing, harassing and gambling himself into oblivion. Another actor might have tried to make the character ingratiating or, even worse, confused his self-destruction with diabolical glee. But Keitel makes everything he does seem more pathetic than fiendishly cruel. He somehow lets us know that this creature possesses a soul. He pours his heart into it, without judgment, and his abandon can result in bizarre black humour, which works too—take the moment where he gets so upset listening to a baseball game while driving his car that he shoots his radio. Ferrara says he originally conceived the film as a comedy anyway—lots of movies have protagonists with one vice, why not make one where the he has every vice?

I emphasize the fragmentary nature of Bad Lieutenant, but it does actually have a sort of rudimentary story, which was based on a real 1981 incident. A young, pretty nun is viciously raped by two young thugs, and the investigation is thwarted by the nun’s refusal to give police any information about her assailants. Yet Ferrara—who always was half exploitation filmmaker, half would-be Pasolini—is barely interested in the investigation’s dramatic potential. What matters to him is the nun’s Christ-like feat of forgiveness, which Keitel has such a hard time believing yet is clearly inspired by—if such utter scum can be forgiven, there may still be hope for him. This leads to some wincingly cheesy Jesus apparitions, but what’s more memorable are the actions it prompts in Keitel, ramping up to a brilliantly stark, poetic finale.

Abel Ferrara

Lion’s Gate’s new special edition of Bad Lieutenant features a rambling but frequently informative commentary track by Ferrara and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. It also features a superb half-hour documentary about the making of the film, which is something in itself: the guerilla tactics of the shooting sound truly insane; Christopher Walken, who’d just starred in Ferrara’s King of New York (90), was originally slated to play the lead, but dropped out because he didn’t think he could deliver; fellow actor Victor Argo had to convince Keitel to do the role, and Keitel was apparently going through some severe personal turmoil that fed his performance. Yet for all the chaos in both its content and genesis Bad Lieutenant survives as something sharp, focused and brutal, direct and rigorous. It deserves to be seen again, and not just by the faithful.

Ode to Joy: Mike Leigh zeroes in on Sally Hawkins' irrepressible smile in Happy-Go-Lucky

Though his reputation is built largely on a number of celebrated ensemble films, the addition of Happy-Go-Lucky to British writer/director Mike Leigh’s filmography draws attention to an element in his work that I’ve long regarded as an untapped source of mastery: individual portraiture. As with John Sayles, the use of ensemble casts in Leigh’s films, from High Hopes (1988) to Secrets & Lies (96), Topsy-Turvy (99) to All or Nothing (01), ostensibly speak to the filmmaker’s socialist ideals, a belief in the collective that rises to the fore even within the gloomiest of stories where the odds are heavily stacked against communion, consensus or any sort of redemption. And perhaps the exception only proves the rule: Leigh’s Naked (93), which, while still featuring a great deal of multiple character development, is finally focused on the whirlwind of brooding, nihilistic, machine gun wit that is Johnny (the never more remarkable David Thewlis), ends as it begins, with its protagonist fleeing the scene of a crime, alone, limping, unable to bear the kindness of others, an embodiment of despair like no other in Leigh’s cinema.

But, regardless of whether it represents the filmmaker’s more generous view of humanity, Naked, complicated, darkly charismatic, engagingly messy, no doubt hated by some, endures like few Leigh films, looming over the bulk of them with its gruesome integrity intact. This makes it that much more satisfying to report that, 15 years after Johnny terrorized the psyches of lonely Londoners, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), the heroine of Happy-Go-Lucky, arrives to dominate the foreground of Leigh’s latest as Johnny’s cheerful nemesis. An apparently gifted teacher of small kids on the cusp of her 30th birthday, Poppy is afflicted with an overwhelming impulse to look on the bright side, and has a similarly divisive effect on all those she encounters: they adore her, abhor her, try to ignore her, or find themselves in a desperate struggle to correct her optimism. Like Johnny, she can natter on like nobody’s business—and Happy-Go-Lucky truly has some of the most brilliant banter of any Leigh movie—and like Johnny her insistence causes considerable problems. This is a comedy about the dangers of thrusting your happiness upon the world.

A friend who wasn’t as taken with Happy-Go-Lucky suggested to me that the film was basically a character study, and for any character study to work you’ve got to fall in love with the character—which he didn’t. I can’t quite agree with this assessment. I think there are plenty of engaging character studies with quite unlikable characters—Citizen Kane (41), anyone?—but if there’s any truth to my friend’s notion then I’d have to claim myself guilty. From Hawkins first appearance, riding her bike through London traffic, ribbons undulating from her basket, hoop earrings dangling, that enormous smile on her face, I was ready to follow her anywhere. When she enters a bookstore and relentlessly annoys the poor clerk who just wants to be silent, I liked her all the more. When she exits the store to discover her bike’s been ripped off and can’t help but just shrug at the silliness of the world, I was pretty much in love with her beguiling audacity.

Over the course of Happy-Go-Lucky we see a fair amount of Poppy both at work and at home, a flat she shares with her best friend Zoë (Alexis Zegerman), their friendship being one I’d place as among the most richly textured in recent movies. We see her take classes in Flamenco dancing from a Spanish fireplug named Rosita (Karina Fernandez, whose over-the-top performance here is absolute gold) and classes in driving from a very tense, troubled, angry young man named Scott (Eddie Marsan, brave, brandishing bad teeth that spring like fangs when overcome by a child-like rant). Between these two polarizing experiences in social interaction the limits of Poppy’s demeanor become increasingly apparent. The Flamenco’s discipline requires her to be in touch with her inner suffering; the driving sessions with Scott require her to accept that her particular energy, however innocently intended, can be construed as something manipulative and damaging when trapped in close quarters with someone whose negativity is just as powerful as her sunniness. The scenes between Poppy and Scott are what unite the decidedly loose narrative threads of Happy-Go-Lucky, merging them into something cathartic, a turning point in Poppy’s maturity, and these scenes are handled so beautifully by Hawkins and Marsan as to be utterly arresting. They are among the finest pieces of acting you’ll see this year.