A few things about the Earrings of Madame de...: Chance, Objects, Lightness

1.

Once you’ve fallen under the spell of the great yet often forgotten Max Ophüls it can become difficult to decide which of his films is best, but so many have argued so convincingly for The Earrings of Madame de… (1953) that I feel little compulsion to contest the consensus. Moving between Paris, Constantinople and the French countryside, concerning an affair between a French general’s wife and an Italian baron, the film is something of a love triangle, as well as one of cinema’s most elegant essays on chance. “Coincidence,” one of its characters tells us, “is only extraordinary because it’s so natural.” Indeed, there’s something strangely inevitable about the journey undertaken by our unnamed heroine’s earrings, first sold to remedy a mounting debt, then sold back clandestinely to her spouse, then bestowed upon a mistress sent off to a faraway country, then lost in a gambling binge, then purchased by a traveling aristocrat, then returned to France and… Like the sublimely fluid camera work for which Ophüls is famous, you get to feeling these objects could go anywhere, never rushing, yet never still.

2.
The first images we see in the film are of our heroine’s many things. She surveys, assesses, strokes them, trying to decide which is least essential. Objects and desire are ceaselessly aligned in Madame de… Some, such as our heroine’s dance card, which is promptly filled by her not-so-secret lover, become fleeting talismans or symbols of what’s to come: the acceleration of the lovers’ flirtation is conveyed through a montage in which they close down multiple dancing parties. Aptly, many of the film’s most conspicuous objects are employed to enhance seeing, such as a monocle, or a tiny telescope mounted on a staff. Nonetheless, objects finally prove meaningless. Gesture becomes everything. A prayer, a fainting spell, a challenge to a duel: these actions are invested with meanings that alter the characters’ lives, until the opulence surrounding them withers in significance.

3.
Danielle Darrieux plays our heroine with such a puzzling blend of conviction and coquetry that only those inclined to dismiss her on account of her elite status can remained unmoved by her emotional maelstrom or unintrigued by her mystery, something written into the very ellipses of the film’s title. Her husband, played by Charles Boyer, is similarly contradictory, tender and remote, amorous and stoic. Played by Vittorio De Sica, the baron, a foreigner, a visitor to their social circle, is necessarily less ambiguous. He must make his intentions clear from his first glimpse of Darrieux, but his charisma, like his barely disguised swoon, possesses its own richness. (De Sica the Italian neo-realist director is far more important to film history, but may I suggest that De Sica the occasional actor is more seductive.) These performances attract marvel not only for the pleasure found in the actors’ graceful transitions from placidity to torment, but for their perfect alignment with Ophuls’ gliding, fundamentally weightless approach to melodrama. Lightness is absolutely essential to Ophuls’ methodology. The film addresses tumultuous emotions without ever succumbing to tumult itself, allowing us to be swept along without being dragged under by heavy-handed sentiment. There’s a moment when torn letters become falling snow, and this, perhaps more than any other gesture in Madame de…, represents the film’s spirit, those fragments of feelings expressed and sent out into the world, only to become the lightest flecks of moisture caught in the wind, before finally disappearing into the shifting landscape.

The Earrings of Madame de... screens at Edmonton's Metro Cinema this weekend.

When we're all orphans: L'enfance nue on DVD

Maurice Pialat was already in his 40s when he embarked on his feature debut, but I like very much that he made it about what we used to call a “problem child.” I’ve read that Pialat was something of an overgrown problem child himself, tempestuous, demanding, and difficult to work with. L’enfance nue (1968) shows 10-year-old François (Michel Terrazon) being dismissed from one provincial foster home and shuttled off to another in the first 20 minutes, by which point we’ve already seen him throw a cat down several flights of stairs. Pialat was not himself a foster child, yet he repeatedly assured anyone who asked that L’enfance nue was a kind of self-portrait. Collaborators describe Pialat as having developed abandonment issues very early in life, feelings he could plausibly project upon François. But I wonder if when Pialat said L’enfance nue was about him he was actually referring to his adult self. This is a story about a shit disturber. It is also, incidentally, a truly remarkable, unnerving, yet also playful and affectionate movie by a filmmaker whose work most of us should probably know much more of.

I only really became aware of Pialat, who died in 2003, after being prompted to review Loulou (80) for Edmonton's Metro Cinema’s screening a few years back. It’s haunted me since, as a defiantly unresolved portrait of working class routines and erotic self-actualization, as a performance from Gerard Depardieu the likes I’ve which I’ve never seen, and as the closest thing in French cinema to a Bruce Springsteen song. I’d seen Pialat’s Van Gogh (91) when I was very young and recall being impressed by how little it catered to my notions of the eponymous artist’s persona or what bio-pics are supposed to do, by how immersed I became in its portrait of the milieux Van Gogh quietly slipped through. Unfortunately Pialat’s name vanished from my thoughts afterwards, probably because like so many of the most gifted post-New Wave filmmakers—Jean Eustache and Philippe Garrel spring to mind as members of this group I’ve belatedly come to cherish—he failed to gain any significant foothold in North American movie culture. But we’re coming around. Criterion’s already released Pialat’s À nos amours (83) and is now offering L’enfance nue for our consideration, accompanied by some excellent supplements, like critic Kent Jones’ video essay and Pialat’s early short L’amour existe (60), which inspired François Truffaut to help produce L’enfance nue. (Pialat based François on a real kid with the same name, so apparently it's only a coincidence that the character shares the same Christian name as Truffaut, who less than a decade earlier made his debut with one of world cinema's defining movies about difficult childhood.)

L’enfance nue might have been a documentary, and the residue of this early conception remains in its opening images of a demonstration, but more pointedly in the camera’s dexterous responsiveness to the action. Most of the players are non-professionals, and several, most memorably Marie-Louise and Rene Thierry, who become François’ sexagenarian second foster parents, were essentially asked to tell their own stories within the boundaries of Pialat’s loose, often elliptical narrative framework. The approach imbues L’enfance nue with an unsentimental yet touching sense of the real. Terrazon however was not an actual foster child and this was probably a wise choice, given that it resulted in a central performance that never for one second comments on itself. We see François do both terrible and tender things and it’s more compelling that he barely seems cognizant of the difference. We see his face when others aren’t watching and he’s clearly listening to what’s going on around him, yet he doesn’t seem to listen with set expectations as to what response his actions will incite. We see François make discoveries—such as the Polaroid camera or Marie Marc’s wonderful, largely bedridden Nana’s mischievous sense of humour—and in these moments our internal scorecard of François’ positive or negative traits falls away while we observe him experience a moment fully. He’ll eventually experience a wedding, a death, and serious punishment for his deeds, and through it all Pialat’s knack for letting a scene breathe before abruptly moving on the next one invites us to simply take it in as we go. It’s only after the final fade-to-black that we can begin to comprehend just how much we’ve been through.

Waiting for Hashem: A Serious Man

It’s an unlikely turning point, this scene in The Man Who Wasn’t There, one of the richest, most underappreciated of the Coen Brothers’ films. Tony Shalhoub’s Freddy Riedenschneider, a lawyer in love with mystifying elocution, dazzling ideas, and the art of distraction—in other words, theatre—presents his client, on trail for murder, with a philosophical argument he believes will form the lynchpin in their case: a thing changes when you look at it. Sunlight beams down upon his upturned face as he savours his discovery of paradox. His presentation finished, he then abruptly leaves the room.

I’ve been trying to figure out why I keep thinking of The Man Who Wasn’t There as the natural companion to A Serious Man, the Coens’ new film, opening today in Toronto, about one Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg, wonderful), a Jewish physics teacher and family man swept up in spiritual crisis 1967 Minneapolis. Sure, both feature a largely passive protagonist caught up in a torrent of troubles. “But I didn’t do anything!” is Larry’s recurring plea. Both are period pieces about middleclass people with unsatisfying marriages living in the suburbs. But more integrally these are the films that come closest to expressing the Coens’ particular take on the human condition, life as something perpetually mysterious and maddeningly unmoored, where chaos is never vanquished but merely ebbs and flows, where parallels and ostensible signs can’t be dependably mined for meaning. “Please, accept the mystery!” a character asks Larry. Dreams deceive dreamers because they seem so real in the moment. Voices echo from one scene into another like yelps into the void. There’s a moment, less flamboyant than Riedenschneider’s but still pretty fun, where Larry tries to explain Schrödinger’s cat to an auditorium full of students, behind him a blackboard of comically titanic proportions covered in a labyrinthine mural of equation almost no one could possibly understand. You can never be certain if the cat’s alive or dead, Larry tells his class, but you still have to explain it on the midterm.

A Serious Man is also like The Man Who Wasn’t There in that, no matter what the rigorously irreverent Coens themselves might say—some general advice: never trust the artist to interpret the work—it reveals the filmmakers at their most discreetly compassionate. The escalating woes of Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) may be rife with black comedy and caricature, but his struggle feels genuine. He’s condescended to by several supporting characters, not by the authors. Maybe—and this is a strict maybe—this is because it’s their most autobiographical work. The setting is their hometown; Larry’s occupation is the same as that of the Coens’ father; Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff, deadpan and very funny), about to bar mitzvah, is roughly the same age the Coens would have been at the time, and we can only presume his pot-addled, utterly detached participation in the rituals of his Jewish community mirrors the Coens’. Maybe it also reflects something of Ethan Coen’s undergraduate studies in philosophy—his thesis was on Wittgenstein—but no matter how circular, inconclusive or just plain baffling Larry’s soliciting of advice from a series of rabbis might be, we’re not made to feel that he’s ridiculous or pitiful for having searched, any more than it might be ridiculous or pitiful for him to seek comfort in the desperate housewife next door (Amy Landecker, blearily sexy), who he first spies sunbathing from his roof one sunny afternoon. He fiddles with the antenna as Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Coming Back To Me’ seems to suddenly drift across the airwaves, lending tenderness to this scene of accidental voyeurism.

Characteristic Coen humour, often verging on non sequitur, abounds. There are jokes about incessant cyst draining or the inexplicable unseemliness of a bar called the North Dakota. There are instances of culture clash that toy with stereotype, such as Larry’s struggle to reason with a Korean student who presumes bribery to be acceptable practice in American schools. The cast, superb and devoid of name talent, speaks to the Coens’ impeccable eye for faces, not to mention ankles, necks, and the hairiest ears I’ve ever seen. Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick), wound so tight she looks like her head’s about to explode any second, seems to be leaving him for Allen Ginsberg (Fred Melamed, reassuring, and creepy). Bodies wordlessly convey repression, especially that of Uncle Arthur (Richard Kind, endearingly childish), whose posture renders him a peeled hard-boiled egg with flippers. So the Coen carnival show is in full effect, but it strikes me as a carnival of the community centre, oddly affectionate, deeply recognizable—to Jews and goys alike—and brimming with sly observations on how familiarity can suddenly become terrifying and strange when the balance of life alarmingly slips over. Larry’s troubles don’t really abate. Indeed, the film ends with fresh threats looming on the horizon. This cliffhanger is a legitimate finale however. There is resolution, even if it urges us to accept uncertainty as life’s sole certainty.

One last thought. It concerns coincidence, a big theme in A Serious Man. There was one other excellent American film released this year that also dealt with a major crisis in the life of a man living in a Jewish community. It was called Two Lovers, it starred Joaquin Phoenix, and is it just me or, from certain angles at least, and especially when smiling, do Phoenix and Stuhlbarg not look very alike? Is Hashem trying to tell us something? Talk amongst yourselves.

What the Dead Know

Imagine you’re unjustly locked up for second-degree murder. You were just protecting your wife. You don’t know your own strength. It was a freak thing. You’re a musician, an aesthete, soft-spoken, demure by nature, a gentle soul with a shuffling walk and the slight lunge of those ready to topple into the grave. You get out of the pen, you’re womanless, hard-up, turned away from some big shot you were promised would give you a little work. You walk the streets in a beat-up hat and too-short baggy trousers when you meet this guy, friendly as can be. He recognizes you from the papers, remembers your case, knows you got a raw deal. He buys you a coffee, says he’s a PI, offers some work, kid stuff, just watch a house for a while, track the gentleman’s movements. The catch is the gentleman in question is the very judge that sent you up. Seems a little queer, but you can’t be picky. You’re too trusting, or fatalistic, to know when you’re being set up.


That’s the lowdown for John Ellman, the hero of The Walking Dead (1936), and if I’m trying to put you in his raggedy shoes it’s only because he’s embodied by Boris Karloff with such texture and compassion that you can’t help but sympathize—even if you never get the full story about that earlier killing. Ellman takes the fall for a mafia hit and gets the chair—a novelty of the period and much in the press. But somewhere a pair of young lovers who witnessed the crime lose sleep over the fact that they never came to Ellman’s defense. They finally confess, but it’s too late. The news gets to the prison just as Ellman gets the juice. But wait, the lovers are scientists, working for a visionary experimenting with reviving the dead. So Ellman corpse is sent directly to the lab, hooked up to electrodes, and Karloff’s given a major dose of déjà vu, five years after Frankenstein (31). He’s alive, again, remote, as though swallowed by completely by the melancholy that hounded him in his previous life. He doesn’t talk much, so the question lingers: what does he remember of death?

Directed by Michael Curtiz, still far from Casablanca (42) but in excellent form in a flurry of prestige Bs, The Walking Dead is a haunting picture. It’s riddled with artifice and coincidence as our Lazarus begins to quietly enact his wrath, yet it’s endowed with spectral beauty and a deep emotional current thanks mainly to Karloff, as well as an inspired feeling for musical accompaniment—Ellman’s final request is to have a cello player score his death march—and a spare lighting and production design that looks back to German Expressionism and forward to noir. The story also looks forward to The Dead Zone (83), David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel about the loneliness that grips those back from the void and carrying secret knowledge.

The Walking Dead is by far the best thing in Warner’s Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics box, though Zombies on Broadway (45) is also very worthwhile. A horror-comedy that’s mostly comedy, it finds Wally Brown and Alan Carney’s New York talent agents coerced by a showbiz mobster into going down to a Caribbean isle to fetch a genuine zombie. Lured by a leggy American showgirl, they eventually find Bela Lugosi secretly cooking up a zombie formula. He fools them into digging their own graves and spending the night in his castle and, you know, hilarity ensues. It’s actually a fairly entertaining bit of hysterical hokum if you can stomach the crude racial gags, but more importantly for classic horror fans it represents a very weird effort to capitalize on a previous hit. Just like Lugosi’s zombies, my eyes popped out of my head when I recognized not only Sir Lancelot, once again playing a calypso singer serenading newcomers with sweetly forbidding ballads, but also Darby Jones, once again playing a shirtless giant zombie. Both were pivotal to the unforgettable spell of Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (42), the second film to emerge from producer Val Lewton’s legendary low-budget horror unit at RKO. Their reprisals here are far less distinguished, though at least Jones gets his comeuppance this time around.

Frankenstein 1970 (58) features Karloff as the original mad scientist’s great-great grumpy grandson. In need of funds to buy an atomic reactor so he can make more monsters, he allows a Hollywood film crew to use his castle. The industry satire is all stale cliché, the story is limpid and limited, the monster’s head in wrapped up in so many bandages he looks like Gumby post-surgery. It’s genuinely curious that director Howard Koch chooses to cover most of the scenes in long, unbroken takes and wide shots, though they only make things drag even more. Though it’s got Lugosi, Karloff and Peter Lorre on board, You’ll Find Out (40) seems mainly a showcase for radio personality Kay Kyser and his College of Musical Knowledge. It’s not much of a horror movie, though it did seem really horrible. I had to shut off the TV and run screaming.

Let there be lightning: Jennifer Baichwal discusses Act of God

The cloud looks lonely and monstrous, cradling some dying sun inside it. Though it’s only the first of many such ominous masses of droplets to loom throughout the film it’s the one that lingers in my mind. It seems to hold an unusually potent charge of destruction and wonder, but it rests there in the sky, suspended static, all threat. Act of God by contrast could be described as all question, an essay on chance and meaning that uses stories of being struck by lightning as a platform for meditation, without concern for hard results.

Paul Auster

Featured among the film’s subjects is novelist Paul Auster, modern literature’s custodian of chance, and musician Fred Frith, for whom improvisation forms the bedrock of his practice. Act of God ends not with a summation of theoretical points but rather a sort of duet between these two, with Auster describing an incident from his childhood where the kid next to him was fatally struck. The interplay between narration, guitar and percussion is buoyed by the filmmakers’ reining in of atmosphere, their evocation of the electrical brooding that precedes a great storm.

Fred Frith

There’s also James O’Reilly, whose monologue about death by lightning inspired the film. There’s Dannion Brinkley, the Las Vegas Lazarus whose near-death experience spurred a career as caregiver and New Age guru. There’s Alex Hermant, who remains off-camera while his lightning museum in Marcenat, France is on curious display. There are trips to Cuba and Mexico, where reverence for lightning assumes religious properties. There’s also a trip to a lab where we get to peek inside the electrical currents flowing through Frith’s brain while he develops one of his spontaneous creations.

Jennifer Baichwal

Jennifer Baichwal’s previous films Let It Come Down, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes profiled author Paul Bowles and photographers Shelby Lee Adams and Edward Burtinsky respectively. In each case the subject served less as material for straight biography than as a launch pad for a discussion of larger themes extrapolated from their lives and work. Act of God breaks from Baichwal’s established model by using a chorus rather than a single subject to address its theme. The result—sculpted in part by Baichwal’s husband and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, not to mention editor Roland Schlimme—works quite well more often than not, and the coda is exquisite. I spoke with Baichwal during the film’s premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto last spring. Appropriately, her responses to my questions rarely leaned toward conclusions.

JB: Act of God proceeds along these two distinct parallel thematic trajectories. It addresses a phenomenon that directly effects only a very small number of people, yet at it also invokes ontological questions that effect everyone. Which aspect sparked the film?

JBa: My background is in philosophy and theology, so I think about these sorts of questions a lot. How much meaning can you ascribe to events before becoming deterministic? How little meaning can you ascribe before becoming nihilistic? I read James O’Reilly’s monologue Act of God, about being struck as a young man and this existential crisis that happened as a result. His description of the moment of the strike and his immediate response to it were so interesting. On one level there’s this physical event, something that can be explained by weather and science and probability, et cetera. On another it’s the perfect metaphor for this struggle between meaning and chance. So what sparked the film was really both things simultaneously. I mentioned to Michael Ondaatje that I was thinking of doing this and he suggested I talk to Paul Auster. As well, Nick has always been fascinated by lightning.

JB: Funny that someone whose medium is photography would be so fascinated by something so difficult to photograph.

JBa: Almost impossible. It’s so fleeting. But Nick taught himself to be an electrician when he was young and knows a thing or two about electricity. We wanted to shoot our own images of lightning. If you look at the existing archive, most of it’s very unsatisfying. It’s generally only about the event itself. It gives no contextual information whatsoever.

JB: Your films thus far has been to some extent profiles of artists. I wonder if Act of God somehow also emerged from a desire to understand generative acts or creativity, accidents that bring flashes of insight or inspiration.

JBa: It’s no accident, I guess, that two people in the film are writers, and one’s a musician. I always turn to art when examining questions of the human condition. Even though Auster and O’Reilly resist ascribing meaning to what happens to them they can’t help but frame it in narrative, which you could argue is another way of doing just that. If the film’s thesis is that narrative is the most basic way we can create meaning, then the parallel of that was Frith’s improvisation, which struck me almost as an existential state of being between meaning and randomness. The fact that he embodies an electrical current somehow; to be able to see what that internal electrical storm in his brain looks like; to hear Frith’s brother explain how the brain learns by being confronted by the unexpected; to hear Auster describe his essay ‘Why Write?’ as an ars poetica but without theory, just stories—these are the essential things the film tries to address.

Plugging into Fred Frith's brain

JB: By creating these narratives we’re also attempting to free ourselves of the burden of these experiences on our consciousness.

JBa: It’s true. Why does that process allow us to be free of these experiences? Is it just because it stands in for making sense where sense can’t really be made? We tell stories about these things and it’s a way or ordering, of creating coherence.

JB: Did you ever consider a more didactic approach? Bringing in some sort of authority on meteorology, say?

JBa: I did wonder at one point if we might bring in someone to talk more about the science. The funny thing is that whenever you see TV shows about lightning, for example, the emphasis is always on demystifying it, where I really kind of wanted to do exactly the opposite. I wanted it to remain a mysterious force that precipitates all of these questions. I’m never really interested in making things didactic because I feel like if these questions we’re asking were very easy to answer then the subject wouldn’t be a very interesting thing to spend five years of your life working on. I don’t think it would be interesting for a viewer to spend 80 or 90 minutes on. Making a film like this is about opening up a space to think about something that’s not easily dismissible.

JB: There’s a significant gamble making a film like this because while it is a sort of essay film you’re entirely dependent on the quality of material you get from your subjects. How do you get them to align their statements reasonably closely to the thread of your film?

JBa: Finding the right stories is part of the process. When we went to France, for example, we didn’t know that Alex Hermant was going to say that he didn’t want to be on camera. We went a long way to interview him—the guy wasn’t in Paris, he was in the mountains. We went there with the kids and my mother, who was there to take care of them. So when Hermant laid this on us, Nick and I just looked at each other and thought, Well, this must be the essential thing about this person. This is the key to him. Let’s use it. Your relationship with our subjects is the most important element in any documentary. Unless there’s some exchange of vulnerability, some sense of authenticity, it’s not going to work. Finding a place where you can communicate can sometimes take days. Sometimes it can happen immediately. With Paul Bowles it took 30 hours to reach that place. With James O’Reilly, just the act of taking him back to this place where he hadn’t been for 30 years, watching him walking around trying to find the site for two days, watching him perform this spontaneous recreation, it seemed to find us all together in that place we needed to be. Because we didn’t set up that recreation. I could never set that up. I just don’t do that. I feel like I can always tell the directed act in a documentary. The person walking away thoughtfully, or whatever. You can always tell when it’s something they’ve been told to do.

JB: That’s something that Herzog seems to have mastered though, the created/spontaneous act. Of course he also made numerous fictional films before he was able to do that. But I was thinking that you do have one very Herzogian character in your film, this Dannion Brinkley. Were you ever concerned about the authenticity of his testimony?

JBa: There’s something completely bizarre and coincidental about him living in Las Vegas, the city of odds. When I asked him why he lived there he said it was the most spiritual place on earth. [Laughs] I don’t quite agree with that. But I absolutely believe that Dannion’s transformation is real. I’m sure there’ll be people who feel what he’s saying is untrue. But in some ways it’s not important whether you believe him or not. I wanted his story to be told the way he wanted to tell it.

Baichwal and Nick de Pencier at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

JB: Given that Act of God is so much about the search for meaning, I wonder if you feel like your own beliefs have made their way into the film, even if only through some unconscious process.

JBa: It’s impossible for me not to be in every frame in some way. It’s not like these stories are somehow being directly transmitted and there’s no author behind it all. There’s no question that we—Nick, our editor Roland, myself—had an enormous impact on how those stories were told. Yet despite the fact that I would disagree strenuously that objectivity is ever possible in documentary, I do think truth is possible. We tried to shape things to retain as much fidelity to how people tell their own stories as possible with the tools at our disposal. It’s the way the whole is framed that’s very much informed by my own personal questions about these things. And also my lack of an answer. I don’t mind living in that uncertain place.

Off the rails: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

Based on the 1973 novel by Morton Freedgood (writing as John Godfrey), this thriller, filmed previously in 1974 and 1998, finds an NYC subway car hijacked by thugs threatening to kill a passenger a minute if they don’t get $10,000,000 in an hour. Brian Helgeland’s new, gizmo-heavy script has alpha thug Ryder (John Travolta, with conspicuously dyed hair, brows and handlebar) striking up a strangely chatty repartee with Garber (Denzel Washington, paunchy, bespectacled, stubbornly handsome), the MTA employee who first takes Ryder’s demands and thereafter becomes the only negotiator Ryder’s willing to deal with. Discovering that Garber stands accused of accepting a bribe, Ryder apparently identifies with what he views as Garber’s victimization at the hands of an unjust corporate and/or social hierarchy. At one point Ryder gets especially vulnerable and shares a traumatic memory of getting shit on by an Icelandic sled dog while on a date with an ass model. Their interplay and its macho—at times homoerotic—sense of connection are, needless to say, deeply silly.

But Tony Scott is, to say the very least, a deeply silly filmmaker. “I never get excited by coincidence,” Garber says in an early scene, but Scott clearly get excited by absolutely everything, regardless of how inane or pointless it might be. His spastic editing and love of blaring soundtracks, his inability to settle upon anything for more than half a second or keep his camera from aimlessly circling his subjects: all these habits combine to make a monstrously glossy cocktail that in its way something to behold. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is as undeniably diverting as it is stupid, though it gets less diverting and more stupid as it goes—see the superfluous faux-suspense sequence where a subway car hurtles toward a destruction we've already been told isn't going to occur, or the nonsensical showdown/show-off/suicidal finale.

However, Pelham 1 2 3 also holds a certain interest simply as a broad portrait of contemporary Manhattan, strikingly contrasting the dinginess of the 74 version with its high-tech transit management, its police force as virtual standby army, and its surprisingly complex characterization of its municipal leaders, with James Gandolfini giving a fun performance as Hizzonor. Garber seems the avatar of this whole vision of a city that’s equally culturally diverse, overwhelming in terms of busyness and bureaucracy, and somehow cozy. The final image of Garber cheerfully bringing a full gallon of milk home to his apparently lactose-starved wife (Aunjanue Ellis, lovely and totally game in a goofy bit part) rather audaciously leaves his guilt in the bribery scandal totally ambiguous. And there’s something oddly charming, if absurd, about the sense that for all the extra drama, this was all just another day at the office for this hard-working New Yorker.

Adoration: Atom Egoyan's patchy puzzle of truths, lies, theatre and technology

Stories fold in upon stories in Adoration. How their contradictions speak to one another forms the backbone of the film. High schooler Simon (Devon Bostick) tells one to his class about how his father nearly succeeded in blowing up an aircraft with his pregnant mother onboard. We see the story play out in flashback, but is the fact that the Israeli airport’s lit like a moody upscale nightclub a splinter in the scene’s verity or merely an expression of some production designer’s caprices rubbing elbows with budget constraints? A woman shrouded in a beaded Islamic veil lurks in a wintry Toronto suburb, complimenting Simon’s bigoted tow-truck driving uncle Tom (Scott Speedman) on his nativity scene while inserting a baldly provocative statement about Jews into the already uncomfortable conversation. Is anything about her visit genuine? Is it some sort of theatre designed to elicit a violent response from Tom? Is she a particularly insistent tommyknocker clinging to Speedman after The Strangers?

Atom Egoyan’s latest finds the writer/director still immersed in the search for where the truth lies, still viewing families with a dissecting eye, still questioning our largely passive acceptance of ever-more invasive technologies, and, rather wearingly, still feeling obligated to plot his stories with a leaden dramaturgical hand. (In a sense Egoyan’s concerns mirror those of Michael Haneke, with the precarious advent of a certain sentimentality that urges resolutions Haneke wouldn’t even sniff at.) A crisp sense of artifice allowed Egoyan’s insistence on coincidence and the unlikely interconnectivity of characters and events to function relatively fluidly in his earliest features. But recent attempts at ostensibly more accessible stories with newly broader, more “globalized” casts of disparate characters—I’d vote for Ararat (2002) as the nadir, though Where the Truth Lies (05) makes a strong contestant—have mangled otherwise potentially interesting movies into overwrought tapestries, contributions to that self-important trend exemplified by Crash (04), Babel (06) and Crossing Over (09).

The good news is that Adoration is a major improvement on its immediate predecessors. Its metaphors are intelligent, labyrinthine and generative. And its creakier conceits are made somewhat more palatable through the sheer conviction of its better actors, namely Arsinée Khanjian, charged with embodying the movie’s most absurd protagonist, a loopy Lebanese-Canadian drama teacher who seems implausibly oblivious to how her audacious actions affect the rest of the world. Khanjian, eerily beautiful and a fixture in Egoyan’s films since Next of Kin (84), remains a beguiling, mysterious presence. She’s the best thing in Adoration, which provides her biggest role in an Egoyan film so far this millennium. If Speedman and Bostick fare less well it may simply be that you need to have married Egoyan to really grasp the vibe. The former seems deeply committed if confused about how to balance Tom’s burbling, inarticulate rage with his ability to adopt new perspectives. The latter may simply lack the preternatural understanding and emotional range required to pull off a truly difficult role—if it can be pulled off at all. And it’s not his fault that he looks like a catalogue model. He’s got a huge weight to carry here, and it’s a relief to see him do something neutral once in a while, like eat cereal.

Simon’s story sparks a highly emotional debate between students and faculty alike, putting his teacher and co-conspirator Sabine (Khanjian) in hot water and allowing Egoyan to explore the film’s thematic threads of the radical religious devotion and the limits of multiculturalism through a multiplicity of images. Egoyan refrains from excessive explicit editorializing with regards to Simon’s dependence on devices to contextualize his experiences, probably because the images say more than enough on their own. Simon interviews his dying grandfather with a video camera between them. He debates with others about his father’s supposed attempts at terrorism through the filter of videoconferencing, every speaker contained in their own little box glowing on the computer screen. Technology, especially screens within screens, grants Adoration the very sense of interconnectivity that some of the characters’ face-to-face encounters strain to convey. When Sabine’s car gets towed by Tom—she knows who he is; he has no idea who she is—we can hear the rusty wheels of dramatic irony churning away, though the payoff is that it does lead to one of the oddest impromptu diner lunch dates in recent memory, affectionately set in the now-closed and much-missed Canary Restaurant.

Space issues: Star Trek

“Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence,” so states a flustered Dr. “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban) en route to the heavens in Star Trek. Yet while Bones’ assessment sounds right, those vacuous descriptives don’t really jive with the colossal spectacle of director J.J. Abrams’ film, a fully loaded throwback/re-conception of the beloved 1960s television series with the bountiful offspring. For two solid hours, darkness and silence are held at bay by explosions that dazzle and bellow in the galactic depths and heated debates between crewmembers that echo unnervingly throughout the starship Enterprise.

It starts with plenty of death and one conspicuous birth. I guess it can’t be helped when a lady goes into labour at the precise moment that her husband chooses to sacrifice himself for the survival of millions while under attack, but it sure leaves her son, one James T. Kirk, with a serious case of survivor’s guilt, which will manifest as arrogance self-destructive behaviour when he grows into a young man (Chris Pine). Meanwhile, another troublesome legacy brews when Vulcan dad meets human mom (Winona Ryder!), generating a half-breed burdened with finding the balance between paternal logic and maternal emotion. Baby Spock will grow into a seductively smart and ambitious young fellow (Zachary Quinto) who’ll serve as the perfect foil for the wild, undisciplined Kirk. These guys barely make it into space before unfathomable terror causes their antagonistic tendencies to flare up and only gradually settle into the collaboration necessary to save the universe from some ireful Romulans in possession of some red matter that makes black holes and kills off entire planets in the blink of an eye.

As I watched Star Trek with a capacity audience, I actually heard some people behind me hyperventilate, usually upon the first appearance of some familiar character with a new face. Full disclosure: I am not one of these people, but, breathing disruptions aside, I know there are millions of you out there and, presumably, unless you had to be hospitalized during the first ten minutes, you’ve all seen the movie by now. I can’t speak for Trekkies, but it seems to me that Abrams’ film, written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, whom Abrams worked with on Alias, walks a pretty fine line between homage and camp. Pine and Quinto give engaging, original and fairly nuanced performances, even if Pine succumbs to his own version of Shatneresque excess on occasion. But a number of others work so arduously to invoke the mannerisms of the original cast that it feels like parody, an effect that’s heightened still further by some pretty one-dimensional villains.

This tension between reverence for the old Star Trek and the thirst for innovation is mirrored in an uncertain overall tone. With a plot that hinges on wildly implausible/poetic coincidences (just wait until you see how they manage to wrangle Leonard Nimoy into this thing), this Star Trek feels at times cut from the blunt stencils of ancient myth, yet at others it’s imbued with the clarity and psychology of a very modern, textured drama. I guess there was no way of avoiding any kind of Star Trek that wouldn't get tangled up in trying to be many things to many people. But whatever it is, this Star Trek is relentlessly entertaining, has sequences of striking beauty and otherworldly strangeness, and speaks to the sort of old-fashioned heroism rarely invoked with any conviction anymore.

Angels, ages, outliers (and beards): Gopnik and Gladwell seek the hidden histories in the lives of great and famous men

It was just over 200 years ago, on February 12, 1809 to be exact, that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born to very different families on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Indeed, there are more differences between these two men than there are similarities—though the similarities are striking. It is above all mere history that has aligned them, through the essential randomness of a birth date, and through the synchronized peaks of their influence. Today, with questions of racial destiny and religious tensions reigning so prominently in public discourse, it’s not difficult to make a case for Darwin and Lincoln as the most influential and enduringly controversial figures in the West.

With Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (Knopf, $27.95), Adam Gopnik has produced a captivating and concise volume that sifts through the myths, biographies and historical powers of both men to flush out the ways in which they speak most directly to the present. The book’s purpose is in one sense pragmatic; given the proliferation of writing on both men, Gopnik successfully offers overwhelmed readers an engaging and informative starting point. But if the book possesses a particular thesis of its own, one that illuminates these disparate lives through a single prism, it is “that literary eloquence is essential to a liberal civilization.” There were others who could’ve unleashed big ideas similar to Darwin’s and Lincoln’s upon the world, but, as Gopnik argues, it’s highly unlikely that anyone could have delivered these ideas in such a persuasive and meaningful way.

“A love of the grease and a feel for the gist, the habit of compromise even at the cost of absolute clarity…” such were the attributes of Lincoln’s famously monosyllabic oratory style. Darwin, meanwhile, “was one of the great natural English prose stylists… a man who had learned to cast his thesis in a succession of incidents so that action and argument became one.” Gopnik stresses the importance of Lincoln’s law practice and Darwin’s observational skills. He writes of their tender and yet challenging relationships with their wives, debunking some myths about 19th century sex life while he’s at it, and considers the grief over the loss of a favoured 11-year-old child each of them suffered. (And I love the fact that Gopnik compares Darwin to Colombo.) He draws parallels, addresses some lingering mysteries, and yet avoids over-working history for superfluous sweeping overstatement. “The past is so often unknowable,” Gopnik writes, “not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present.”  

If I quote Gopnik a lot in my attempts to convey something of his readings of these two men, it’s only to give you some hint as to how Gopnik himself, a staff writer for The New Yorker, utilizes a special talent for articulating something as difficult to characterize as literary or oratory style, as well as providing a sense of how this style accumulates in complexity and resonates across the ages. And he makes you crave more. If Angels and Ages acquires a large readership, it will surely expand the readership of The Origin of the Species in kind.

“Coincidence,” Gopnik observes, “is the vernacular of history, the slang of memory.” It’s a statement that could slip easily into the foreplay of one of the many intellectual sucker-punches Malcolm Gladwell doles out in Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, $30.99). Gladwell, author of the best-selling pop provocations The Tipping Point and Blink, has set out to discredit the myth of the self-made man, the heroic figure who conquers adversity through sheer will power, vision and a dazzling array of innate gifts. Circumstances—class, era, race, cultural demeanor, opportunity—matter too, Gladwell reminds us, and if that sounds like common sense, it’s Gladwell’s willingness to actually prove it through one case study after another that forces the reader to reconsider their assumptions. At least for as long as it takes to read Outliers, which is not long at all. The book’s lively, diverse and colourful in subject matter, and so inclusive and methodical in tone you’ll feel like you’re taking a beginner’s business seminar: “Just as we did, then, with Bill Joy and Chris Langan, let’s start over with Joseph Flom, this time putting to use everything we’ve learned from the first four chapters of this book.” Ready, kids?

Gladwell exposes how hockey stardom is fixed from the time children try to get on teams; how Bill Gates lucked out by getting thousands of free hours on a computer back when they filled garages and were difficult to access; how the Beatles honed their craft thanks to landing that early and arduous Hamburg gig; how Robert Oppenheimer clawed his way to science superstardom even after attempting to murder his tutor; how plane crashes proliferate under air crews who come from countries where people typically speak in deference to superiors; how the Chinese rock at math because the way they verbalize numbers just makes more sense. These are all great stories—I was especially intrigued when Gladwell compares Oppenheimer’s career to that of Chris Langan, some freakin’ genius who lives in obscurity because, it would seem, he lacks good communication skills—and in a basic, anecdotal way, every one of them rings true.

The problem arises when Gladwell uses these stories as avatars. So many questions arise when we start to apply these generalizations to all cases. Why do some people fail when they actually have every single one of Gladwell’s ingredients for success? What exactly is success anyway, especially in, for example, the popular arts? Awards are a most dubious measure. Plenty of world famous and enduringly appealing rock bands never had their Hamburg—some of them, strictly speaking, didn’t even know how to play their instruments. And if Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” of practice is true, how do we apply it to, say, filmmakers? What exactly should they practice doing for 10,000 hours to become masters?

Make no mistake, Outliers is a terrific read. It feels like a carefully edited transcript of a really smart guy effortlessly holding court at a dinner party. It’ll teach you things, and make you think twice. Just be wary of accepting Gladwell’s over-confident conclusions. The promise of universality draws us in, but the success of a good story often lies in part on its singularity.

Unlucky numbers: Knowing

In just about any movie where the protagonist is a teacher you can usually count on a classroom scene in which the movie’s themes and conflicts are announced. It’s surprising actually how often the convention works. It’s a way of playing fair with the audience and certainly preferable to having the characters make similar announcements in the thick of a heated climax. Early in Knowing astrophysicist and MIT prof John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) engages his students in a conversation about determinism, randomness and purpose. Koestler’s a man of science, the errant son of a pastor, and a still grief-stricken widower. For him, “shit just happens.” And if there’s one thing you can say about Knowing, it’s that a lot of massively cataclysmic shit happens.  

Call it disaster porn. Through a series of coincidences that are surely more than just coincidences Koestler gets his hands on a paper covered in numbers that’s been buried underground for 50 years, its author a creepy little girl who’s since grown up and died. During a drunken math binge Koestler unravels the document’s hidden code, which prophesizes a series of wickedly fatal disasters, most of which have already come to pass—but there’s still three left! Can Koestler, recklessly/stupidly throwing himself into the eye of the hurricane, prevent these catastrophic events? The little girl got all the other ones right, so hey, you do the math. But you may want to cover your eyes when the screaming crowds being crushed to pulp or the burning bodies stumble about begging for mercy. Some of this shit will give you nightmares.

For better or for worse, Alex Proyas, who helmed cult favourite Dark City, fully commits to the material, which means balancing Koestler’s personal revelation and Cage’s odd, sleepy breed of hysteria with the broader story of global apocalyptic hysteria. If you’re willing to go along with this thing, there’s something genuinely compelling at the base of all this. Loony, half-baked and more than a little friendly to religious nuts and conspiracy theorists alike, but compelling. Of course, there’s also something stupendously silly about numerous key points on which the plot turns: the messages scrawled under a bed, the skinny blonde stalkers in overcoats, the risible final images of some sort of paradise that cry out to be included as outtakes on a DVD for The Fountain. You have to admire Knowing’s willingness to go all the way with its catastrophic equations, yet it arguably could have benefited from a few hints of ambiguity, a little room for doubt. In life and art alike, certainty can be a precarious thing.