The Rite: Study hard, eat well, exorcize regularly

Diagnosed with a dearth of faith, aspiring priest Michael Kovak (Colin O’Donoghue), who only joined the seminary to wriggle out of working at his old man’s funeral home anyway, gets sent to exorcist school at the Vatican, where he meets a kooky old Welshman (Anthony Hopkins) who teaches him the ropes. Their first client’s a pregnant teen who becomes a contortionist and barfs up bloody spikes whenever the Devil’s steering the bus. But what really rattles Michael’s sturdy skepticism is the way Satan seems to know his secrets, and speaks them out loud through the mouths of the possessed, in front of everybody, and in English, no less. Because The Rite is fundamentally about the acquisition of faith, as a weapon against diabolical forces attempting to control the flesh, as a way of focusing your mind and settling on a career. This is the story of a young fellow finding his vocation, and thus doubles as a recruitment video for the Catholic Church. Come, we’re told, and fetching Italian journalists will dig you, even if you can’t make out with them. More importantly, you’ll get to put demons in the sleeper-hold on a regular basis.

I certainly appreciate how The Rite, helmed by 1408 director Mikael Håfström, “inspired by” true events and “suggested by” a book by Matt Braglio, honours its own convictions enough to hold off on dopey spectacle and manifest its evil in relatively subtler forms—if Satan made everybody levitate and do the head-spin there wouldn’t be any reason to doubt his existence. Perhaps the central problem with the film is that its conflicts are so abstract and internal that the final showdown feels artificially protracted and actually pretty dull, with not especially riveting newcomer O’Donoghue driving the devil out of Hopkins, who in going from mentor to victim gets to transition from affecting an amusingly businesslike air to supplying a torrent of Hannibal Lecter-like taunts. At least he’s having fun.

There’s also something about the way The Rite appeals to the ostensible latent Catholic in all of us that feels annoyingly simplistic, that feeds into a childish desire for sweeping solutions to life’s most complex problems and absolutions from responsibility for our inner demons. Michael does indeed initially question church dogma and defer to psychology in his attempts to explain away freaky phenomena, but once he rises to the occasion and casts Satan out of a poor soul the implication is that he’s learned a glorious truth, one tantamount to a free lunch: by simply speaking some magic words, The Rite assures us, and doing so like you really mean it, we can each of us be cured of what agonizes us.

Do you believe in Magic?

When Corky first takes the stage for Amateur Night he totally bombs. Once this hits home his habitual timidity suddenly falls away and he berates the audience for failing to appreciate his card tricks. Corky relates this story to his bedridden mentor and revises it as he goes. We see select flashbacks that could verify or contradict his narrative depending how you figure it, and so right from the start Magic (1978) is already playing with misdirection, albeit conservatively so—you get to feeling the movie can’t bear to let Corky be truly humiliated. Next time we see Corky perform he’s got Fats in tow, and all that rage Corky couldn’t keep in check has now been channeled into Fats. This miniature version of Corky redistributes Corky’s repression, cursing and insulting everyone in the room and having them roaring with laughter. With Fats’ help Corky now gets paid for his tantrums. Fats even helps Corky win the affections of that beauty he loved from afar in high school. You might even say Fats can get away with murder. Or try, anyway. Magic is a little like Dead Ringers (88) except instead of two Jeremy Ironses you’ve got Anthony Hopkins and a dummy.

Okay, so Magic isn’t nearly as fascinatingly perverse, chillingly sexy, or generally psychologically juicy as the Cronenberg, but it’s still pretty nifty, if a tad overlong. Adapted by William Goldman from his own novel, directed by Richard Attenborough before Gandhi (82), and starring Hopkins long before Hannibal Lecter, there’s a sense that this modest horror picture with the high-grade talent probably caught most audiences off guard. It left a number of critics sniffy and dismissive, but it’s developed something of a cult following and is available on DVD and now Blu-ray from Dark Sky.

The dummy really is creepy, but this has much to do with Hopkins’ uncanny ability to convey the clot of pettiness nurtured by the damaged child locked inside the beefy adult, something that comes across like lightning every time his face goes from slack to smiling. Hopkins is very good with the ventriloquism—a practice once suspected of being in league with the devil, and one, we should note, usually mastered before puberty—but the movie is almost better when you can see him move his lips. Burgess Meredith has a terrific supporting role as Corky’s manager, bald on top, with glasses and foot-long cigars that make him look like a Vegas Hunter S. Thompson. Eschewing camp, he’s somehow just about Magic’s most sympathetic character, yet his affection for Corky, who he’s convinced with be the next Rich Little, is perhaps best not thought about too carefully. Corky’s clearly got a screw loose long before Fats starts to nag him like Norman Bates’ mother.

Victor Kemper’s cinematography is lovely and effective, evoking the movie’s pervading sadness through diffused light, and often playfully doubling Corky with ostentatious shadows. Breaking away from the epic for a change, Attenborough’s strengths here lie with his attention to actors and their business. Besides creating the right space for Hopkins to give his very polished but nonetheless remarkable performance, Attenborough also gets terrific work out of even the minor players, such as the cab driver who gives Corky a tour of his home town and looks like Keith Ritchie from the A-Team. But I think Magic’s most wonderful surprise is Ann-Margaret—that’s right, Anthony Hopkins gets to make out with Ann-Margaret. She’s great because she seems to understand that the teenage hottie once desired by every boy in town might grow up to be lonely, lost, and a little loopy herself. Her spastic glee upon seeing old Corky do his thing with Fats feels just a little off—most gorgeous women I’ve known don’t usually get so excited about nerds with talking dolls. Of course, we can always fantasize.

Done with mirrors: The Magician on DVD

In the carriage we find a troupe of traveling showmen: a mute mesmerist in a corny fake beard, a beautiful woman in drag, and a bespectacled, hunched-over crone who claims to be a 200 year-old witch. Call them mystics, entertainers, or businessmen like anyone else, they’re still fugitives the lot, wanted on charges of fraud and blasphemy, which makes you wonder just what it is their audiences were expecting. It’s the middle of the 19th century and all over Europe are towns not big enough for both science and the spirit.


The troupe offers a lift to a fellow thespian found starving in a wood, an alcoholic seemingly on his deathbed. His name is Spiegel, the Swedish word for mirror, so when Vogler (Max Von Sydow) hovers over him closely, smelling the despair on the man’s breath, there’s much to imply that he might as well be looking at himself, or what he’ll become just a few more miles down the road.


The troupe arrives in Stockholm, where they’re to perform for a small, elite audience, among them the chief of police and the royal medical advisor (Gunnar Björnstrand), a righteous rationalist determined to prove irrefutably that their magic show is a sham. Though his more intimate struggles would be dramatized numerous times over the coarse of his long career, The Magician (1958), newly available from Criterion, is probably Ingmar Bergman’s most unabashedly autobiographical film about his professional life, pitting artists and critics against each another to see who can out-humiliate who. Björnstrand’s debunker was based on the critic Harry Schein, who Bergman felt persecuted by. Schein was the husband of actress Ingrid Thulin, and this knowledge injects a delicious audacity into a scene where Björnstrand simultaneously iterates his distaste for the troupe’s hocus-pocus and confesses his attraction to Thulin, who plays Von Sydow’s wife. Björnstrand has a line here that’s terribly on-the-nose yet somehow more potent for it, as though he himself were mesmerized and felt compelled to utter some naked truth: “You represent what I despise most of all: the inexplicable.”


The Magician was made during a transitional point in Bergman’s career: between The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring; between anxiety about death and anxiety about godlessness; between collaborations with cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist; between staging his films as, to some degree, extensions of his theatre practice, and transforming his aesthetic into something more wholly cinematic, driven as much by the characters’ internal states as their external dramas. It’s never been an especially beloved installment in Bergman’s oeuvre, and critics fret every now and then about whether it successfully adopts one genre or another, since some sections are comic, while the climax borrows conventions from horror. I can’t get too worked up about regarding any Bergman film’s genre status, but I find it tremendously interesting to see how The Magician so casually dismantles the obligatory narrative conventions used in every genre. It starts out focused on the troupe and implies that Von Sydow’s the hero. Yet we gradually become more invested in Thulin, who’s character and performance are more sympathetic and dynamic. (Von Sydow, usually so very good in Bergman, is a little hammy here, his character’s silence prompting him to overact with his face and hands. This overcompensation for silence would be memorably corrected some years later by another Vogler: Liv Ullmann in Bergman’s Persona [66].) Regardless, a third of the way into the film we abandon these characters and their adversaries both and pass an extensive digression with two younger, minor characters hungry to bring excitement to their lives: the troupe’s coachman and a servant girl, played by a very sexy yet subtly sad Bibi Andersson, who each drink from an ostensible love potion and await the results with a certain desperation. It’s as though Bergman conceived The Magician not as a propulsive drama or even a character study, but rather a sort of ensemble-driven essay on precarious ambitions under constant threat of having the rug pulled out from under.


We gradually come to the troupe’s performance, thoroughly pulled apart and laughed at, as promised, and to a series of deaths or seeming deaths, one being that of a man we already thought dead, another being a man we can’t quite believe is dead, and still another being a death already foretold by the crone, who may be the film’s one genuine mystic. These deaths set the stage for a carefully devised haunting meant to shake up Björnstrand. It’s a wonderful display of trickery, much of it dependent on mirrors, shadow and imagination, none of it ultimately capable of persuading Björnstrand that he was wrong in his initial assertions. Not that it matters. The troupe comes and goes and want only to amuse us, and perhaps move us, for the short duration of their stopover. As Bergman himself writes in his memoir Images: My Life in Film, which is excerpted in the booklet that accompanies Criterion’s disc, “I had often felt that I was involved in a continuous, rather joyous prostitution. My job was to beguile the audience.”

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.

Pros and cons: The Brothers Bloom

Wayfaring grifters, the brothers Stephen Bloom and just plain old Bloom—the latter presumably having lost his given name in a Polynesian poker game, or perhaps while convalescing from ennui in some Alpine hospice—have toured the world in search of ever-more risk-courting and inventive cons, but the lifestyle’s no good anymore for Little Bloom and hasn’t been for some time. He wants out, but is persuaded into the proverbial one-last-big-score by his tireless elder. Their ultimate mark is a lonesome and preposterously wealthy heiress with a fantastical, perhaps autistic penchant for collecting and perfecting hobbies, making her something like all of the Tenenbaum children rolled into one. Over the course of our story she’ll inevitably move from being a surprisingly formidable victim to a brilliant accomplice.

That reference to The Royal Tenenbaums just sort of slipped out, but it’s tough not to let such references accumulate when trying to describe Brick writer/director Rian Johnson’s second feature, which has been crafted top to bottom with the sort of cutesy comic pageantry and fraternal drama which Wes Anderson has made his domain for well over a decade now and with considerable success. The Brothers Bloom has been craftily titled so that it ends with both a surname and a verb, though, despite the avalanche of plot and the truly magnificent efforts of its actors, it’s hard to say if anyone or anything truly blooms here since the movie itself is often so stiflingly manicured as to preempt anything so spontaneous as discovery. Right from the prologue, which finds the Blooms as children already working elaborate ruses and dressing themselves as Amish undertakers, which ends with a prematurely cathartic slow-motion climax, replete with exultant Rod Stewart bursting through the speakers and an explosive announcement of the film’s title spelled out in lights, we’re meant to feel really excited about what we’re seeing –even before its even properly begun!

The casting is ideal. Maybe too ideal. Adrien Brody brings the same melancholic amiability, uncertainty and romantic longing to Bloom as he did to Peter Whitman in… Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. His scarecrow physique seems custom-built for heroes who wilt like a frail weed when they suffer but are just as easily swept up in the winds of an exuberant game plan. As Stephen, Mark Ruffalo is all charm, and I mean all. He’s so charming it seems he could con himself right out of existence. (He’s also one of my favourite screen actors to watch eat.) Rachel Weisz as Penelope, the mark, is so damn good that she frequently makes what should be an annoying artifice of a character into a gas, walking with the gait of a 12-year-old who hasn’t yet figured out she has the body of a rather fetching and shapely thirtysomething woman. Robby Coltrane arrives on the scene to ham it up with absolute mastery. Sadly, Rinko Kikuchi, who didn’t get to talk in her Oscar-nominated performance as a deaf teen in Babel, still doesn’t get to talk while playing Stephen’s sidekick, a demolitions nut rendered as a tired stereotype of mute Japanese cool.

So we’ve got terrific actors, a dazzling and diverse array of locations, and a little Asian girl who wears kooky costumes and lives to blow shit up. We’re having fun! Or so we’re often reminded. With it’s deluge of sight gags—Penelope’s casual smashing of her car into a brick wall is admittedly a real winner—and shower of winky literary nods, there’s an eagerness to impress on display throughout The Brothers Bloom that most of us can’t help but feel kindly to, the way we might indulge some precocious kid who just can’t wait to show you her entire collection of rare stamps or, more fittingly, magic tricks. Narrated by magician Ricky Jay, The Brothers Bloom is finally an ode to the pleasures of getting fooled, of slight of hand and fast fingers. But the hand guiding this tale is too slight by half, giving us a good enough time when its all just a lark, but fumbling things up when he expects us to invest more deeply in the emotional journeys. I’d have been content with mere showmanship.