The road to parturition: Away We Go

A welcome entry into the surely under-explored subgenre of the bulgingly pregnant road movie, Away We Go begins with considerable brio, its first act’s chain of clipped, zingy, well-sculpted scenes just bouncing along, unburdened by preciousness or ponderousness. There is, initially, so much here to like. The dinner scene featuring a fizzy Catherine O’Hara as doting hippy grandma-to-be and a hilariously over-boisterous Jeff Daniels as the absent-minded old dad who’s really big of affirmative adjectives. The warm, inviting photography, courtesy of Ellen Kuras. The final line in the establishing scene of comic cunnilingus, which begins “From what I’ve read about vaginal flavour…”

As Burt and Verona, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are exceptionally relaxed, lived-in, and appealing as the shaggy thirtysomething couple setting out via plane, train and rusted-out Volvo on a slightly loopy quest for an ideal family upon which to model their impending one, for a new place to call home, or, shit, maybe even a new country. Their first stop is Phoenix, where Allison Janney sparkles as Lily, Verona’s old workmate, recently condemned to middle America’s desert suburbs with her shrunken, paranoid husband and pudgy, tormented children. Loud, crass and funny as all hell, Lily, in an especially memorable scene, completes with the PA at the dog track to describe how her children slowly drained the life from her once tremendous tits. I believe “old man’s hairy nut sack,” was how she described their current state. But Janney’s brief appearance in Away We Go finally constitutes, however prematurely, all that’s best in the film. She offers both its comic peak and its most elegantly rendered moment of pathos, a wordless exchange where she lingers too long over a goodnight kiss to Burt. The moment billows with sad desperation in the arid Arizona night, playing out beautifully in a single, uncut wide-shot. From here, it’s all downhill.

Janney, to be sure, gives a broad performance, but she still manages to bring specificity and nuance to a stereotype. Despite some valiant efforts, the same cannot be said of the grotesque Wisconsinite New Age shrew and her sniveling pony-tailed husband played by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton. Their characters are so simultaneously imbecilic and condescending that it’s all too easy for us to go along with Burt when he finally explodes and insults them. There’s no real tension building in the scene because nothing’s at stake. Things get only worse when our errant heroes visit old friends now living in Montreal, a handsome, happy couple with a gaggle of adorable and conspicuously adopted tykes running free in their warmly messy house. Everything seems peachy until the four adults go to amateur strip night at some hipster joint and, in what must be the most dreadfully gag-inducing scene of the year if not the decade, the barren matriarch of the clan suddenly takes the stage to perform a painfully mopey pole dance while her husband explains to Burt how devastated the couple feel because she can’t seem to bear children. All of this to the decidedly unsubtle tune of ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin.’’ (You remember the one, the closer both to Loaded and the Velvet Underground’s career? The one where Lou Reed sings “She ain’t got nuthin’ at all” about 90 times?) And she doesn’t even strip!

This is probably a good time to mention that Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes, who even when helming material far breezier than the likes of Revolutionary Road or The Road to Perdition still manages to display a heavy hand, one made more leaden still by his irritatingly reverent use of songs by Alex Murdoch, which sound like they were designed for long distance commercials and sap the juice from scene after scene by turning it into some lame-ass precession. I had to rush home and slap ‘Oh! Sweet Nuthin’’ on the turntable just to squeeze the stuff out. It’s hard to know whether to lay more blame for the film’s weaker passages on Mendes or his screenwriters, novelists/spouses Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, though its easy to imagine how another director less inclined to pomp and more trusting of his actors to carry a scene could have kept things relatively buoyant. Either way, Away We Go winds up frustratingly uneven, a patchwork of some nearly sublime humour and some genuinely touching moments laced with too many clichés for its sometimes superior air and to many scenes that are facile and over-explanatory.

The return of the Exiles

The silvery images of faces from a lost world dissolve into one another, faces with lines deep as arroyos and expressions that might suggest bitter resignation. Their gazes hint at some antagonism toward the camera. These old stills of Native Americans, taken more than a hundred years ago by Edward S. Curtis, compose the opening sequence of The Exiles, accompanied by the steady beating of a drum. They serve as context, the first part of a jarring entrée into Kent Mackenzie’s stark yet lively portrait of Native American youth in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill district, circa 1961. The drum and traditional grooming gives way to rock and roll and pompadours, the images of plains to multistoried apartment blocks, broad avenues, bars and gas stations, and cramped, crowded flats where a radio or television always plays. That primordial drum will return however near the end of the film, though when it does it undercuts hoots and hollers, singing and laughter, honking horns, squashed beer cans, and girls asking to be left alone.

The juxtaposition between old ways and modern cacophony is de rigueur in aboriginal histories, but it appears here absent of forced pathos, a necessary prelude to a story placed firmly in the present rather than eulogizing the past. But this narrative of change and loss works on a number of levels. The film is also a study of Bunker Hill itself, once a zone of affluence and opulence that, by the time Mackenzie and his crew of fellow film school grads arrived to capture it, had already began its descent into postwar neglect and decay. Mackenzie had already made a controversial short in the neighbourhood while still at the University of Southern California entitled ‘Bunker Hill – 1956.’ But The Exiles was something still more ambitious, a distinctive construction of voice-over testaments concerning the inner lives of three Bunker Hill Native Americans and re-enactments featuring the actual subjects. The use of non-professional actors, or rather people being asked to “play” themselves, is elegantly executed, and looks forward to other such fusions of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques from the likes of Iranian director Moshen Makhmalbaf, to name but one prominent example.

So The Exiles is a very special film, and a landmark in the American cinema’s reflection on its own marginalized at the very least. Yet, following a triumphant premiere at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the film failed to secure commercial distribution and became a sort of legend, a film with a reputation vastly overwhelming its viewership. It’s prominent role in Thom Anderson’s 2003 compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself sparked the latest resurgence of interest, prompting a theatrical release from Milestone Films, the same company that ushered Charles Burnett’s 1977 masterpiece Killer of Sheep into theatres 30 years after its completion. Burnett himself, along with Sherman Alexie, supervised the restoration, courtesy of Ross Lipman at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the belated release. The Exiles had its Canadian premiere at the Cinematheque Ontario last November, 47 years after its completion, Sadly, it was also 28 years after Mackenzie’s death.

The first disembodied voice to emerge in The Exiles is that of Yvonne (Yvonne Williams). She’s young, lovely, desperate and pregnant. The imminent child is the bright spot in her strained existence. Her husband Homer (Homer Nash) seems disinterested and cuts a dubious figure as a supporting patriarch. “He might change if he sees the baby,” she says at one point. “He likes children.” She returns home from the market and cooks up some pork chops and beans for Homer and his pals, who only vaguely acknowledge her. Soon the night comes and Yvonne is dropped at the movies while the boys go out for a long of night of drinking, gambling and wandering.

Homer himself picks up the film’s ongoing chain of voice-over once the night’s activities begin. He speaks of his restlessness and desire for some excitement, maybe get into a fight or something. How strange then, and compelling, that the Homer we see contrasts the Homer we hear, as well as the Homer Yvonne describes. While his friends become increasingly wild in their behaviour, Homer seems to get only more quiet, ending the night wrapped in a blanket and keeping to himself. At one point he discusses his upbringing back in rural Arizona, his childhood spent asking for money from white tourists snapping photos of the local Indians.

Rounding out the voice-over subjects is Tommy (Tommy Reynolds), a slick dancer and would-be ladies’ man. He figures white people have more problems than Indians, what with so much on their minds. He validates his unruly behaviour by its purity—when he parties, he parties right. He also becomes belligerent and rough with unwilling women. Yet there’s something poignant in the scene where he plays air piano on a wooden countertop in a bar along to some boogie-woogie, and the sense that this is the closest he ever comes to giving vent to a genuine talent.

The Exiles is all the more affecting and fascinating for its crispness, emphasis on observation over overt analysis, and its lack of sentimentality. Though presented with the nuance, textured imagery and rhythms of a fiction film, it gains considerable spontaneity and diversion from its documentary foundations. Especially intriguing is a strange scene where some white guy dances with a Chinese guy in a bar. But what makes the film gel so marvelously is its emphasis on people’s relationship to place. The subjects are people displaced in their own country—they are internal exiles. Mackenzie photographs them in such a way that they are never without context, without their surroundings looming over or around them, tacitly posing questions about where it is they think they belong. The scene of bleary morning stumbling home that ends the film promises renewal, but of what sort? What has changed? 50 years later, the questions linger in the air after the lights go down.

The good neighbour policy: Sam Jackson does a little creative gardening on Patrick Wilson's white ass in Lakeview Terrace

The first two-thirds of Lakeview Terrace feel like Marxist propaganda, the last third like capitalist propaganda, the whole thing like some sort of distinctly American nightmare, with some surprisingly curious politics and one hell of a dunderheaded narrative. Abel (Samuel L. Jackson) is old school LAPD, a widower with two-kids, a humongous piece of carefully manicured residential property and a chip on his shoulder the size of Plymouth Rock. He’s a hard-ass with a knack for intimidation as well as flights of charm and manipulation. (The movie’s got plenty of good cop/bad cop—in the same cop!)

Abel’s also got some serious issues with racial integration and cultural appropriation—in a memorable early scene, he menacingly reassures his new next-door neighbour Chris (Patrick Wilson) that he can listen to hip-hop all night long if he wants but when he wakes up the next morning he’ll still be white. More importantly Abel’s stridently territorial—at one point he even hires some slob to piss in Chris’ shirt drawer. Chris and his conspicuously fetching black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) are thus shamelessly sullying Abel’s suburban enclave, practically asking for the full brunt of our man Jackson’s wrath—which apparently is precisely what the very loud, obnoxious but nonetheless jovial audience at the sneak preview I attended came to gobble up. I felt like I was at a wrestling match. These guys actually talk to the screen.

Though I was initially surprised to see Neil LaBute credited as director, it’s actually not that hard to see what attracted him to this material, which, incidentally, was dreamed up by David Loughery, the guy who brought you Money Train and Passenger 57. Right from his earliest films—In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors—LaBute’s fancied himself something of a moralist and provocateur, though the results have dwindled to the point where his last movie was the outlandishly dumb remake of The Wicker Man. Yet Lakeview Terrace shares with The Wicker Man a gleeful immersion into an essentially closed community lorded over by those who would shape it into some sort of fascist paradise, and the fires consuming Southern California and creeping toward Abel and Chris’ pissing contest carry a certain apocalyptic portent that no doubt agreed with LaBute’s natural pessimism.

Of course it all goes nowhere. At least nowhere all that interesting. The prickly marital squabbles that burble up in the midst of the war-like neighbourly ones feel lazily tacked on, and Chris’ paranoia being surrounded by pushy, Alpha Male Negroes doesn’t build up to a confrontation worthy of the concept. There’s a lot of motivational overkill—like the monologue about the deceased wife’s carrying on with her whitey boss—perhaps to help us understand Abel’s little attitude problem, but in the end he still goes down in a hail of flamboyant nonsense instead of prompting further intrigue or audience implication, and—hooray!—property ownership and vague liberal values rule the day.

(For something more substantial on suburban angst, check out Gary Burns and Jim Brown's Radiant City.)

Born slippy: too close for comfort encounters with unidentified life forms, too few encounters between James Cameron and editor

Just a glance at the personnel involved in Alien (1979) serves to remind us just how remarkable this movie—at once science fiction and slasher flick, not to mention a chamber drama—truly was. The cast included John Hurt, Harry Dean Stanton, Tom Skerritt, Yaphet Kotto and Ian Holm, while the director came fresh from his in many ways never bettered debut The Duelists (77), and would thereafter make a little futuristic detective yarn called Blade Runner (82) which managed to revolutionize a genre. His name was Ridley Scott, he came from advertising, and while time hasn’t proved him the world’s deepest director the guy had style to spare and a cunning, merciless sense of economy.

The strength of the ensemble cast is emphasized early on, their first scenes being group ones of seemingly regular folks amiably bitching about their jobs. Intriguingly, the film’s hero only establishes herself roughly halfway through. We only really start to notice—if not entirely trust—Ripley (a long, tall and very cool Sigourney Weaver) after we see just how badly things go with the unidentified creature she alone insisted not be let aboard the spacecraft, the first major spasm of mayhem occurring in that still utterly traumatizing “birth” scene where the only overtly sympathetic character dies writhing in his own blood. It's a scene that instills a sort of corporeal discomfort that would undoubtedly make David Cronenberg smile. From there onward a showdown of intergalactic Darwinism locks the movie between its teeth, playing out on a brilliantly claustrophobic set from one of the great periods in sci-fi design, with gear made of industrial strength material, stuff with actual weight you want to wrap your knuckles on.

Edmonton's Metro Cinema is screening Alien this coming Sunday afternoon along with Aliens (86). There are camps that claim the sequel superior, yet to my eye the relationship between the two is nearly identical to that between The Terminator (84) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (91), which Metro screened last week and which were both directed, like Aliens, by James Cameron. Aliens indeed establishes its themes of ruthless maternal and/or propagatory instincts more clearly, and develops Ripley, awakened after a 57-year sleep to help fight an entire colony of the acid-blooded, multi-mouthed aliens, into a fully fleshed out character with a resonant backstory and inner conflicts. Yet after Scott’s style and economy we go straight to Cameron’s workmanlike flabbiness. Like T2, Aliens is another two-and-a-half-hour movie full of over-cooked sequences and abundant redundancies. The climactic scene where Ripley discovers and then escapes from the queen mother’s lair, all goopy vaginal egg pod thingees, smoke and sweat, is masterfully handled—too bad we’re then forced to sit through a “surprise” second ending that’s not half as thrilling and just takes forever.

There are concessions, like a sinister Paul Reiser as the corporate weasel, Bill Paxton, fresh from playing Chet in Weird Science (85) and reveling in playing a babbling human Nerf ball, and Lance Henrikson, proving robot scientists can actually be nice guys, always lending a hand, even when their bodies are chopped in half. For better or for worse, there’s more of everything in Aliens, though I’d pick its predecessor for the stronger, meaner chills and thrills any day of the week.

Not hi-5 nor finger-snap nor knuckle buckle nor forearm grab, The Guatemalan Handshake is hard to learn

It opens with a beguiling slow-motion plume of tire-squalled dust. It then glides through a montage of black and white expository tableau, sumptuous colour images and sonic elements that seem lovingly culled from scrapbooks for David Gordon Green’s first two movies: a little girl swinging over a river backwards through time or a demolition derby, the scenes arcing across the screen while the little girl—her name, which she’ll no doubt come to resent, is Turkeylegs—speaks through voice-over about her best friend Donald. What she says here is, in its way, crucial. There are three things Donald would like to see before he dies, Turkeylegs tells us, “a lake of chocolate, a turtle the size of a horse, and a trophy with his name on it.”

The Guatemalan Handshake unfolds in a Pennsylvania town, dividing its time between various representatives of its citizenry. The film’s catalytic event is a power surge that, in a compelling sequence, inspires a mist of varied voices that speak of malfunctioning appliances with the awe of hurricane survivors or pilgrims who’ve witnessed a miracle. Yet might the real, underlying catalyst that afflicts the characters in writer/director Todd Rohal’s feature debut be something more like a toxic spill? Judging from those reactors lingering in the background, maybe it was a nuclear accident? Something funky must have infected the water supply in these parts, because the local eccentricity meter is way into the red.

The flashback to Spank Williams’ failed public death, a grieving dog owner’s attending her own funeral, a story about Amish time travelers, a guy who sounds like he’s gonna have a coronary every time he talks, a photo of a man posing with Willie Mays and the world’s biggest chewing gum, a handicapped boy who explains that nose-picking is “awesome”—when do such bubbles of quirkiness reach critical mass? There are several inspired gags, like whenever Stool (Rich Schreiber), the movies’ most awkward date since Jackie Earle Haley, spontaneously takes off his shirt in some misguided act of foreplay—but a lot of these gags would probably work better if they weren’t all shoved into a single, heavily saturated comedy.

Rohal’s definitely gone out on a limb here, making something this unapologetically, warmly goofy, yet the goofiness rarely seems to serve much more than goofiness itself. On occasion this tack is so cartoonish that it only distances us further from the characters it purports to have affection for, like that grieving dog owner. Rohal’s story is basically a chain that links characters with accoutrements—a turtle, an electric car, a wheelchair, a headband—and a scattering of events, such as Donald’s disappearance following emotional trauma and a dog’s electrocution, or the double injury at the roller rink. Things feel most harmonious is when we get evidence of what may be Rohal’s true gift: his ability to nurture strong performances from a cast of mostly non-professionals, especially Katy Haywood, who plays Turkeylegs, and Sheila Scullin, who plays Donald’s estranged girlfriend Sadie. There’s also a very appealing performance from musician Will Oldham as Donald himself. Strikingly clean-shaven after his beardy turn in Old Joy, Oldham looks and sounds so endearingly boyish here he could’ve walked right off the set of Matewan, a movie made when he was all of 16.

The Guatemalan Handshake is threaded together by themes of paternal anxiety—manifested in a pregnant woman participating in a demolition derby and the father of her unborn child absconding—and the letting go of childish things. Yet the film itself often feels stunted, closely guarding its own preciousness, retaining each and every affectation whether they actually gel together or not. If Rohal’s next film works better than this one, it will likely be because his eccentricities are the icing on the cake rather than the cake itself.

Starting Out in the Evening: the literary movie, its splendour, and its limits

There’s no mistaking Starting Out in the Evening for anything but a very literary-minded film. There is, rather refreshingly, no sense of apology whatsoever for this from its director Andrew Wagner. The film opens and closes with its protagonist, septuagenarian novelist Leonard Schiller (the marvelous Frank Langella), seated with stony concentration before a typewriter, one thick hand closed around the other, patiently waiting for the conditions, at once familiar and mysterious, to arrange themselves in his mind and body, for that crisp moment that allows him to start his daily work. It is a moment recognizable to any writer, but it also plays with surprising clarity on the screen to a general audience. In these visual bookends is the implication that it is only with Leonard’s intake of breath and the pounding of text onto paper that this particular film can begin and end.

Based on the novel by Brian Morton, and adapted by Wagner and his co-scripter Fred Parnes, Starting Out in the Evening is elegiac, frequently elegant, and, by its very literariness, perhaps a bit cloistered in a world apart from most movies. It is a film in which two of the three central characters, all of them New Yorkers, all of them very comfortable, live their lives passionately for books. Indeed, they converse about everything, even their most conflicted feelings, with a certain formality, a declaratory, almost didactic bookishness. You might say they speak like characters in a Woody Allen movie, except they’re not very funny. For all that, they do feel real. They’re feelings feel real. Their stories are very adult. And, despite a few stumbles here and there, the whole thing is not only intellectually stimulating but also quite moving. Yet, sadly, is it any wonder such a film barely made the rounds in today’s climate of movie distribution? Hopefully, Starting Out in the Evening will find a new life on DVD.

Leonard is visited by one Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), a young, gifted female student looking for his participation in the development of her doctoral thesis on his work. She petite but strikingly sexy. She has a mane of red hair that frames a round face and large eyes that fix on Leonard like he’s the only person in whatever room. She’s clearly in love of a sort, but also very tough and uncompromising in her attack on his small oeuvre—his first novel changed her life, while the subsequent ones she finds increasingly soft.

Leonard, a long-time widower living in a large but fragile body, is a man whose spent decades carefully nurturing a lifestyle that courts no surprises and is devoted to work. Heather seems set to revive something in him long forgotten, something perhaps connected to some missing vitality in his work. But don’t let the set-up fool you. Both characters go far beyond facile April-December archetypes, things do not wrap up so neatly, there is no wish fulfillment waiting to be enacted, lives are stirred and shifted to be sure, but sweeping changes do not come easy to these people, while betrayal and adoration prove to be close neighbours. Most importantly, Starting Out in the Evening defies the tired notion that art can be reduced by the values of a single age group, a single critical perspective, or of a single era.

There is another woman in Leonard’s life to help thicken the plot. Ariel (Lili Taylor) is Leonard’s daughter, not a literary type but a yoga instructor and once a dancer. She’s pushing 40, wants a baby something fierce, but has serious problems with long-term relationships. After failing at tricking a current boyfriend into unknowing paternity, she goes back to a precarious lover from her past, one disapproved of by Leonard. As terrific and utterly unique an actor as Taylor is, Ariel’s subplot does expose some of the more blatantly artificial mechanics at work in the film, her emotional ups and downs and healing process with her ex are approached rather preciously by Wagner, and they often seem to weigh down Leonard’s story unnecessarily, which is itself more than rich enough for one movie. In short, the breadth of Ariel’s presence in the film does in fact feel like a device more in keeping with a novel than a film.

Starting Out in the Evening works best when most immediate, when words are merely implied or are simply insufficient for even these articulate characters to express themselves, when talking ceases and body language takes over: a brush of fingers on lips, a little wave across a crowded room, a hovering hand over a prone, fully clothed body. In such scenes Langella exhibits a titanic presence, embodying so much while doing so little. Thus it is finally the moments of silent or near-silent connection, as well of those where connections suddenly snap harshly, are the ones that make this film worth watching. They also make Wagner a filmmaker to watch, and make you wonder if Langella, in the “evening” of his acting career, might not just be reaching his heights of grace.

Then She Found Me: it's never too late to be less bland

Age has arguably been pretty good to Helen Hunt. Founded on her television work, her star persona, whether sculpted by the actress or projected upon her, became most closely associated with safe, cute, likeably bland, Oscar-friendly, middle-brow, JC Penny earnestness, and with providing sturdy support to Hollywood big boys. Just survey the quartet of films she made in 2000, her zenith year—What Women Want, Cast Away, Pay It Forward, Dr T and the Women—was there room in any of these for Hunt to be anything but the patient, kind-hearted love interest to Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Kevin Spacey or Richard Gere? It’s a wonder that in every case she still managed to leave an impression, to be above all resilient and genuinely affecting. For those who prefer their movies to with significantly more edge, Hunt became something like a guilty pleasure.

She seemed to have vanished from movies not long after, though the 2004 Oscar Wilde adaptation A Good Woman suggested that Hunt may be most appealing when duplicitous, dangerous, and not at all the girl next door. The movie itself had problems and did no business, but Hunt was suddenly in full bloom, playing a seductress-opportunist who actually managed to out-sex Scarlett Johansson. Hunt vanished again and is only now returning in a starring role, but this time on her own terms. Then She Found Me, adapted from Elinor Lipman’s novel by Hunt with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, marks Hunt’s directorial debut, and while not a radical departure from her past work, her foray into this increasingly rare genre—the comedy for adults—does finally place her firmly in the spotlight and possesses an unusual maturity and depth.

Hunt plays April, a kindergarten teacher pushing 40, raised an orphan, and so painfully hungry to generate a child from her very own womb that malicious fate seems to bite her right in the ass as punishment. Her adoptive mother dies, her childish husband of less than a year (Matthew Broderick) ditches her, and the pathetic quickie break-up sex results in a very awkwardly timed pregnancy. To boot, her biological mother (Bette Midler) appears out of nowhere, a blowsy, affably obnoxious talk show host eager to suddenly be the mom she never was. There’s also a most precarious love interest (Colin Firth), a deeply neurotic single dad blessed with a wicked temper and lack of tact.

It’s all a bit much for one movie, though Hunt and her colleagues juggle reasonably well. There’s something admirable, if not especially inspired, about how drab it all is, and Hunt is anything but glamorized playing this very dowdy Jewess in shapeless skirts and sensible shoes. There are ill-chosen detours, especially when the characters begin discussing faith, and the odd eccentricity, such as casting Salman Rushdie as an OB-GYN. But Then She Found Me isn’t really meant to be all that tidy or crisp, working best when rigorously exploiting its rawness, exploring messy emotions, difficult choices, disappointments and frustrations, all of which are evoked most effectively in the scenes between Hunt and the equally talented Firth, which are often funny, plausibly crazy and touching.