Tools
dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Jan 21-27 at the Northwest Film Forum.
The latest work from the once-important French director Jean-Luc Godard takes a few welcome steps toward both relevance and comprehensibility, offering what film critics are encouraged to call a "meditation" on humankind's warring nature that is both complex and beautiful, despite a deeply embedded philosophical abstruseness. Constructed in three segments--Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven--Notre Musique begins with a powerful, breathless 10-minute montage of carnage, death, explosions, and, oddly, penguins. Moving on to Sarajevo, the site of a literary conference, Godard himself appears alongside a retinue of students, bystanders, journalists, and artists, all of whom attempt to grapple with the elusive meaning of art in a place suffused by death and, just as importantly, with how art relates to parts of the world where violence "severs the lifeline" of society and terror destroys its "irretrievable trust."
Context is revealed not by establishing shots--though there are a few stunners, like the walls of a ruined library--but by the subtle, painterly repetition of colors (on one level, the film seems to be largely about the contrast between red and yellow). It is also revealed by the entirely unsubtle incrementum of Godard's greatest talent: the sociopolitical epigram. The film is sprayed with declarations like, "The dream of the individual is to be two; the dream of the state is to be one" and, "Humane people don't start revolutions; they build libraries." They're spoken conversationally, but they're obviously meant to shine like billboards on a highway. These ideas are as suggestive as the big yellow "?" signs that bookend the Purgatory sequence.
Stranger Personals
The Heaven section, with its armed American soldiers, is pretty lame, but not so much that it obscures the questing intelligence of what precedes it. In a film that wrestles with the biggest and scariest ideas that exist to be wrestled with, it's nice to know that an artist of Godard's caliber isn't content merely to deliver the kind of cynical misanthropy that marked his middle period. SEAN NELSON
The Assassination of Richard Nixon
dir. Niels Mueller
Opens Fri Jan 21.
Sometimes, a movie can save itself with a single shot. Based on a true story, The Assassination of Richard Nixon follows Samuel Bicke (Sean Penn), an unemployed salesman and failed husband whose growing disillusionment with Watergate-era America leads him to attempt the title act. Comparisons to Taxi Driver are probably unavoidable but not exactly flattering: Where Scorsese's hallucinatory technique allowed the viewer to see how the main character's craziness was fed by his environment, debuting director Niels Mueller adopts a more naturalistic approach that amounts to a long, slow, downward plummet that's honestly tough to watch.
This attention to grimy realism extends to the lead performance, which, while technically impeccable, deflects any and all attempts by viewers to gain a sympathetic finger hold; by hermetically sealing himself within his Method, Penn makes this schlub so utterly wretched from the get-go that it becomes hard to believe any of the people he systematically alienates (including a stranded Don Cheadle and Naomi Watts) would have had anything to do with him in the first place.
But about that shot: Just before the end credits, there's a brief out-of-context moment when Penn's character tear-asses around his dingy apartment with a toy airplane and a goofy grin. Whether planned out or grabbed on the fly, it packs a serious wallop; here, somehow, is the empathy and pathos that was missing from the rest of the film. In a flash, it transforms the movie from a gratuitous bummer into something that lingers clammily in the back of your head. ANDREW WRIGHT
Assault on Precinct 13
dir. Jean-François Richet
Opens Wed Jan 19.
So you're sitting through the reasonably watchable remake of a violently dingy 1976 exploitation piece that was originally notable for the glimmer of talent it revealed in its creator, John Carpenter. And as with all movies that star Ethan Hawke, you spend the first several minutes engaged in the eternal Ethan Hawke debate--can he be forgiven for Reality Bites?
You'd think after Before Sunset and Gattaca he'd have earned his pass, but no. As it turns out, Reality Bites was a big enough disgrace that it still stings, even 10 years later. Still, Hawke cast in the role of (unlikely) action hero, and (even less likely) police sergeant, seems to be working.
Then, it seems like the scenario--bad guys try to infiltrate an understaffed precinct house during a New Year's Eve snowstorm--is going to yield some good confined-action results, despite the slightly lazy treatment of the villains, who never seem terribly threatening, which makes the heroes never seem terribly heroic, which, in turn, makes the stakes never seem terribly high. Still and all, as genre exercises go, Assault on Precinct 13 redux has a lot going for it.
Then you notice that every time one of the bad guys gets violently killed--by point-blank bullets to the brain, multiple stab wounds, Molotov cocktails, grenades in the pocket--the audience drowns out the throbbing soundtrack with deafening ovations. I guess it's worth mentioning that the villains are dirty cops (uh, spoiler alert), but it doesn't seem like a particularly class-based response. No, it mainly just seems like everyone in the room is getting off on seeing people kill people. Which is kind of unsettling. SEAN NELSON
Dolls
dir. Takeshi Kitano
Jan 21-27 at the Northwest Film Forum.
If you're looking for a textbook definition of the modern renaissance man, writer-director-editor-actor Takeshi Kitano is your guy. (He also paints, writes poetry, does standup comedy, and devises multiple ways to drop idiots into sewage on TV's Most Extreme Elimination Challenge.) Beginning with 1989's Violent Cop, Kitano has created and starred in a remarkable series of films, combining absurdist humor, aching romanticism, and unspeakable carnage under the same poker face, often within the very same shot.
Dolls, a rambling, loosely threaded trio of stories illustrating how love can both heal and mutilate, the quadruple threat is limited to a rare behind-the-camera-only project. Unfortunately, without Takeshi the actor acting as an onscreen anchor, Kitano the director seems to lose focus, drifting into a blurry Nyquil fugue of gorgeous pictures and half-baked artsiness. Perhaps attempting to compensate for the slightness of the narrative (based on 16th-century fables, usually reenacted by puppets), the director's regular cinematographer Katsumi Yanagishima delivers an absolutely ravishing backdrop of autumn leaves and snowy roads.
The film may look too good, frankly, as it seems to have lulled the filmmaker into a relative stasis. The final results, despite a few welcome flashes of trademark tragic wit, will be mainly of interest to completists and insomniacs. Still, if occasional pretentious doodling like this is what it takes to keep Kitano's copious creative juices flowing, so be it. The Great Ones are allowed the occasional snoozer. ANDREW WRIGHT
The Merchant of Venice
dir. Michael Radford
Opens Fri Jan 21.
The Merchant of Venice is perhaps Shakespeare's most culturally distant play. Tragicomedy confuses us, anti-Semitism can't be played for laughs, and as for the grave sin of usury… well, I'll bet the Christian employees of all those South Dakota credit-card companies--with their promotional APRs and skyrocketing late fees and impersonal threats to irreparably damage your FICO score--still fancy themselves righteous. It's nearly impossible to imagine yourself in the audience during the first performance of this bizarre, compelling script. More so than with any other Shakespeare play, modern directors have to forcefully relocate the concerns and emphasis of the text.
Michael Radford, who wrote the screenplay in addition to directing, makes a brief effort to contextualize the terrible bind European Jews faced during the Renaissance. (At once essential and reviled, Jews could be punished for the very act of moneylending that powered the expanding trade economy.) But mainly Radford's strategy is to whittle down the text. Anything confusing or outside of the scope of the main plot gets cut out, leaving meaty roles only for Al Pacino as the Jew Shylock and Jeremy Irons as a grimly effete Antonio.
You can sleep through the rest of the watery Venetian canal scenes, which are diverting but never funny. Lynn Collins as Portia and Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio are particularly anemic; Zuleikha Robinson and Charlie Cox as Jessica and Lorenzo make a cute couple but hardly say a word. But Pacino and Irons are fascinating. These aren't definitive performances by any means--Pacino is so infinitely burdened he almost buckles, and that's before his daughter leaves him--but they are acute, stubbornly personal, and a joy to watch. ANNIE WAGNER
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