Cross Country Checkup: The Kids Are All Right, Winter's Bone

Although it seems unlikely that many people today preserve strict monogamy, its ghost lingers on, manifested in guilt feelings, in the secrecy and furtiveness of 'infidelity'. The rationale for monogamy (surely by now thoroughly discredited) was based purely on the supposed sanctity of the patriarchal line, on the husband's need for assurance that his sons were indeed his... Victorian men were officially supposed to be monogamous, but few thought it really mattered.

[...] I assume that [Michael] Haneke, in La Pianiste [2001], would have liked to show us everything, since one of the film's central projects is the demystification of sex. In a healthy sexual climate, full-frontal nudity (of both genders) and actual intercourse would be shown in movies as a matter of course--not as the latest form of titillation, but as casually as scenes of people eating their dinners. We need to see Isabelle Huppert sucking Benoît Magimel's cock, not because it would give us our latest thrill but because it is an intrinsic part of the scene, and to conceal it is to continue the repression that is the mere obverse of our 'liberation'.
—Robin Wood, "'Do I Disgust You?' or Tirez pas sur La Pianiste," CineAction no. 59: p. 56.

A stable relationship? What happened to traditional gay values? You know, hot, sweaty, rock-hard men slapping against each other in a dark room to a pulsing beat. No names.
—Stephen Colbert, The Colbert Report, August 5, 2010.

The spirit of Stanley Kramer is alive and well in Lisa Cholodenko's eminently mediocre The Kids Are All Right (2010), which is simply the worst kind of liberal message picture: One in which any kind of formal or narrative experimentation has been studiously spurned in the interest of communicating a well-intentioned message to the widest possible audience. However, despite the film's smug, self-congratulating Look-How-Far-We've-Comeisms (the apex of which is a toast to an "unconventional" family in a film that's anything but), the depressing irony is that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was far more advanced in his treatment of a lesbian relationship thirty-eight years ago in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972). Cholodenko's film suggests a toothless girl-girl dramedy equivalent to Brokeback Mountain's gay male tragedy, the Indigo Girls to Ang Lee and James Schamus' the Smiths. Not knowing whether there was an organized gay rights movement in Germany in the '70s roughly analogous to post-Stonewall America, it's tempting to hypothesize that Fassbinder had the benefit of not being a slave to a liberal movement (not that I imagine he would've cared anyway). Incidentally, it seems relevant that in Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009), adapted from a pre-Stonewall 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, the narrator's mocking criticisms of liberal platitudes have been carefully excised from his monologue on the oppression of minorities, which is otherwise faithfully reproduced in the film.

It's true that I praised Ford's film in a previous entry written prior to my reading the book, and I'm not about to take that back. It's still an accomplished piece of filmmaking, embedding within a Dalloway-esque day-in-the-midlife-crisis narrative five flashbacks spanning sixteen years which are placed in reverse chronological order, and two dream sequences which bookend the film, as well as using extreme close-ups and slow motion to suggest a subjective gaze in a manner that recalls the best work of Martin Scorsese--to say nothing of the particularly fine, understated performance given by Colin Firth. Here, one has to give Cholodenko credit for framing her actors largely in medium and long shot, thus affording them the opportunity to act with their whole bodies, but her approach to sounds and images is strictly functional, and at times downright awkward. There's one shot of a kitchen in which a sink faucet is given more prominence than any of the performers (whose distance from the camera is exaggerated by the use of a wide angle lens) by virtue of being framed in the foreground centre, so that one almost begins to expect that the faucet will play an important role in the scene. (Perhaps Alain Robbe-Grillet would've appreciated how forcefully the faucet asserts the fact of its existence without being reclaimed by any human use.) And the one time Cholodenko gets fancy with the sound mix, turning down the volume on the ambient dialogue during a dramatically significant close-up, it's clearly "motivated" by the story, the subject being too absorbed in her thoughts to pay attention to what's being said around her.

In terms of narrative, the film couldn't be more conventional. Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a stable, monogamous couple living in an affluent suburban neighborhood with their bland teenage offspring, Joni (Mia Washikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who are each afforded a minor subplot regarding their own burgeoning sexuality. The status quo is threatened when the kids decide that they want to meet their sperm donor dad, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), who soon becomes almost a member of the family, much to Nic's consternation. Paul hires Jules to do some landscaping for him, and they wind up going to bed together, making Paul essentially the Other Woman. (Laser's discovery earlier in the film that both of his moms enjoy gay male porn has already established that one can be a total lesbo and still dig cock.) This leads to a crisis when Nic discovers the affair (cue dramatically significant close-up), with Jules ultimately deciding to go back to her wife, and Nic calling Paul an "interloper" (i.e., not a member of the family) before literally slamming the door in his face. In an epilogue, Joni moves into a college dorm room, and Nic and Jules happily reconcile.

The ideological thrust of the film is to validate Nic and Jules as a legitimate couple, so there's really no way the film could end without them reconciling. Similarly, in A Single Man, the protagonist, George Falconer (Firth), asserts emphatically and emotively that his sixteen-year relationship with his partner, Jim (Matthew Goode)--which we see in flashback, and which ended when the latter was killed in a car accident--was as real as any straight relationship, and that they'd still be together if Jim hadn't died. Fassbinder, on the other hand, doesn't feel the need to validate anyone's relationship, which liberates him from the shackles of political correctness. In The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Karin (Hannah Schygulla) goes back to her husband, and Petra (Margit Carstensen), far from being a noble victim, takes out her anguish on her teenage daughter (Eva Mattes), mother (Gisela Fackeldey), and mute assistant, Marlene (Irm Hermann), in an extraordinary extended sequence. It's unlikely that many of the people who are going to see The Kids Are All Right are ignorant homophobes whom the film's advertising campaign has some how tricked into buying a ticket and come out two hours later having been enlightened. So one has to ask: Why is this film a hit, both with audiences and reviewers? And I think the answer, depressingly enough, is that liberal viewers, like their conservative counterparts (think of Michael Medved), simply want to see a conventional movie that unambiguously confirms their values.

(Incidentally, if you want to see what the neoconservative take on the film is, I can direct you to Victor J. Morton's blog entry on it. Originally, I had intended to respond to Morton's piece in some detail, but I think his creepy and hateful essay--in which he describes artificial insemination as a "despicable perversion" that turns children into "manufactured products"--speaks for itself.)



And now the story of a poor family who had nothing, and the one daughter who had no choice but to keep them all together...

Although it has no overt political agenda, Debra Granik's Winter's Bone (2010) is a film that lays claim to representing a certain aspect of American society--particularly, the lives of poor rural whites in the Ozark mountain range. Early in the film, the teenage heroine, Ree (Jennifer Lawrence), observes a group of high school students carrying rifles into the gymnasium to practice military-style formations, and later she talks to a military recruiter about enlisting because she wants the forty thousand dollar signing bonus. Also, there's a scene in a character's living room in which a photo of a man in an army uniform is visible in the frame. Although no one in the film ever mentions the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one inference I drew from the film is that the resources spent on the wars might've been used instead to help the disadvantaged communities whose children are actually fighting it. Rather than offering an escape from reality, the film wants to enhance our perceptions of it by showing us a glimpse of a section of the American populace that seems as remote to educated, middle-class liberals (the sort of people who typically go to see independent movies) as the nomadic Kazakh sheepherders in Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan (2008). And as in that film, a great deal of craftsmanship has been enlisted in the service of absolute verisimilitude.

The question is then one of telling a story (or not telling a story), and the opening scenes of Winter's Bone suggest an American Claire Denis film. We see snatches of the characters' daily lives, but scenes aren't held together by any causal link, and the style affords each (non-)event an equal degree of (non-)emphasis. Ree is brushing her mother's hair when her younger brother comes in the room with a dog he just found. At the high school, Ree, who evidently had to drop out in order to take care of her two younger siblings, silently observes a home ec class in which students are given cabbage patch dolls to take care of. Because her family can't afford hay to feed their horse, Ree asks a neighbor if she'll let it stay with her lot. Well, that doesn't last very long before the plot kicks into gear, presenting Ree with a clear-cut objective, consequences, a deadline, obstacles; and a chain of cause-and-event takes shape which links one sequence to the next. In short, the film becomes a conventional thriller.

And as in a lot of thrillers, the characters seem to exist solely for the plot--a trait the film shares with Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). In that film, if the protagonist had a dead wife, it's because Hollywood screenwriting manuals prescribe that characters have a personal demon which they need to overcome before they can achieve their goal. Winter's Bone isn't even that character-driven; every obstacle Ree faces is external to herself, and she pursues her goal with boundless self-assurance and doggedness. So it's appropriate that Lawrence plays her as a determined, self-reliant young woman who doesn't betray a lot of emotion; like a Buster Keaton hero, she never seems to ask for our sympathy. There's something stoic in the way that she and Granik trust the situation to be inherently compelling without attempting to make Ree particularly lovable.

If there's a Sundance spectrum, The Kids Are All Right and Winter's Bone err towards the conservative end of it. They, and countless other US independent films, including such recent examples as Courtney Hunt's Frozen River (2008) and Oren Moverman's The Messenger (2009), seek only to tell a good (read: entirely conventional) story, as opposed to self-conscious narrative experiments like Hal Hartley's Flirt (1995), Todd Haynes' Poison (1991) and I'm Not There. (2007), and Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991). If I slightly prefer Winter's Bone, it's because it doesn't seem to set out from the beginning to illustrate a predetermined thesis (for instance, that gays can be great parents), which reduces Cholodenko's film to pious agitprop. (Gays can also be lousy parents, which might produce a more interesting, Fassbinderian film. The fact that gays can't marry or adopt kids in the States simply because they're gay is unambiguously fucked up, but that doesn't mean that marriage is for everyone, or that all gays would make great parents.) However, setting a traditional thriller in a realistic milieu doesn't seem to me an ideal solution either, even if in the case of Granik's film, I find the results less offensive and exploitative than Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2008), not to mention more entertaining (though still fairly grim). It plays like a juiced-up version of a Canadian social realist film of thirty or forty years ago, like Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road (1970) or Francis Mankiewicz's Les Bons débarass (1980), which focused on marginal, disempowered rural characters (which is to not to say that either of those films were exactly masterpieces). I suppose it comes down to what sells, and the indie movies that typically get a big push--Alexander Payne's Sideways (2004), Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris' Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Jason Reitman's Juno (2007)--tend not to be the most challenging films. In fact, next to those movies, it's almost understandable why reviewers are making such a fuss about Winter's Bone.

Marienbad Explained

"It was absurd to suppose that in the novel Jealousy [1957] [...] there existed a clear and unambiguous order of events, one which was not that of the sentences of the book, as if I had diverted myself by mixing up a pre-established calendar the way one shuffles a deck of cards. [...] There existed for me no possible order outside of that of the book."
—Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Time and Description in Fiction Today," For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (1963): p. 154.

In most (if not all) narrative experiments made in Hollywood, particularly those that play with time, there is the habitual assumption that there exists an objective chronology of events which is different from the order in which the film's sequences unfold. Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000), Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002), François Ozon's 5x2 (2004), and one episode of Seinfeld all tell linear stories in reverse chronological order, while Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train (1989) and Doug Liman's Go (1999) tell multiple stories which are meant to occur simultaneously, following one set of characters and then moving back in time to follow another over the same period (in both films, a single night). Similarly, Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) and Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) both show the same event (namely, a robbery) from multiple points of view, creating a layering of perspectives, and Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) begins with a botched bank robbery, and then moves back and fourth between the events leading up to it and those which proceeded it. Such films are sometimes referred to as "puzzle movies," the implication being that viewers are given the pieces of the story all in a jumble and are invited to sort them out, reconstructing the chronology of what happened.

Alain Resnais' second feature, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), written by Robbe-Grillet, is something rather different and more radical. The story is about a man, X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who meets a woman, A (Delphine Seyrig), at a ritzy European hotel. He believes they met there the year before and had an affair. She has no recollection of this, and he begins to tell her the story of their affair: how he asked her to come away with him, and she asked him to wait a year. The scenes representing his story are clearly demarcated from the present-tense story in various ways as "flashbacks," although as we shall see, the word is rather imprecise in this context. For instance, a shot of A walking in the hotel garden with one shoe is retroactively identified as a flashback later on, when X describes it to A as part of his story.

Sounds simple, right? What makes the film so unusually challenging is that the present-tense scenes don't follow each other in the way that we're accustomed to from conventional narrative films. Resnais will cut from X and A standing in a salon, the former extending his hand to her (see above), to a shot of the two of them in a in a different part of the hotel, in different clothes, X's hand still extended to her (see below). Yet this is neither a flashback nor a flash forward, words which imply a sequence of events. Here, there is only now. Now they are standing in one place, and now they are somewhere else. Or as Robbe-Grillet himself puts it, "The duration of the modern work is in no way a summary, a condensed version, of a more extended and more 'real' duration which would be that of the anecdote, of the narrated story. [...] The entire story of Marienbad happens in neither two years nor in three days but exactly in one hour and a half" (p. 152-53). The scenes representing X's story aren't objective flashbacks, or his memories, or the images they conjure up in A's imagination, but exist only in the mind of the spectator: "In his mind unfolds the whole story, which is precisely imagined by him" (p. 153).

Early in the film, there is a scene where A becomes frightened, and as she backs away from X, bumps into another woman, causing the latter to drop her glass, which shatters on the floor. Later, the film seems to return to this scene to show us what happened next, yet if these two sequences seem to represent two parts of the same continuous action, there is no overall timeline in which the viewer can place them. In a conventional film, like Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992), X would meet A to tell her part of his story, and then make another appointment to see her again the next day. Here, they simply run into each other somewhere in the hotel, and the interval of time between each encounter is ambiguous. It could be several hours, days, years. Time has no meaning here; if we take Robbe-Grillet at his word, the interval between each encounter is is duration of the intervening sequences. These are often static tableaus of hotel guests, filmed with an elegantly tracking camera, or idle conversation; scenes of men standing in a shooting gallery, or X playing a game with A's companion, M (Sacha Pitoëff), using matches. M always wins, but from a purely narrative standpoint, the game is of no real consequence. Like Jealousy, the film is essentially the description of a static situation.

Consider the sequence which occurs forty minutes into the film: It begins with a group of people standing in a corridor, making idle conversation about something which may or may not have happened at the hotel the previous summer. They decide to go to the library to verify whether the story is true, and walking away, they reveal that X was standing there the whole time, hidden by another member of the group. He looks as though he's about to follow them when he notices something off-screen right.




A closer view of X reveals A approaching in a mirror. She stops when she sees him; it is evidently a coincidence that they should run into each other here, rather than an arranged rendezvous. (In many meta-narratives, such as Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon [1950], the listener is intended as a stand-in for the viewer who wants to see how the story ends, but here it seems that A would rather avoid him.) He explains to her what the group was just discussing, that the previous summer at the hotel it was so cold the lake froze, remarking, "That's surely wrong."



Following a close-up of A, there is a shot of the two of them standing on a balcony overlooking the garden, which is evidently a continuation of a flashback begun earlier in the film. Then there is a cut to a close-up of A in her room, which is virtually identical to the close-up we just saw of her standing in the hallway.




Over the latter shot, X says in voice-over, "One night, I came into your room," identifying this shot as also being a flashback, perhaps following the previous shot chronologically, although A's line on the balcony, "What do you want from me? You know it's impossible," hardly sounds like an invitation. The film cuts to a more distant, full body shot of A standing in her room. Looking offscreen left (presumably at X, as if to maintain the axis established at the beginning of the sequence in the corridor), she says, "Leave me alone, please." Finally, the film cuts back to X and A standing in the hallway, where she repeats the line. He says to her, "You're right, ice would've been quite impossible," as if responding not to what A says, but to what he himself said earlier. The same mirror is visible behind him, and the axis is maintained with X on the left and A on the right. However, while in previous shot in her room, A is wearing the same black dress as at the beginning of the sequence, now she's wearing a white coat, and X is likewise wearing a suit and tie instead of a tuxedo.



Of Jealousy (the third, and in many ways the most audacious of the four novels he published prior to L'Année dernière à Marienbad), Robbe-Grillet writes that the narrative was, "made in such a way that any attempt to reconstruct an external chronology would lead, sooner or later, to a series of contradictions, hence an impasse" (p. 154). In the case of Marienbad, the flashbacks at one point refuse to obey the narration (X insists the door was closed, but we see an open door), and are elsewhere contradicted the present-tense story. In flashback, we see M shoot A with a gun, but here she is alive and well in the present. In the final sequence, we see A and X leaving the hotel together instead of her asking him to wait a year--or is this part of the frame story in the present? If there is no past or future, only now, then last year is this year (and the next, and all others), and the flashbacks are not flashbacks but are happening right now, as if by saying, "One night, I came into your room," X were calling the event into existence. Does that clear things up?

It's All a Dream: On the Okay-ness of 'Inception'

Reviewing Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) in the Village Voice, Nick Pinkerton compared it (unfavorably) to an Olivier Assayas thriller, and there are some notable similarities between this film and Assayas' demonlover (2002), one of my all time favorites. Both films tell stories about corporate espionage that shuttle between Tokyo and Paris, and each has a scene in which a character is drugged during an international flight. However, where the infernal fantasies that eventually take over Assayas' film are terrifyingly real, and the movie's implications are deeply political (like Charles Chaplin's no less misanthropic Monsieur Verdoux [1947], it links big business with murder), Nolan's film is resolutely apolitical, and philosophically speaking, it's closer to a virtual reality thriller like David Cronenberg's eXistenZ (1999) with its suggestion that nothing is real.

As some one who's favorably predisposed towards movies that attempt to represent the world we all live in, the more political the better, I'm not the ideal viewer for a film like Inception (or eXistenZ, for that matter), whose primary objective is to make me forget about that world for a few hours to the point of suggesting that it's no more real than the fantasy world onscreen. If I slightly prefer Cronenberg's film, which still seems to me a long way off from his best work, it's simply because he's a better filmmaker than Nolan. In contrast with eXistenZ, with its backwoods setting and the ooey-gooey organic-looking quality of the special effects, neither Inception nor any of its characters ever seem to have any blood pumping through their veins. The settings are all anonymously upscale (a Marienbad cocktail party in a Japanese palace; an expensive hotel in Matrix City; a spic-and-span Paris in which no one is ever heard speaking French), and the photography tends towards commercial-slick high contrast lighting. At one point, Ken Watanabe (Hollywood's all-purpose Japanese guy) gets shot in the chest--in a dream, of course--and thereafter, some one will periodically lift open his suit jacket to reveal a tampon stain-sized pool of blood on his shirt so as to remind us that he's dream bleeding to death without anyone having to get their hands dirty.

The plot has no connection with reality, even in the sense that dreams are a part of real life. The protagonist, Cobb (Leonardo DiCapprio), is a corporate spy who enters into peoples' dreams in order to steal their secrets. (Unless I missed something, the film never explains how he's able to do this, but really, who cares? Could there be any explanation more satisfying than, "It's a movie, numb-nuts"?) Living in exile after being framed for the murder of his wife (Marion Cotillard), Cobb, like Homeless Dad, just wants his kids back (they're back in the States with Granny). As the film opens, Cobb and his team botch a job, and their intended mark, a Japanese CEO, Saito (Watanabe), decides to make them a counter-offer: If Cobb can place an idea inside the mind of a competitor (Cillian Murphy), Saito will make the murder charge disappear with a single phone call. (If only Roman Polanski had his connections.) But to accomplish his goal, Cobb will have to confront his own personal demons.

The film tells us that implanting an idea in some one's mind is more difficult than extracting one (which is already impossible), and to do the job, Cobb and his team devise a plan involving four levels of dreams and dreams-within-dreams, reminding one of the cons-within-cons in David Mamet's House of Games (1987). And Nolan cross-cuts between parallel action in all four levels like D.W. Griffith on mescaline (alas, none of Nolan's razor-flat images has one-tenth the wonder of Griffith's gargantuan Babylonian sets in Intolerance [1916]). This proves to be a pretty nifty means of cranking up the suspense, with an SUV full of dream thieves on the top dream level plunging ass-backwards into a river in super, super slow motion. Since the further down you go into dreams-within-dreams, the greater the feeling of time expands (one waking hour at the bottom level feels like fifty years), the action in the second, third, and fourth levels all happens in the time that it takes for the SUV to hit the water. As I said, this has nothing to do with actual dreams as they're experienced by human beings, but as a variation on the ticking clock (i.e., the characters have to get in and do their thing before the car hits the water, waking them up), it's pretty neat.

As accomplished as the film is as an SF thriller, I can't help but wish that Nolan had found space in this two and a half hour movie to give his characters a reality beyond their function in the plot. Sometimes typecasting fills in the blanks (DiCapprio is traumatized by the death of his wife and living in a dream world for the second time this year; Michael Caine is fatherly and distinguished for about five seconds), but the younger actors, like Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, simply draw a blank. The former plays an architecture student, Ariadne, who's tasked with designing the levels of the dream world, but her real function in the film is to discover things about Cobb that the rest of the team is unaware of. Gordon-Levitt fares even worse: They post his character, Arthur, on the second level of the dream to distract the Murphy character's subconscious, which has Matrix-like goons chase him around a hotel with guns, while the other characters venture deeper into the mind to do the real work. When the SUV in the first layer goes off the bridge, this disrupts the gravity in the second layer (but not the third and fourth) so that Arthur spends most of his scenes floating in mid-air, like Kier Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

If the story, particularly the ending, contains echoes of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), Nolan's high-gloss style and intensified continuity cutting are as far from the authentic griminess and meditative rhythms of Tarkovsky's work as one could possibly get. Of course, some one will point out that Nolan's film is essentially a fast-paced thriller, and wouldn't be well served by Tarkovsky's heavy, long take style. Still, I find it slightly ironic that, as the characters move "deeper" into the second and third levels of dreams-within-dreams, the film becomes increasingly reliant on external violence, as opposed to Tarkovsky's film, which is all talk and no action. Also, I wish... well, I was going to say, "I wish, for the sake of realism, that everything didn't look so gosh darn clean," but then I realized, just as I was about to type it, how utterly absurd the phrase "for the sake of realism" was in this context. This is what I meant about me not being the ideal viewer for this movie.

Rather unfortunately, in a farce resembling the plot of Life of Brian (1979), Inception was appointed, even before it opened, to be the film that saved the summer--which surely says less about the film itself than the overall wretchedness of most Hollywood movies that, when a moderately ambitious blockbuster does come along, it's praised well out of proportion to its modest but very real virtues. Much the same thing happened when Nolan's previous film, The Dark Knight (2008), appeared two summers ago. Faced with a prosaic, noisy, and undistinguished action movie, and a hammy performance by a recently deceased Heath Ledger, the critical community lost its shit, as if a girl who should really know better suddenly decided to drop her panties for the biggest schlub at the party. The film was widely read as a complicated political allegory, and Ledger's performance was praised as the greatest piece of screen acting since Renée Falconetti in La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928). I suppose it all depends on what you go to the movies looking for. And speaking as some one who'd generally rather see a film about something real, like Pedro Costa's movies about the slums of Lisbon, or demonlover for that matter, I can't see too much reason for getting so excited about a movie defined by its unreality, no matter how skillfully made it is.

Qu'est que Mumblecore? (On Cyrus)

I don't have a great deal to say about Jay and Mark Duplass' Cyrus (2010), an engaging and funny if not very distinguished romantic comedy, but I am intrigued, sort of, by the way people are talking about it. The Duplass brothers' previous films, The Puffy Chair (2005) and Baghead (2008), both unseen by me, were low-budget, low-fi "Mumblecore" movies, while this film, though resolutely low-budget and low-fi, features mainstream stars articulating clearly and is getting a much wider release (Ridley and Tony Scott are credited as executive producers). In his review of the film, Mike D'Angelo finds that the filmmakers don't seem to know whether they want to make an independent feature or go Hollywood, which begs the question: What exactly is the difference between an indie movie generally, and a Mumblecore film in particular, and most mainstream studio fare?

First of all, what is Mumblecore? According to Wikipedia, the term was coined by Eric Masunaga, a sound editor who's worked with Andrew Bujalski, to describe a small number of US directors whose handmade aesthetic helps to distinguish their work from the professional model of filmmaking associated with Hollywood and emulated by most independent features which turn up at the Sundance film festival (Frozen River [2008], Precious [2009], et al). A Mumblecore feature is shot on 16mm or video rather than 35mm, and the actors are more often friends of the director than experienced professionals. The brand takes its name from the tendency of the non-professional actors who appear in these films to mumble their lines, and most Mumblecore movies have their premiere at the South by Southwest Music Festival.

However, once you get past their homemade quality, a Mumblecore movie is anything but experimental. They rely on the same principles of story construction and continuity editing which have been the basis for commercial filmmaking for more than ninety years. The brand has even produced its own stars, with Greta Gerwig going on to appear in Noah Baumbach's Greenberg (2010). (Mark Duplass also makes a cameo, and Baumbach served as producer on Joe Swanberg's Alexander the Last [2009].) Contrary to what D'Angelo claims, it seems to me that, apart from Cyrus having an obviously low-budget look (which I guess is supposed to denote uncompromising artistry and realism), the Duplass brothers have transitioned rather seamlessly into professional filmmaking. In other words, Mumblecore isn't an attempt to break away from Hollywood so much as a means for aspiring directors like the Duplass brothers to get their foot in the door.

One might argue that in Cyrus, the protagonist, John (John C. Reilly), has the potential to alienate viewers. A desperate loser who evidently hasn't been on a date since his ex-wife, Jamie (Catherine Keener), dumped him seven years ago (the film opens with Jamie walking in on him masturbating), John meets a woman, Molly (Marisa Tomei), at a party early in the film, and miraculously, she goes home with him at the end of the night. However, John begins to suspect that she's married because of the way she always leaves right away after intercourse, and one day, in stalker fashion, he decides to follow her home. Surely this is more characteristic of edgy indie fare than a safe Hollywood romantic comedy?

Actually, as David Bordwell argues in his book, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (2006), starting in the 1970s, screenwriting manuals began to place a much greater emphasis on having a flawed protagonist, which becomes the basis for an internal conflict between what the protagonist wants and what they need. As an example, Bordwell cites Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), in which the protagonist is a workaholic who learns to be a devoted father: He wants to succeed in the business world, but he needs to be a good dad. Ironically, although indie movies are often associated with character-driven stories (in contrast with action-orientated Hollywood features), the plot of Cyrus is all external conflict.

The story charts John's substitution of one brunette mother figure for another. (In the first sequence, Jamie shows up at his house to tell him she's getting remarried.) However, since John's stalkerish tendencies never pose a threat to his relationship with Molly, the only obstacle to his goal (that is, to make it work with Molly) is an external one--namely, Molly's grown son, Cyrus (Jonah Hill), who sets out to sabotage their relationship. (Cyrus' attachment to Molly is mirrored in John's attachment to Jamie, and the irritation it causes her fiancée.) In the end, the character who grows the most is actually Cyrus, who learns to be less selfish in his relationship with Molly.

The plot moves through the four stages outlined by Kristin Thompson as the basis of Hollywood storytelling: setup, complicating action, development, and climax (sometimes referred to, more vaguely, as three acts and a turning point). Upon falling in love with Molly, John discovers that she has a grown son (setup). Although Cyrus pretends to like him, John begins to suspect that Cyrus is out to sabotage his relationship with Molly when his sneakers mysteriously disappear (complicating action). After John discovers his shoes in a closet, it's all out war between the two men, although they try to hide their mutual enmity from Molly (development). Things boil to the surface at Jamie's wedding when Cyrus gets drunk (echoing John's behavior at the party where he first met Molly), and attacks John in the bathroom. In the scene where John first confronts Cyrus, he takes his sneakers down from the closet, and he shows them again to Molly when breaking up with her in order to explain how the situation with Cyrus has become intolerable. (In screenwriting jargon, the breakup is "the darkest hour," where everything looks bleak for the characters.) Finally, seeing how despondent Molly is without John, Cyrus goes to his apartment to beg him to take her back (climax).

Stylistically, the film bears many of the hallmarks of what Bordwell terms intensified continuity, which isn't a violation of continuity editing, but rather continuity on steroids. This aesthetic is characterized by the use of long and wide lenses, close framings (often of one person, or an over-the-shoulder angle), fast editing even in conversation scenes, constant camera movement (in Cyrus, some handheld shots are punctuated with sudden zoom ins), and insane redundancies (I counted no fewer than four nearly identical establishing shots of Molly's house). In the hands of a director like Baumbach or Spike Lee, these can be effective tools, but too often, as is the case here (not to mention every Christopher Nolan movie), it seems to encourage unimaginative staging and découpage.

Politically, the film is essentially conservative. The sole obstacle to John having a normal (heterosexual, monogamous) relationship with Molly is her abnormal (vaguely incestuous) relationship with Cyrus, whom as they say, has boundary issues. (When John spends the night at Molly's for the first time, she tells him that she and Cyrus always keep their bedroom doors open during the night.) To put it in the most Freudian terms possible, the first thing Molly notices about John is his "nice penis," and it's Cyrus realization that Molly needs John to love her in a way that he can't (i.e., with his penis) that brings about the happy ending.

So, what can an indie film do that a Hollywood film can't? D'Angelo associates indie films with subtle character studies, and mainstream fare with broad comedies, but as we've seen, that's an inaccurate generalization. Tom Ford's slick Hollywood feature A Single Man (2009) is as subtle and character-driven as a low-budget item like Cyrus is broad. There are, however, experimentally-inclined US commercial filmmakers, such as Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Jim Jarmusch, Harmony Korine, Richard Linklater, and David Lynch, not to mention still more radical avant-gardists like Craig Baldwin, Ernie Gehr, and Michael Snow, and video artists like Gary Hill, Steve Reinke, and Bill Viola. Under the Mumblecore umbrella, there are those who are simply auditioning for a studio gig (like the Duplass brothers). But others, such as Bujalski, seem driven by a desire to see represented on film a segment of American life that's so far been ignored by the mainstream--although I wish that Bujalski's wholly apolitical films about the romantic entanglements of a bunch of boring white heterosexual hipsters, such as Funny Ha Ha (2002) and Mutual Appreciation (2005), were darker and edgier, like the Baumbach of Margot at the Wedding (2007) and Greenberg. In other words, Bujalski and the Duplass brothers could stand to learn a thing or two about flawed protagonists from the screenwriting manuals.

The Wretched of the Earth (On Pedro Costa)

Broadly speaking, there are commercial movies and then there's everything else, films which sometimes get filed under categories like "avant-garde" or "experimental." Though none of them were exactly colossal hits, the first three features by Pedro Costa--O sangue (The Blood, 1989), Casa de lava (1994), and Ossos (Bones 1997)--are all nonetheless, technically speaking, commercial films in that they were shot on 35mm with a professional union crew; are a commercial length (in the area of ninety minutes); and most importantly, they all tell stories. Casa de lava (the only one of Costa's early films which I haven't seen) even features a recognizable star (Isaach de Bankolé, who's best known for appearing in films by such commercial figures as Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch), though reports that he and Costa nearly came to blows over the fact that his character spends almost the entire movie in a coma suggest that, even then, the director's methods were rather at odds with industry norms.

Though they both tell stories, O sangue and Ossos are both full of lingering ambiguities. The latter, set in a slum neighborhood in Lisbon, is about the interactions between three impoverished characters and a middle-class nurse who adopts each of them in turn. Early in the film, a teenage girl, Tina (Mariya Lipkina), brings home a baby boy from the hospital, and the father (Nuno Vaz), who isn't given a name, takes him to a downtown area to beg for money in front of a metro station. Just prior to this, there's a long lateral tracking shot of the father walking down a sidewalk, holding a garbage bag which may or may not contain the baby. Outside a pastry shop, a sympathetic nurse, Eduarda (Isabel Ruth), gives him milk for the baby and a sandwich for himself. But after feeding the baby milk and bread crumbs in an alley, he's shown rushing him to the emergency room. There, he tells Eduarda that, should the baby die, it's her fault for giving him "bad milk"--a statement typical of his refusal to take any kind of responsibility. (Eventually, he and the baby move into Eduarda's apartment. And later, he'll abandon the baby in a corridor.) Although he's shown following Eduarda as she walks away from the pastry shop, it's never explained how the father got her name.

The other major character is a neighbor of Tina's, Clotilde (Vanda Duarte), who eventually becomes Eduarda's maid. Clotilde isn't the most responsible person either; in one scene, her husband (Miguel Sermão) finds her at a party and tells her that her children haven't eaten. It's strongly implied that Clotilde, Tina, and the father are all drug addicts (at one point, the latter passes out on a bed, and Tina, in the middle of a suicide attempt, drags his unconscious body into the next room), but we never seen any direct evidence of drug use in the movie.

Costa favors a de-dramatized style of acting, which has the effect of making his actors seem at times like vacant zombies--an approach that works wonderfully in a movie about hopeless drug addicts living in abject poverty. (Some of the actors are old pros, such as Ruth, who's appeared in films by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Manoel de Oliveira; but even the non-professional actors, like Duarte, who would go on to play herself in two of Costa's subsequent films, are here playing characters.) Writing about Costa's work, Jonathan Rosenbaum observes that his films aren't populated "so much by characters in the literary sense as by raw essences--souls, if you will" (and likens him in this regard to such exalted figures as Robert Bresson, Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Demy, Alexander Dovzhenko, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jacques Tourneur), but in a separate capsule review of Ossos notes that, "the Bressonian vacancy of the leads sometimes feels spooky rather than soulful." Like Philippe Garrel, Costa often lingers on his actors' faces in medium close-up as if they were painterly subjects, but even when the story comes to a halt, the film's dense ambient soundtrack is buzzing with offscreen activity.



To pursue a crude analogy between Costa and the marginal characters who populate his films, while mainstream figures such as Pedro Almodóvar, Noah Baumbach, Kathryn Bigelow, David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, and Martin Scorsese (to pick half a dozen names at random) can afford to live downtown, filmmakers like Costa are kept in a ghetto, invisible to the public. And just as a rich person can afford a bigger place, a huge blockbuster like James Cameron's Avatar (2009) will open on many more screens than a more specialized commercial movie, like Tom Ford's A Single Man (also 2009). If Costa started his career on the outskirts of commercial filmmaking--the Scarborough of cinema, if you will--with his fourth feature, In Vanda's Room (2000), it's as if he had dropped off the grid completely. Marking a radical break from the conventions of commercial cinema (which his earlier films at least nominally adhered to), this three-hour film was shot on video with a crew of less than five people, and it doesn't tell a story. A singular and unclassifiable work, it blurs the distinctions between fiction and documentary, as much of what we see looks like it's really happening. For instance, in contrast with Ossos, drug use is so ubiquitous here that very often one of the characters will be having a conversation while an unremarked upon syringe hangs out of his arm.

One might describe the movie as a kind of phenomenological documentary, in which each shot seems to say, "This is so." Included on the DVD as a bonus feature is Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (2005), a video installation Costa made for a museum in Rotterdam incorporating footage from In Vanda's Room, which provides a window into how Costa shot the movie. On each side of a split screen, we see an unbroken take, of which only a small snippet was used in the feature. As the piece opens, we see on the left a building being demolished in the background, as passersby (who may or may not be aware that they're being filmed) move in and out of the frame; on the right, we see some of the film's stars doing nothing in particular. However, unlike a traditional, vérité-style documentary, which positions itself as an objective record of a pre-existing reality, Costa's film is reportedly a collaboration between himself and his actors, and the film's soundtrack is obviously constructed. During one scene in a living room, we hear a violin being tuned offscreen; Costa then cuts to a man tuning a violin, creating the illusion that the man is sitting in an adjacent space to the living room.

Structured as a series of days and nights in a slum neighborhood, the film is mainly about a woman named Vanda (Duarte), who--when she's not holed up in her room with her sister, Zita (Zita Duarte), smoking crack--goes door-to-door selling vegetables, and a neighbor of theirs', Nhurro, who's an intravenous drug user. As the film opens, Nhurro has just moved into a house whose previous tenant was a girl who tried to sell her baby, or left it in a trash can, or both, and gradually it's revealed that Vanda and Zita's sister has been sent to prison for some minor infraction, but there's nothing here that you could call a story (at least, not by the standards of a Robert McKee screenwriting seminar, the aim of such seminars being to make commercial films). Most of the film consists of the characters hanging out and getting high, tidying up (early on, Nhurro tells a fellow addict that he wants the place to be clean so they can feel at home), and trying to make money wherever they can.



For me, Costa's most difficult film is Colossal Youth (2006), even though, at first glance, it looks closer to a conventional narrative than In Vanda's Room as it has something like a protagonist, and indeed something like a plot. Again, the movie is structured as a series of days and nights in the life of its subject, Ventura (Ventura), a retired Cape Verdean laborer whose daily rounds involve visits to a loose assortment of wretched-of-the-earth types who comprise his adopted family. In an early scene, Ventura goes to the home of a young woman, Bete, who may or may not be his daughter, to tell her that his wife (whom we never see) has left him. Bete tells Ventura that he has the wrong house, but over the course of the film, the two gradually become more and more intimate.

What makes the film so difficult is Costa's willfully static staging of his actors, who remain seated or standing in one place during extremely long takes, and the trance-like quality of the performances (in contrast with the more naturalistic and energetic performances of In Vanda's Room). As David Bordwell often points out, when we look at other people, our gaze is instinctively drawn to high information areas like faces and hands, and looking at Colossal Youth a second time, I was able to downgrade my attention enough to focus on what the actors were doing particularly with their hands. The high point of the film in this regard is a long monologue delivered by a recovering drug addict, Vanda (Duarte), relating the pain of childbirth, in which her way of talking with her hands helps the viewer to imagine the scene she's describing. This sort of downgrading inevitably leads one to the question: Is this really the best use I could be making of my time, focusing so much attention on every minute gesture these people make? The film made me realize how most commercial movies are filled with big, exciting events, which are presumed to be the only ones worthy of our time and attention. (Accordingly, when I saw Lone Scherfig's An Education [2009] a few months back, I was disappointed that the heroine didn't suffer more.) Still, even after downgrading my attention, as the film went on I found myself becoming increasingly restless, and I'm left wondering: What makes the difference between an interesting downgrade movie, like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), and one that's simply boring and a waste of time?