Review: The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

* * * *
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Luke Wilson, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Danny Glover, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray

"Family isn't a word... it's a sentence." Such was the tagline for Wes Anderson's 2001 gem The Royal Tenenbaums, a whimsical film about a toxic family that comes together after years of estrangement. Featuring a pitch perfect cast and arguably the most quotable screenplay of the first decade of this century, this instant classic is a movie you can watch again and again without it losing any of its luster.

The Best Picture Countdown #65: Unforgiven (1992)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman

“I ain’t like that no more,” Bill Munny insists, though every turn takes him closer and closer to that man he used to be. Unforgiven is, indeed, an unforgiving film, dark and brutal, unromanticized and demystifying. It tells the story of a man who was once bad but has since tried to be good, of women fighting against their status as property, and of the “Wild West” making its final transition from reality to legend.

In a small outpost a man attacks a prostitute, cutting her face up to bits. The law in town is unofficial but absolute, headed up by Little Bill (Gene Hackman), who rules with an iron fist. The prostitutes, led by Strawberry Alice (Frances Fisher), want the attacker and his friend hanged, but their wishes aren't exactly taken into consideration. When the brothel's owner suggests that he’s willing to settle for monetary reimbursement, Bill tells the men that they can walk away without so much as a whipping provided that they give the brothel owner six horses. Strawberry Alice is furious. “We may be whores, but we ain’t horses,” she says before proceeding to rally the other women to pool their money and hire a bounty hunter to exact revenge on the two men.

A young gunslinger who calls himself the Schofield Kid (Jamiz Woolvett) gets word of the bounty and goes out in search of Munny, hoping to form a partnership. The Munny he finds, however, is not the man of legend, but a widower living with his two children on a pig farm. He declines the offer, insisting that he’s out of the outlaw life, the love of his late wife having changed him and set him on the right path. After the Kid leaves, however, Munny begins to think it over and decides that the promise of money is too strong to keep him away. He seeks out his former partner, Ned (Morgan Freeman) and they set off after the Kid, whom they quickly realize isn’t quite as adept a gunslinger as he’d like to suggest – but, of course, Munny himself isn’t so adept anymore either. Before setting off, he practices his shooting, setting up a tin can on a post and missing every time until he swaps in a shotgun that couldn’t possibly miss. His first attempt at riding a horse after so many years is similarly pathetic and for a while it seems as if the film will be more comedy than drama. That all changes as soon as they arrive at the outpost and Munny has his first run-in with Little Bill, who beats him and tells him to get out of town.

Earlier in the film Little Bill had done the same to English Bob (Richard Harris) and, in beating and exiling him, inherited his biographer (Saul Rubinek), who dutifully records all his thoughts and stories and actions for posterity. The biographer character is, in certain respects, the film’s comic relief but he’s also an integral part to the larger story because he’s symbolic of the change that’s taking place as the West becomes civilized and the people within it become mythologized. The film is bookended by a prologue and an epilogue which suggests this storytelling element and implies that everything in between is just another exaggerated tale woven by writers who want to sell books. The screenplay is very strong, weaving together ideas about mythology, criticism of celebrity-making culture, and a dash of hard nosed feminism (though, interestingly, it hardly touches on racism), while also creating finely etched characters who exist simultaneously as two people: the larger than life character and the real person living in its shadow.

I've always been pretty indifferent to Eastwood as a director. As a craftsman I’ve always found him solid but not extraordinary, though I think he consistently draws good performances out of his actors. With Unforgiven I finally see Eastwood’s directorial greatness, his skill at setting the tone and, in particular, his eye for composition. My favourite sequence of shots comes at the end, when Munny is riding out of town in the rain, a bad man once again, issuing warnings to everyone in his vicinity. There’s a shot of Strawberry Alice holding a light as she and others watch him ride away, back into the folklore from which he came. It’s a great and evocative sequence and makes for a fantastic ending.

The Best Picture Countdown #44: The French Connection (1971)

Note: this post is modified from a previously published post

Director: William Friedkin
Starring: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider

I've got to imagine that The French Connection played a lot differently in 1971 than it does now. I mean, in the first 15 minutes alone, we watch Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) help his partner kick the hell of a suspect they have in handcuffs and a couple of scenes later he releases this pearl of wisdom: "Never trust a nigger." And he's the hero! What a difference 40 years makes.

So, as I said, Doyle is our hero in this story, which gets going with him and his partner Russo (Roy Scheider) stumbling onto what they believe to be a major drug ring. At a bar they spot Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) throwing money around like it grows on trees and become convinced that he's in on something nefarious. They begin a surveillance operation that confirms their suspicions, though their proof is never concrete. It isn't until Boca's partners - the eponymous French connection - tip their hand by trying to take Doyle out that the enormity of the situation becomes incontrovertibly obvious.

The story is constructed to work on two levels. On the one hand it's a police procedural film which takes great pains to show us how Doyle and Russo gather evidence, and on the other hand it's a psychological character study. Doyle is a very troubled character, a loose cannon whose part in the death of a fellow officer is frequently alluded to though never elaborated on. We're left to assume that his ends-justify-the-means attitude played some role in his colleague's death, an assumption justified by the film's final scenes in which he's so desperate to capture the French mastermind Alain Charnier (played by Spanish actor Fernando Rey) that he doesn't even given a second thought to who gets hurt in the process. He's so stuck on the idea of getting his man that he fails to see the situation as a whole or the consequences his actions have for other people.

I found the film more interesting when it focused on this aspect of the story, showing us just how messed up Doyle is. Hackman is good at expressing that Doyle is lost, his life empty except for his job. He needs his job because it's the only thing that gives his life any sense of structure or meaning, and he needs to bring the drug ring to justice in order to make people stop talking about that time when he wasn't so good at his job and someone died as a result. He's tortured by his past and needs to vindicate himself with this case to prove to everyone that he's a good cop because that professional identity is all he has. He's not a particularly nice character - he's racist, he's an alcoholic, he's extremely self-centered - but thanks largely to Hackman's nuanced performance he's not unsympathetic. We understand his drive even if we're sometimes appalled by his actions.

I know that The French Connection is a much loved film, but I have to say I was a little disappointed in it. The famous chase sequence is amazing, of course, and Hackman's performance is great and very deserving of the Oscar he won, but I felt that as a whole the film wasn't really all that special. Admittedly that might be because it influenced so many subsequent films and helped establish new tropes in the genre so that the things that might have been groundbreaking about it in 1971 just seem standard now and the film can't really be faulted for that. Still, there are a lot of films that influenced decades worth of other films that still manage to retain that magic something that made them worthy of reverence in the first place and I just didn't feel that with The French Connection. It's a good movie but not one that I can see myself revisiting with any degree of regularity.

Oscarstravaganza: The French Connection

* * *

Winner: Best Actor, 1971
Director: William Friedkin
Starring: Gene Hackman, Roy Scheider

I've got to imagine that The French Connection played a lot differently in 1971 than it does in 2010. I mean, in the first 15 minutes we watch Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) help his partner kick the hell of a suspect they have in handcuffs and a couple of scenes later he releases this pearl of wisdom: "Never trust a nigger." And he's the hero! What a difference 40 years makes.

So, as I said, Doyle is our hero in this story which gets going with him and his partner Russo (Roy Scheider) stumbling onto what they believe to be a major drug ring. At a bar they spot Sal Boca (Tony Lo Bianco) throwing money around like it grows on trees and become convinced that he's in on something nefarious. They begin a surveillance operation that confirms their suspicions, though their proof is never concrete. It isn't until Boca's partners - the eponymous French connection - tip their hand by trying to take Doyle out that the enormity of the situation becomes incontrovertably obvious.

The story is constructed to work on two levels. On the one hand it's a police procedural film which takes great pains to show us how Doyle and Russo gather evidence, and on the other hand it's a psychological character study. Doyle is a very troubled character, a loose canon whose part in the death of a fellow officer is frequently eluded to though never elaborated on. We're left to assume that his ends justify the means attitude played some role in his colleague's death, an assumption justified by the film's final scenes in which he's so desperate to capture the French mastermind Alain Charnier (played by Spanish actor Fernando Rey) that he doesn't even given a second thought to who gets hurt in the process. He's so stuck on the idea of getting his man that he fails to see the situation as a whole or the consequences his actions have for other people.

I found the film more interesting when it focused on this aspect of the story, showing us just how messed up Doyle is. Hackman is good at expressing that Doyle is lost, his life empty except for his job. He needs his job because it's the only thing that gives his life any sense of structure or meaning, and he needs to bring the drug ring to justice in order to make people stop talking about that time when he wasn't so good at his job and someone died as a result. He's tortured by his past and needs to vindicate himself with this case to prove to everyone that he's a good cop because that's all he has. He's not a particularly nice character - he's racist, he's an alcoholic, he's extremely self-centered - but thanks largely to Hackman's nuanced performance he's not unsympathetic. We understand his drive even if we're sometimes appalled by his actions.

I know that The French Connection is a much loved film, but I have to say I was a little disappointed in it. The famous chase sequence is amazing, of course, and Hackman's performance is great and very deserving of the Oscar he won, but I felt that as a whole the film wasn't really all that special. Admittedly that might be because it influenced many subsequent films and helped establish new tropes in the genre and so things that might have been groundbreaking about it in 1971 just seem standard now - the film can't really be faulted for that. Still, there are a lot of films that influenced decades worth of other films that still manage to retain that magic something that made them worthy of reverence in the first place and I just didn't feel that with The French Connection. It's a good movie but having seen it once I don't know that I'll ever feel the need to see it again.