Review: Minority Report (2002)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell

People don't seem to talk about Minority Report that much these days (though that may change when the TV series premieres this fall), which is odd because, aside from being a really good science fiction/action film, it's also a high point in star Tom Cruise's career since the 20th century gave way to the 21st (I'd say it's a high point in director Steven Spielberg's 21st century career, too, except that Lincoln, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Catch Me If You Can and War Horse are among the 10 films he's directed since 2000, so Minority Report falls more in the middle of his output). I hadn't seen Minority Report in years before sitting down to watch it recently, and I was pleasantly surprised by how well it has held up, the soft ending aside. It's a film very much worth revisiting.

21st Century Essentials: Synecdoche, New York (2008)

All eras have works of art that are fundamental to our understanding of not only the craft itself, but the culture from which it was created. The 21st century is still nascent, but it isn't too early to start creating a canon that demonstrates the heights to which film as an artform has reached since the year 2000. These are the essential films:


Director: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Dianne Wiest, Catherine Keener, Emily Watson
Country: USA

Worlds within worlds within worlds. A life is comprised not just of experiences, but of how the mind filters, understands, organizes and relates those experiences. Because of that, a life cannot be understood in simple terms; an event is not just an event, but something defined by multiple layers of meaning, some of which remain hidden. Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York is a film of almost unfathomable ambition, one rich with ideas about the relationship between the mind and reality, which starts as a story of the interior and then just keeps burrowing deeper and deeper until finally turning itself inside out. It’s a film which demands multiple viewings and which can, perhaps, never be fully unpacked – but it’s well worth a try.

Review: Morvern Callar (2002)

* * * *
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Starring: Samantha Morton

Unopened presents under the tree, an unpublished manuscript on the computer, and a dead body on the floor. It must be Christmas. A study in existential nihilism, or perhaps just extreme detachment, Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Morvern Callar remains a stunning film, both for its brief bursts of exuberance and for its long stretches of silence. Rarely has a film so brilliantly conveyed the inner life of its protagonist, a woman whose flat affect and, shall we say, unusual coping methods, masks deep pain and an even deeper feeling of restlessness. Morvern Callar is a cold but fascinating movie, built around a pitch perfect performance.

Review: Control (2007)

* * * *
Director: Anton Corbijn
Starring: Sam Riley, Samantha Morton

I feel like I've been waiting for a movie like Control for a long time. It's a biopic that not only seems to really "get" its subject - Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, masterfully played by Sam Riley - but also finds the exact right balance between the professional achievements and ambitions that made him famous and the personal life that inspired and, in some ways, derailed him. It is a beautifully rendered and poetic film.

The film spans from 1973 to 1980, beginning with Curtis meeting his future wife Debbie Woodruff (Samantha Morton) and ending with his suicide. It is a film that is as much about a marriage as it is about a band, which is not surprising given that the screenplay is adapted from Woodruff's memoir "Touching From A Distance," and that she acted as co-producer on the production. Curtis is depicted here as both a sensitive, artistic type and as someone oddly detached from the very emotions he expresses in his poetry and music. At times it almost seems as if he understands emotions but doesn't really feel them himself, that for him love is less about what he feels for another person than about what they feel for him. He is a strangely muted presence when he's not on stage, a passive figure who doesn't seem to make decisions so much as surrender to inevitabilities. When he casually says to Debbie, "Let's get married" (and, later, "Let's have a baby"), it seems less like something that he's decided he wants than something that, for the moment, seems to him like the thing to do.

He and Debbie do get married and they do have a baby and he joins the band that will become Joy Division. He throws himself into the work (many of the performance scenes show him dripping with sweat, looking exhausted and exhilarated) and soon discovers that his career ambitions are at odds with his family responsibilities. Out on the road, he drifts into an affair with Annik Honore (Alexandra Maria Lara), a Belgian journalist, and he struggles with epilepsy. The epilepsy, the pressures of fame, and his feelings of being torn between domesticity and freedom - the sense that in every way, he's lost control - all converge one night when he hangs himself from the clothes line in the kitchen.

His final act is interesting when you consider the way that the film frames his relationships with Annik and, particularly, Debbie. Though he enters into his marriage with (presumably) good intentions, by the time he starts to find success he's come to resent Debbie and the middle class milieu to which she's tied him. His relationship with Annik represents freedom, but only in a very tentative sense. She can't actually free him, he has to do that himself by making a decision, but since he's such a passive character he instead ping pongs between the two women, at one point insisting to Debbie that one relationship doesn't have to do with the other. Even when Debbie essentially makes the decision for him, he still feels bound to her and what she represents and trapped between that life and the life represented by Annik. When he commits suicide he not only claims the freedom he had hoped to get from Annik, he also effectively repudiates the way of life represented by Debbie by hanging himself from the clothes line, a symbol of domesticity.

The screenplay creates a nicely layered pscyhological portrait of Curtis, but it would all be for naught without Riley's wonderful performance. He disappears into the role, portraying Curtis as wounded, sometimes frustratingly remote, sometimes casually cruel. The film's best scenes are those between him and Morton, an actress who with each role convinces me that she's one of the best (if not the best) actresses working today. The role of "the wife" can easily be thankless but Morton makes it matter and in scene after scene she acts as the emotional core. I can't remember the last time I saw a scene as raw and resonant as the one in which Debbie confronts Ian about his affair and, frustrated by the fact that he has completely shut down, just loses it on him. Riley and Morton's performances are not only great in their own right, they totally complement each other's.

For those for whom the primary draw for a movie like this is the music, rest assured that it plays as big and as important a role as Curtis' personal relationships. Like his marriage, his music brings becomes a trap through the fame that it brings and in its own way leaves him feeling powerless. I wasn't born yet when Curtis died but as someone who came of age in the '90s, it was hard for me not to think of Kurt Cobain when the film version of Curtis started talking about how he just wanted to make music and not be adored or famous. The music has allowed him to express himself in perhaps the only way that he truly can, but it has also boxed him in and introduced more pressures and responsibilities than he can handle. That pressure, combined with his romantic turmoil and his inability to control his illness, leads to his end.

Filmed in stark (and beautiful) black and white, the film has a look that I think will serve it well in the years to come. There's a sense of timelessness to it, both in terms of the content of the story and the way that the story is presented, that I think will keep it from becoming dated. There's nothing about Control that stands out for me as a weakness; it's pretty much perfect from top to bottom.

Review: Sweet and Lowdown (1999)

* * * *
Director: Woody Allen
Starring: Sean Penn, Samantha Morton, Uma Thurman

I’ve been a Woody Allen fan for a while and I’ve seen some of his best films and some of his more dreadful pieces, but somehow I’d missed out on Sweet and Lowdown until recently. My loss because while I was giving movies like Anything Else a chance, I missed out on this delightful film and the extraordinary performances contained within courtesy of Sean Penn and Samantha Morton. This isn’t just good Woody Allen, this is Woody Allen at the very top of his game.

The film is constructed by incorporating documentary conventions into its story, ostensibly the true (well, truish) story of Emmet Ray (Sean Penn), who was once the second best guitar player in the world. Woody Allen appears alongside other experts and historians in interview segments disbursed throughout the film in an attempt to get at the man behind the legend, telling anecdotes of varying believability, including one story involving a hold-up at a gas station that is told three different ways. The only thing that isn’t really in dispute is that Ray was a genius and underappreciated in his own time.

A few facts, just to get them out of the way: Ray idolized Django Reinhardt – the best jazz guitarist in the world – and couldn’t be near him without fainting; if he showed up for a gig at all, he usually showed up drunk; he was briefly married to a dilettante novelist named Blanche (Uma Thurman, who makes her entrance into the film as if she’s auditioning for a Marlene Dietrich biopic); and he had an obsession with watching trains and shooting rats down at the dump. All of this, while supplying amusing moments in the story, are secondary to Ray’s relationship with a mute laundress named Hattie (Samantha Morton). Although he treats her badly, repaying her unconditional affection with meanness, infidelity and mocking of her muteness, not to mention simply disappearing on her one night, she is ultimately the glue that holds him together.

The relationship between Ray and Hattie is inspired by the relationship in Fellini’s La Strada, though it leans more to the comedic than the tragic, at least up until the very end. Despite the great difference in tone between the two films, Ray’s final moments on screen – which find him sad and broken with the too-late realization of what he had and lost – are as moving as the final moments of Fellini’s Zampano. Although Ray is indisputably selfish and occasionally even cruel, Penn provides him with enough humanity that you can still feel for him even while knowing that he’s gotten exactly what he deserves. Penn is also able to blend Ray’s brilliance in one respect (as a musician) with his buffoonery in nearly every other respect without making the character seem inconsistent. Ray is a man who knows that he’s great at this one thing but never really feels secure about it because he’s not certain that everyone else knows he’s great, too. He is, in his way, more vulnerable than Hattie, which is perhaps what draws her to him and then keeps her there long after most women would have left. As with Penn, Morton is terrific in the role, suggesting the inspiration of Fellini’s story without allowing Hattie to become simply an imitation of Gelsomina. Her performance is a thing of absolute beauty and the impression she leaves is remarkable given that she never utters a single word.

Allen’s mix of fact (Django Reinhardt) and fiction (Ray) and his joining of “talking head” segments with traditional narrative segments works really well in this film. Allen’s obvious enthusiasm for the subject matter, being a well-known jazz fan and musician himself, also helps immeasurably. Though he is inarguably a great writer and director, it is also difficult to argue that every once in a while he puts out a film that seems to simply go through the motions and in the last 15 years, or so, those less than great films have outnumbered those worth remembering. Sweet and Lowdown is one of Allen’s great films, totally deserving of being ranked alongside such films as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters.

Review: Synecdoche, New York (2008)

* * * *
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton

... WTF?

Okay, I’ll admit it: Charlie Kaufman kind of broke my brain – and I mean that in the best possible way. Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman’s directorial debut, is a film rich with ideas, composed of layer upon layer of detail. As with other films penned by Kaufman, the subject of this one is the relationship of the mind to reality. From the first shot – with the protagonist shown reflected in a mirror – Kaufman sets the film up to be a story of the interior and it just keeps burrowing deeper and deeper inside until finally turning it inside out and exposing all the wheels in motion beneath the surface.

Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as Caden Cotard, a theatre director whose marriage to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter, is failing. They have a young daughter, whom Adele takes with her to Germany where she becomes a much celebrated artist. Caden stays in New York – Adele’s choice, not his – and wins a MacArthur grant which he uses to fund an elaborate and impossible play which he will spend the next few decades putting together, trying to capture the essence of life in general and his own specifically. It’s a play of such grand scale that it takes a warehouse to stage it (not that it’s ever ready for an audience to see) and where eventually the street on which the warehouse is located is recreated including the warehouse, which probably has a smaller version of the set inside including the warehouse and so on like a Russian doll. One of the oppositions that Kaufman sets up is between the artists Caden and Adele. His work keeps getting bigger and bigger, becoming more and more untenable because there is no detail he can stand to leave out. Adele, on the other hand, creates paintings that keep getting smaller and smaller – so small that they can only be viewed with magnifying glasses.

There are many women in Caden’s life, portrayed by some of the best and most underappreciated actresses in film. Aside from Adele, there’s her best friend Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who becomes Caden’s arch nemesis, and Hazel (Samantha Morton), Caden’s friend and assistant, although that’s putting it far too simply. She loves him, he comes to love her, but their timing is never quite right and they spend most of their lives finding excuses not to be together. There’s also Claire (Michelle Williams), an actress in Caden’s grand opus who becomes his second wife and eventually leaves him when forced to confront on a daily basis his feelings for Hazel, which the play goes to great lengths to explore; Tammy (Emily Watson), who plays the stage version of Hazel and becomes romantically involved with Caden, Madeline (Hope Davis), Caden's therapist who is more interested in promoting her books than helping him, and finally Millicent/Ellen (Diane Weist), who essentially usurps Caden, taking over for him as he begins to fade out. His relationships with these women, the way that he tries to understand them and himself through them, the way that he tries to organize the details of all these relationships in a way that explains his life, drives him and his work and, of course, the film.

All this is only the tip of the iceberg, but I don’t know that the intricate workings of the plot can actually be described in such a way as to give a complete and accurate picture. Having said that, though, I should confess that I don’t entirely get what it is that I’ve seen. Coming to the end of the movie, I knew that I had just seen something amazing but I also knew that I would have to see it at least once more before I really started to get a handle on it. At this point I’ve only had the opportunity to see it the once, but I’m looking forward to seeing it again and I can think of no better way to measure the greatness of a movie than by the eagerness one feels to revist it.

As Caden, Hoffman renders his most interesting work to date. Aging about 40 years, weaving in and out of various states of consciousness and being, and acting simultaneously as subject and audience, it would be easy for any actor to be lost in this role and this film but Hoffman manages to keep Caden grounded and present throughout. The performance is as complex and layered as the film itself, a beautifully constructed piece of work which has virtually no comparison. I can’t wait to see it again and pick up on some of the nuances that I surely missed the first time around.