The Gulf

Here's a brief taste of my review of the new Iraq War documentary Brothers at War, posted here on emanuellevy.com:

Since the film’s stated focus is the bond between “brothers,” spending most of the film with Americans is to be expected. But in almost totally losing sight of the war’s other human sacrifices — Iraqi civilians — “Brothers at War” goes further than promoting an uncritical “Support Our Troops” mentality. If brotherhood means ignoring rather than engaging Iraqis unhappy with the invasion, then it also ignores the complexity of the war, and of the troops themselves. In other words, it implies that the understanding of brotherhood (violent, callous) that animates one soldier in the film animates them all: “you get one,” he says, comparing killing an Iraqi to being tattooed, “and you kind of want to get another.”

The Cruel Place We Know

Robert Altman’s rollicking upstairs-downstairs satire of England between the wars, Gosford Park, is not as ambitious as Nashville, his 1975 phantasmagoria of country music, antiwar sentiment, the cult of celebrity and Middle-American chaos; not as formally impressive as The Player (1992), whose brilliant, eight-minute title tracking shot calls to mind an entire history of cinema — replete with allusions to Pretty Woman and Touch of Evil — as it introduces the callow inner workings of a high concept studio; not as sharply drawn, as dangerous, as the earthquakes, car accidents, riverbed corpses and prank calls of the almost-apocalyptic Short Cuts (1993); and certainly not as sweet or valedictory as A Prairie Home Companion (2006), the director’s last film, in which the folksy, sometimes funereal ballads of Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin come to seem stand-ins for an entire ideology of art and culture long ago lost.

But of his films large and small — and here I’ve merely touched upon the large, leaving out McCabe and Mrs. Miller, 3 Women, A Wedding, The Long Goodbye, Dr. T and the Women, innumerable others — Gosford Park is perhaps the best, the most controlled, the one which most succeeds in straddling that ever-elusive line between comedy and drama, the one so thick with meaning and detail that I feel I’m still discovering the film ten viewings on.

Ostensibly a murder mystery set at a shooting party in the English countryside in 1932, the film is better understood, I think, as a few dozen chamber dramas and family sitcoms tied together into a coherent whole, aided by Altman’s magnificent ability to keep the action just this side of nervous breakdown — all while maintaining the intimations of such, the social anxiety, the secrets and lies, the sense that the England of the Depression was already roiling for a fight. Julian Fellowes’ superbly acute, witty and ultimately affecting script only misfires by making Stephen Fry’s police inspector too much an unthinking boor, and minus Fry’s disappointingly broad humor, the same could be said for the cast. I wouldn’t be the first to call it a Who ’s Who of British stage and screen during the last four decades, or the first to find it a bit difficult to keep everything straight.

But here goes: Maggie Smith, deliciously frigid and snobbish as the Countess of Trentham, begging for an increased allowance and devouring each meal with relish while turning up her nose at store-bought marmalade; Michael Gambon as the owner of the estate, William McCordle, a capitalist come up from nothing by working young girls to the bone in sweatshops before the war, and sleeping with them to boot; Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, Sylvia, bored even by murder; Derek Jacobi as the unfailingly loyal butler, Probert; Emily Watson, devilish, seductive and bitterly funny as Elsie, the lady’s maid (who happens also to be having at affair with William); Clive Owen as the mysterious — and also seductive — valet Robert Parks; and Eileen Atkins as the curmudgeonly, hard-nosed cook, Mrs. Croft, with just the faintest streak of gentleness in her face, as though it’s been buried under the past.

That was quite long, but it doesn’t even touch on the three finest performances, the ones that create the moments in which the film transcends its simpler purpose and gets at real feeling, the tenderness and beauty beneath the facades of class. First there’s Kelly Macdonald as Trentham’s maid, Mary, the film’s moral center, just discreet enough to keep her job and just indiscreet enough to win our hearts, the one through whom the emotional core of the film begins to enter our view. Then there’s the always masterful Helen Mirren, as head maid Mrs. Wilson, a woman woven up so tightly that when the seams tear the revelation that follows suggests all the cruelties of class, of even having an upstairs and downstairs so rigidly separated — it’s a moment, indeed a performance, that fills the gut and hurts the heart. And in an underrated role, a singing Jeremy Northam plays the silent film star Ivor Novello, entertaining people who look down on him for his talents. Crooning “The Land That Might Have Been” as the servants sneak into the darkened rooms upstairs and bask for a few joyous moments in one of life’s tiny, surprising pleasures, his words wrap up the film in microcosm, swooning through the disappointments and hopes of an entire country, alluding to the darkened rooms of the past — and looking toward the light, into some tenuous, questioning hope:

Somewhere there's another land
different from this world below,
far more mercifully planned
than the cruel place we know.
Innocence and peace are there--
all is good that is desired.
Faces there are always fair;
love grows never old nor tired…

Shall we ever find that lovely
land of might-have-been?
Will I ever be your king or you
at last my queen?
Days may pass and years may pass
and seas may lie between--
Shall we ever find that lovely
land of might-have-been?

The Tower of Babel

The minor terrors of everyday life that infuse the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu — an escaped dog, a hole in the parquet floor, a drink too many — are at first so innocuous that their eventual explosion punches one firmly in the gut.

The moments are brief, fleeting and flickering like a bulb about to burn out, passed over by the eye with nary a second thought. Inevitably, however, they return: whole lives seem built around those first glimpses, whole worlds of interaction where humans, loudly but without understanding, collide and hurt and die.

Iñárritu's most recent film, Babel, is the most far-flung of these (too far-flung, in fact), tied together by the horrifying circumstances of an American couple in Morocco, their nanny and children in Southern California and a girl in Tokyo; 21 Grams, a similar take on a widow, a hit-and-run killer and a heart transplant recipient, is the tightest in construction but the most over-the-top in execution.

His best film is his first, Amores Perros (2000), set in an incongruously chilly Mexico City. Rather than teeming with the crashing, sweaty bodies we've come to expect from Latin America as depicted on film (Fernando Meirelles' City of God comes immediately to mind), the people here are sparse, the skies unendingly gray. The bustle of the city fades. Characters seem rarely to come in contact with others, instead only simulating the quotidian— working as a cashier in a grocery store, for instance — while pursuing, silently, the more devious — bank robbery, illicit affairs, dog fighting. These Janus-like characters, all facade and wary depth, emerge when those minor terrors begin to reveal the disease of their lonely lives, when an infinitesimal event sets in motion something irrevocable.

The multiplicity of narratives, as in Iñárritu's other pictures, suggests our tenuous connections with the world and the people around us; he reminds us that we live in a world where innumerable stories play out simultaneously, stories to which we give no notice until they intersect with our own. He asks us, in a way, to walk down the street and imagine even a sliver of the tale of the next person we pass.

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion once wrote, and Iñárritu, even if he has never read her work, abides quite beautifully. The characters in his films construct narratives around the unspeakable, the fateful, the terrifyingly random. They, like us, try to make sense and order from the disparate threads we are given. They, like us, often fail.

Each of the three main characters in Amores Perros — a young man in love with his brother's wife (Gael García Bernal), a successful supermodel (Goya Toldeo), a hired assassin (Emilio Echevarría) — has a plan, a story, thrown into disarray by an accident, by an inability to predict what will come next and how they will react. And then that moment of fate, that brief image from which everything in the film descends, becomes the focus of the story: the narrative shifts to new ground, unfamiliar ground. Like a flower petal or piece of wood seen under a microscope, the intense focus on these tiny disruptions of life distorts them. An escaped dog becomes a reason to flee; a hole in the floor signifies a crumbling relationship and broken body; the death of a companion segues into the painful birth of a new man.

In short, Iñárritu seems to ask: What becomes of us when we are left bereft of our plans? When our story is hijacked by fate, how do we tell a new one? The answer, though bleak, is in an old man's room, in the flaking, peeling paint — when we are stripped of everything we become like the paint, cracked and dry and decrepit and sad. But then he awakens: he trims his beard; he cuts his toenails; he puts on the bent and broken glasses of someone left with almost nothing. He returns to a home of sorts, pockets filled with dirty money, and leaves a message for a stranger from his past.

He rids himself of that burdensome old narrative of revolution and murder, of life's troubles writ large, and begins a whole new story. He re-enters the world, cautiously, slowly; he reconstitutes his tale with a fresh beginning and, we imagine, a future populace of new characters, walking across the charred earth under an almost imperceptibly brighter sky.

American Gothic

The pageant that burgeoning playwright Margot Tenenbaum (Gwyneth Paltrow) puts on at one of her childhood birthday parties crams the gently decrepit home in which her family lives with passionate admirers. The stage overflows with the stripes of zebras and tigers; the fronds of painstakingly made faux palms seem to emerge, fully formed, from the walls. But her father (Gene Hackman) dampens the enthusiastic ovation she receives. He didn't, he tells her, find it believable.

Such is the world of Wes Anderson, teeming with the flotsam and jetsam of lives lived parallel to our own: a boar's head on the wall, a junky Gypsy Cab, a falcon on the roof; prep school uniforms, an aquarium ground breaking, a childish love expressed through red, felt-tipped pens; Pescespada Island, Vietcong man-o-wars, the crumbling Belafonte. He fills his films, as Margot fills her pageant, with fakery of place and time that teeters on the edge of the real — "American Gothic," you might call it, with the same stoic humor and grim honesty of the famous painting. His world is one tipped slightly askew, listing with soft tides of graceless human interaction. It's a world that easily obscures the vitality leaping across the screen, a world that easily obscures the fact that Anderson's films tell stories about, quite simply, family.

The Royal Tenenbaums is about a family whose members are so stunted by their early successes that, when failure comes, it rumbles like an oncoming train. Over a theme hopping with the faintly sinister beat of a cello played pizzicato, we see a self-described "family of geniuses" writing plays, selling stocks and bonds, winning tennis tournaments — all in the nostalgic glow that infuses families falling quietly into ruin. "What did we do?" they seem to ask from their still faces and deep-set eyes. "Where did we lose ourselves along the way?"

The answer, despite the fantasy world of cozy urbanity it implies, is in their sprawling house - one that's fallen into the kind of neglect houses that have lost their raison d'etre often do. This is where board games were played and juvenile paintings hung, where tents were pitched and the trinkets of a once-blissful family life have been filed carelessly away. Home, it is said, is where the heart is, but home is in fact a collection of objects, a stable place where memory is hidden in dusty corners and the walls seep with old arguments and bliss. The film doesn't really begin until the grown Tenenbaum children return home, because that is where their collection of collective objects rests.

It is The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, however, that strikes me most forcefully as a story of family, possibly because the story of family flows as an undercurrent through what is, essentially, the story of a journey. Here the dysfunction is (in some ways) more subtle — instead of asking, "What did we do?" it asks, "How does a man without a family find one?"

Steve Zissou (Bill Murray), a sort of modern-day Cousteau, is the scientist and explorer at the head of a documentary film crew on the search for the shark that ate Steve's closest friend and co-captain, Esteban. He neglects his wealthy wife; he's abandoned a son conceived in a moment of philandering; his film career has tanked on the poor reception of his most recent film. Murray, with a growing paunch of tan, flabby skin and a face fighting a losing battle with gravity, gives Steve a deadened egocentrism. At first glance, he seems a self-absorbed jerk, and he certainly is that. But there's something else there — some aging, some slowing and slipping-down that sends him reeling. He's abrasive, cocky, maybe even stupid. But he's inconsolably sad, too.

After a long series of diversions — too long, in fact — he catches up with the elusive jaguar shark and descends with his companions into the great black deep of the sea in a submarine called Deep Search. Music bubbles up, tapping affirmatively to the rhythms of his final quest, as animated sea life scuttles by. Out of the dark water comes the massive shark, its scales glimmering in the light of the sub, shaking Steve's vessel, and Steve himself, to the core. "It is beautiful, Steve," his wife tells him. "Yeah," he replies. "I wish Esteban were here to see it."

As his aloof, confident façade melts away, his friends reaching in unison to place a hand on his shoulder, something of family is reaffirmed. Some love coils up and springs forth, some recognition that family — whether composed of blood relatives or just the people one feels kinship with — is consolation, bitterness and fear rolled into a group of people tied by an unseen cord. There is, in the stillness of the moment, an unspeakable beauty: an understanding that certain mishaps in life are not meant to be understood so much as endured. Steve's home is a collection of creatures, of companions, emerging out of the dark. And you can tell, watching his eyes for that simple reanimation by which we move through grief, that his heart's finally in it, too.