Reprise

Reprise begins with Erik (Espen Klauman Hoiner) and Phillip (Anders Danielsen Lie), two twenty three year olds standing in front of a mailbox. They are aspiring authors, manuscripts in hand. After dropping their novels in the mail, a fanciful, sped up montage looks into their (imagined) futures: critical adoration, rabid cult audiences, fierce academic debate, doomed romances, African street revolutions triggered by their prose. It’s an amusing aside. But the choppiness that this diversion introduces to the film lingers. These flashy, New Wave indulgences of debut director Joachim Trier threaten to ironically evoke the strained pretensions of the young literary set his solid film gently mocks. Thankfully the pace settles, resulting in a nimble exploration of youth forging an artistic (and adult) identity.

Phillip’s fate briefly approaches the grandiose daydream by the mailbox. His novel is published to some acclaim and decent sales. Erik’s book is rejected, though he harbors little ill will towards his friend. (An Americanized version of this movie, and most likely American writers, would surely revel in such animosity.) Of course, it is a universal truth that fame and success are mixed blessings, so Phillip spirals into a profound depression that ends in a suicide attempt. His fleeting success over and his health on the mend, Phillip returns to Erik and their core group of friends. The film is strongest when examining twentysomething male camaraderie. There is vulgar machismo posing- incapable of healthy relationships, the gang dismisses women as intellectually bankrupt sex objects, cultural one-upmanship (the obscure references come fast and furious), naïve hero worship (of a reclusive, depressed cult author) and relentless binge drinking. There is also their utter dependency on one another, for reasons of sanity and inspiration.

Fortunes shift as Erik writes a book that becomes the latest victim of the publishing hype machine. A vapid talk show host says it is “about madness,” suggesting that Phillip was no small inspiration. Ultimately, neither young writer quite realize their marvelous ambitions. Reprise settles into a minor key as it shows its young characters stumble into adulthood and its attendant compromises: modest goals, quiet accomplishments, generic but happy relationships and the occasional business suit. In short, all the bourgeois trappings the film’s characters initially spurned. Reprise, like the literary strivers it documents, has its faults. There is occasional audience manipulation; several scenes forecast Phillip checking out for good. And a climactic party montage verges on John Hughes territory. But for the most part, Reprise succeeds as a bittersweet homage to youthful talents and indiscretions. It mirrors the success of its protagonists in distilling a lifetime of passions and references into a coherent whole.

Dive Alive

Dejectedly surveying the NYU-strewn wreckage at Botanica, my friend Dan and I decided to hop over to Milano’s next door. After navigating one of the narrowest bars we’d ever encountered (made all the more treacherous for Dan by his yoga mat, which ran perpendicular to the bar both physically and philosophically), we found a mellow, amber-lit back area with a smattering of two-tops. Initially thrown off by the Shania Twain song blaring over the speakers, we ordered drinks and quickly remedied the music situation with Pixies and Joy Division tracks via the Rolling Stones-laden jukebox.

Milano’s is a classic dive, with grizzled old vets who have likely been glued to the same barstools long enough to function as art installations, a cash-only policy, pungent, saloon-style bathrooms and practically sepia-toned photographs of legendary patrons (and requisite Irish flag) festooning the walls. It's the type of place where you'll hesitate to order anything more "refined" than a whiskey, though eye-rolling was kept to a minimum when Dan asked for a Pinot Noir. Located in boutique-ridden Nolita, it’s an old warhorse that has defiantly bucked the relentless gentrification that has engulfed the area. Drinks are cheap ($5 a pop with additional discounts during happy hour) and are served from 8 a.m. (!) through 4 a.m.

Babies Everywhere

Following in the wake of Knocked Up, that other pregnancy movie, two newish releases have been riding different waves of hype: Juno (to Oprah, blockbuster status, the Oscars) and the Romanian 4 Months, 3Weeks and 2 Days (to the Palm d’Or, Film Comment dissections and sustained runs at Los Angeles and New York arthouse showcases).
The former tells the story of quirkily named, sixteen year old Juno (Ellen Page), who discovers she is pregnant after a tryst with Bleeker (Michael Cera). Antics ensue as she befriends the uber-yuppie couple (played by Jennifer Garner and a creepy Jason Bateman) that wishes to adopt her unborn child.

Juno has been lauded for its “freshness” and its convincing hipster dialogue. But I found the “hip,” “young” dialogue strained and cloying and off-the-mark. Despite an ever-widening gulf between me and my teen years, I am virtually certain that the adolescent parlance on display in the film resonates with few of its teenage viewers. Slightly less offensive but nearly as irksome is the incessant use of folksy alternative guitar-strumming throughout. There is nothing wrong with this kind of music, but it is best enjoyed in moderation and makes for a dull soundtrack when there are no alternatives to be heard.

The (strangely unheralded) strength of the film to me was its quiet moments, particularly those involving Jennifer Garner, who, frankly, stole the show from Page. Garner’s reaction to Juno telling her character she’s lucky not to be the pregnant one is priceless, as is the scene in the mall when she desperately wishes to feel the baby kick. I wish there had been more of these scenes. There were plenty of opportunities for their inclusion: the scene in which Juno reveals to her parents that she is pregnant is one of them. Instead, it struck me as false and oddly truncated. Also disappointing and unrealistic is the lack of focus on the torment and unease that a pregnant sixteen-year old would undoubtedly feel at the hands of high-school peers. Juno has enough bright moments to make it a worthwhile rental, but is wholly undeserving of its praise (especially that egregious Best Picture nomination) and media-dubbed “importance.”

Veering in the opposite direction of Juno is Christian Mungiu’s 4 Months…. It has no soundtrack or cheeseburger telephone to promote. The dialogue eschews showiness and is often purposefully banal. And the film itself is alternately bleached and murky. Most strikingly though, it does not revolve around an accidental pregnancy’s coming to fruition, but rather its agonizingly deliberated termination. As Otilia, Anamaria Marinca is in nearly every frame of the movie as she loyally aids her friend Gabita Laura Vasiliu in obtaining an illegal abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania. She is phenomenal. In one sustained shot we see her at a dinner party, surrounded by inane conversation, with an agonized, shell-shocked expression as she ponders the fate of her friend, and her own choices, after leaving Gabita alone in a seedy hotel room.

While strenuously unsympathetic and apolitical (it could easily fuel the fires of both sides of the abortion debate), 4 Months... does not treat its characters or milieu with kid’s gloves. Dr. Bebe, the abortionist, is a monster. Gabita is not particularly bright. And the communist society portrayed within is overwhelmingly bleak, with everything (from cigarettes to sex to abortion) is commoditized in a brutal barter economy. Despite an ambiguous ending that would never have passed muster with the Juno test audiences, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days nonetheless stays with the viewer far longer than its Hollywood counterpart.

Vampire Weekend

I checked out a show by this endlessly buzzed-about quartet at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night. A couple of worrisome signs preceded the show. Though I’m unaware of the opening act’s history, their derisive introduction of Vampire Weekend implied an understandable frustration over the endless press ink that’s been spilled over the fresh-faced band, whose members have been out of college (Columbia) for eighteen months. Then there were the four camera jockeys planted all over the venue filming the show for posterity, confirmation perhaps that Vampire has read their own, largely euphoric press and swallowed it whole. As it turns out, the band will probably end up shelving this footage. At most, they’ll look back at it nostalgically as a memento of their incipient touring days, before they cohered as a live act.

I’ve no interest on jumping on the inevitable and tired backlash bandwagon against this group. I was wholly unaware of the blogosphere having built these guys up as the Next Big Thing over the past year. And I can only shake my head at the same engine now gleefully ripping them to shreds. It’s a tired cycle: “underground” act is anointed new indie darling; group attracts fans outside of the Williamsburg-Lower East Side axis of hip; group is abandoned by blogging hipsters who have their homepages set to Pitchfork.

Their debut contains five very good-to-great songs: despite the band wearing its influences (Afro-pop, Graceland and, as they are less eager to admit, the Strokes) on its sleeve, the music is catchy and light. But all four members are undeniably green when it comes to performing. Chris Tomson threw his drumstick straight into the air a minute or so into the first song and spent much of the set hunched over and grinning maniacally when not playing. Also appearing slightly autistic was keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij who, along with frontman Ezra Koenig, busted out several spastic dance moves during the course of the gig. Such movements can actually amplify a performances (see: David Byrne in Stop Making Sense or Ian Curtis channeled by Sam Riley in Control), but came off studied and self-conscious in this instance. Ultimately, I appreciated the show as an opportunity to see a band on the cusp of what may well become major stardom and to appreciate the endearingly novice antics of a competent group still working out its kinks.

Atonement, director Joe Wright’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s fine novel, makes clear at the start that it share’s little of its source’s regard for subtlety. “England, 1935” is scrawled letter by letter across the screen, each stroke accompanied by the clang of a typewriter. A series of too-quick jumpshots then follows Briony Tallis (played by Saorse Ronan as a child, Romola Garai as a teenager and Vanessa Redgrave as an old woman) as she gracelessly plods through her English country home. Thankfully, things calm down after that. The narrative is set in motion when Briony witnesses what she naively misinterprets as an act of cruelty by Robbie (James McAvoy), the son of servants who lives on the grounds) towards her sister Cecilia (Keira Knightley). She goes on to read a pornographic letter that Robbie had entrusted her to deliver to Cecilia (he having mistaken it for a later, revised draft) and interrupt a tryst between the fledgling couple in the library. Given her earlier fears, she naturally sees this as a physical attack and the culmination of Robbie’s sexual deviance. After yet another wrongful accusation by Briony, Robbie is sent away to jail, then to war, effectively dislocating the family (Cecilia cannot forgive her sister’s ignorant machinations nor her parent’s for taking the child’s word) and leading Briony to atone for her mistakes for the remainder of her life.

The film is not without considerable strengths: the cinematography is lush, the actors are all competent (a few are stellar) and a fair amount of the dialogue lives up to McEwan’s perceptive, eloquent repartee. But certain scenes are handled clumsily: there is really no need for the close-up shot of “cunt” being typed across the entire width of the screen as Wright tell us, for the third time, the contents of Robbie’s letter. Nor is it clear why Wright changed McEwan’s poetic description of a single corpse lying at, and intertwined with, the base of a tree into a score of neatly arranged dead children with bullets through their heads. Furthermore, several of the novel’s most indelible (ant not exactly extraneous) sequences are curiously omitted.

In fairness, Atonement is a difficult novel to adapt. Its strength, in my mind, lies more in its psychological acuity than in its romance or period detail. There is also that unconventional structure to tackle: the first and third part of McEwan’s work (as well as its epilogue) focus on the evolution of Briony and her writing, while the middle section abruptly shifts to a World War II narrative, with Robbie as its center. It might be the fault of a baffled marketing department or a deliberate re-imagining of the source material. But Atonement is being sold as, and too often feels like, a conventional romance rather than an intricate look at the mental and creative development of a writer from her confused, fanciful adolescence to wise, measured and mournful old age. When the movie focuses on Briony’s maturing consciousness (as it does when she correctly reinterprets the events of that last idyllic summer via flashback and in Redgrave’s wonderful concluding monologue) it is a success. But there are too many mawkish bits, including a ridiculous postscript showing Cecilia and Robbie frolicking along the cliffs of Dover, that ultimately do a disservice to McEwan and the intentions of his novel.

Despite the fact that Hollywood releases only one or two major musicals each year, the genre constantly seems to be at the forefront of critics’ minds. The scarcity of musical offerings is at once a cause for concern (for those wishing the genre was not perpetually on its deathbed) and excitement: they’re still being made, after all! And because so few musicals are produced, those that do make it down the pipeline are often backed by big names and bigger budgets, resulting in crowds and Oscar-baiting spectacle. Along with the Western, the musical is a largely forgotten relic of the bygone studio days that evokes nostalgic reverence among much of a public that constantly hopes for a revival. I recently saw two musicals: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in movie theaters and Spring Awakening, on Broadway. Both struck me as strenuously unorthodox entries in the genre that, while trying to subvert the clichés of the form, sacrifice much of its joy.

Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd (an adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical) goes against the cheery musical grain by cloaking itself in darkness and spilling buckets of fire-engine red blood. The plot sees Sweeney (Johnny Depp) seeking vengeance on Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman), who years earlier kidnapped his wife and daughter and sent him into exile. Along the way, he meets Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham-Carter), baker of the “worst pies in London.” Sweeney hones his skills for an eventual confrontation with Turpin as a maniacal barber whose customers, once he has slashed their throats, find their way into said meat pies.
The plot is devious fun, and tailor-made for the quirky Burton, who once again excels at lending an eerie gothic edge to his films. The Victorian London of the film may hew closely to the grimey and depraved version seen in countless other movies and books, but it is an ambience that, for me, never tires. But for a musical to work, the music has to be good. And Sweeney Todd’s music mostly left me cold. This might be symptomatic of the production essentially being an opera: the music is not intended as a flashy diversion from the story, but is rather how the story develops, with few speaking scenes to break it up. Amateurish singers (particularly Bonham-Carter, whose voice is distractingly bad) compound the problem, leading me to appreciate the set design and occasionally successful dark humor and little else.

Spring Awakening flouts Broadway convention with raunch. Adapted by Duncan Sheik from a 1891 German play about burgeoning sexuality amongst repressed teenagers, it features simulated masturbation and sex and fair amounts of exposed young flesh. As with Sweeney Todd, the musical frame momentarily casts this sensual frankness in a shocking light. But modern audiences have undoubtedly seen far lewder content not only in movie theaters and sordid computer downloads, but on their own televisions on daytime soap operas. Spring Awakening does not attempt to be puerile or even titillating. It is a tragedy. But its tragic story of doomed young love has been recycled endlessly. The score is competent though it contains only a handful of great tracks. The formula is stale: there are unrequited crushes; squirmy homosexuals and melodramatically severe, one-dimensional authority figures. Appropriate to the simplistic material are frequently amateurish (if musically talented) actors. By trying too rewrite all the rules, Spring Awakening focuses too much on the flesh at the expense of the heart.

In There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson transposes his preferred themes of avarice and dysfunction onto the California desert during the early 20th Century. While not technically Anderson’s first period piece (a write-up in the current New Yorker argues that Boogie Nights, his electrifying look at the San Fernando Valley porn industry of the 70’s and 80’s, remains his finest film), it is surely the most self-consciously epic and refined. And despite stretches where it takes a bit too much of its own time to develop, it ultimately engrosses, with both its grand images and narrative intriciacies seared upon the viewer's mind. It is the rare movie in which all the elements come together both forcefully and seamlessly. The acting, particularly Daniel Day-Lewis’, is volcanic, but saved by the tremendous scope of the film from being overbearing. Johnny Greenwood’s mesmerizing score complements the action onscreen rather than intrudes upon it. The lush camerawork and exacting production detail recall Days of Heaven and the movie itself could qualify as a continuation of that Terrence Malick classic, detailing what happens after the pastoral idyll is corrupted by man and machine.

Anderson traces the rise to fortune (and, in a nutty epilogue, subsequent drunken decline) of Texas oilman Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis). With his son, H.W. (Dillon Fraesier) in tow, Plainview traverses the expansive and largely undeveloped California landscape (stunningly rendered by Robert Elswit’s cinematography) convincing various townspeople to sell him land for drilling. During one of these stops, he is visited by Paul Sunday (Paul Dano) who tips him off about the oil bubbling beneath the surface of Litte Boston, his hometown. Upon Plainview’s arrival there, the plot kicks into high gear, introducing an adversary in Paul’s brother, Eli Sunday (also played by Dano). Eli is an evangelical minister and self-professed faith healer whose surface spirituality is at odds with Plainview’s transparent (and his own, thinly veiled) greed.

This conflict is the American binary of pious self-improvement and blind capitalist ambition made manifest. Only here, the piety is fraudulent and, were it ever pure, fully tainted by the prospect of oil riches. Daniel and Eli are both duplicitous salesman, with more in common than they would ever like to admit. This is not a story of good versus evil; all intentions are muddled. Even the normally solid family structure is compromised. As in his earlier works, the family Anderson depicts here is a surrogate one. Plainview masquerades as H.W.’s father, using him as a “sweet face to buy land,” after the real father, a fellow driller, is killed in a well. A stranger appears on the scene who claims to be Plainview’s half-brother, a dubious claim whose ficition is quickly exposed, its author swiftly dispatched. All is suspect. We first see Plainview in a dark abyss; neither he nor his many adversaries ever emerge from it to see the light..

Manhola Dargis, in the Times, interpreted the movie as a metaphor for George W. Bush: a rich, Texan oilman who will stop at nothing, including blood, to get his way. She might be onto something: “I want to rule and never, ever explain myself,” says Plainview. But perhaps the contemporary contextualization is a narrow one. There Will Be Blood is a timeless American fable in which the drive to succeed often lays waist to those individuals and institutions both behind the wheel and trying to slam on the brakes.