Recent New Movies

This is another post that's been stewing on the back burner a while. Long enough that I should add another film to it! I saw The Puffy Chair - another indie picture made, it seems, by a bunch of friends with a couple nice video cameras, in the vein, let's say, of Andrew Bujalski's films (duly thanked in the credits), maybe Caveh Zehedi's (also thanked...), or Andrew Wagner's The Talent Given Us. Like those films it is low budget and looks it, but carefully written and acted, and a certain amount of attention has gone into making the style (the shaky camerawork, the tight framing, the video textures) functional - making it intimate and casual seeming in a way that connects (or should connect) you to the story. It's a road movie, with the usual themes of relationships and families and responsibilities, as well as the importance of using credit cards when you buy stuff on e-bay. These films share quite a lot - the style, the themes, their fondness for sharp, surprising endings - and their willingness to look for alternative modes of distribution. The Puffy Chair is doing even better than Bujalski's films, or Wagner's - getting into the local Landmark theater - though there were only 4 people at the showing today...

Meanwhile, a bit closer to the mainstream - I've seen a couple fine Australian films recently. Somersault is a film about a teenaged girl who runs away after making a pass at her mother's boyfriend. She ends up in the ski country of southern Australia, where she gets a job, a boyfriend and a lot of trouble... In some ways, it felt rather familiar - a kid doing stupid things, getting away with a lot of it because she is beautiful, but some of it, maybe, because she is in a movie... but different, for telling a young woman’s story, from her point of view - and not actually turning it into quite the cautionary tale you expect it to be. It has some interesting ideas tucked into the corner. It haunts you a bit. Someone on a message board asked how it compared to L'Enfant, which they should see first - it's a strange thought, but it compares rather well to the Dardennes brothers. It's a good deal more conventional, with hints of sentiment and romanticism, especially in the filmmaking style - but in its interest in young people trying to figure out what they should do, in a fairly direct and unjudgmental way, it's closer than you might expect.

Meanwhile, The Proposition brings us an Aussie western starring Guy Pearce, Danny Huston, Ray Winstone, plus John Hurt, Emily Watson, David Gulpilil and David Wenhem - directed by John Hilcoat and writen by Nick Cave, like he was fleshing out one of his murder ballads.... Huston and Pearce are the Burns brothers, Arthur and Charlie, Winstone is a trooper, trying to catch Arthur, in particular - he offers to pardon Charlie (and their simple minded younger brother) if he will kill his brother. So Pearce heads off into the bush looking for Huston, and Winstone heads back home, to shuffle between the vengeful citizenry and his civilized wife, trying to keep the peace at least until Arthur Burns is dead. But the townsfolk have to have their pound of flesh... Meanwhile, out in the hills, Charlie finds Arthur, who we should not be shocked to learn, is a poetic psychopath - they all are, after all, in the end... Anyway, all this goes where it is supposed to go, and when heads get blown off, they get blown off in fine style.... It's not perfect - it's marred by Irony, a bit of wateriness in some of the characters (Huston's and Watson's, especially - they are good ideas, but not quite finished, and their outlines have appeared in far too many films already to be quite as effective as they should be), and some plot stumbles, but is still a tense and intelligent film, with uniformly outstanding performances and a strong sense of visual story telling. It has a well wrought sense of moral ambiguity too, slipping back and forth between the various factions, giving both Winstone and Huston their due, worrying their contradictions and redeeming features - and letting Pearce stand between them, in a way, as their judge. It works. It also grains power from its occasional nods to history, drawing on things like the Kelly gang and the abuses of the aborigines. Those old Aussie gunslingers were an interesting lot - poking around reading about them led me to the information that the world's first feature film was - an Australian Western!

Finally, on a more genteel subject - if anything involving Whitey Bulger, the IRA and a guy without a nose (the hero of the film!) can be called genteel, there's Stolen - a documentary directed by Rebecca Dreyfus about the robbery of the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in 1990. Mostly about one Harold Smith, an old art detective, suffering from skin cancer (which makes him strangely photogenic, with his false nose and scars and scabs, his head bandage and black derby). He seeks the pieces - Manets and Degas’ and 2 Rembrandts, a gorgeous double portrait and the Sea of Galilee painting - and The Concert, a Vermeer. The film flips between three threads: Smith’s quest for the art (which leads us to speculation about Whitey and the Irish mob); Gardner’s collecting, especially through her letters to Bernard Berenson; and critics (and a couple novelists) discussing the Vermeer (mostly.) It’s a pile of loose ends (the Phoenix called it) - which it true; edifying, the Phoenix added, also true. It is hard not to be moved by the story - the art is quite magnificent, and the museum itself is a unique and fascinating place that has had a personal impact on people. (One interviewer talks about being "adopted" by Sargent's portrait of Gardner as a child.) The chances of getting it back don't seem promising. It is interesting that many reviews of the film refer to the complexity of the theories about what happened to it - in fact, the film really only covers 2 scenarios: one involving Myles Connor, art thief, who claimed various ex-associates of his must have done it; the other involving the Irish mob, and possibly the IRA. Neither have led to the art - but they make a good story.

Still - the film spends as much time talking about the art itself as about the search for the art. Dreyfus focuses on her experts' personal reactions to the paintings, especially the Vermeer - and it is hard not to take the robbery personally. The museum and its history, as the creation of a single person, a work of art itself, invites that reaction. The Gardner has a personal impact that other museums don't have, no matter how great their art is. I'm not immune to the feeling. It is a fact that I have not been to the Gardner museum since the thefts, despite being a fairly regular visitor to it's neighbor in the fens in recent years. I can't say there is a direct correlation - but I can't deny some. When I was in college, I went there a lot - not just because you could get in for $2 in those days. It is quite a place. Dreyfus concentrates on the Vermeer, and its affect on people: I was more moved by the Rembrandt, back in the day. I was young - 20ish, and impressed by grandeur and virtuosity and ambition, and inclined to identify those things with dramatic subjects, scope and scale. The Vermeer, then, was just another nice picture to me. But that Rembrandt - I could get lost in it. Today, I am sure I would still be impressed by the Rembrandt, though I am also much more likely to see the Vermeer for what it was. I have not seen a lot of Vermeer - I've been to the Met, I paid attention to the Vermeers there, but that was a hurried visit, as most first trips to the Met must be. And a couple years ago, the MFA had Young Woman With a Water Pitcher on display - set up like a shrine, in the middle of the floor, with lines going out the door to look at it. And is is a painting that deserves such display - the brilliance and delicacy of the painting, the effect of that beautiful light, is almost shocking.

But it was the Rembrandt that got to me in the early 80s. Probably as much as any painting I saw in that period of time - it's the one painting, from any museum, that I went back to over and over. It's the one I remember, the one that defined the Gardner to me, the way, now, the MFA is defined by, say, Sargent's "Daughters of Edward Darley Boit" or its Hoppers ("Room in Brooklyn" and "Drugstore"). Things I just have to see before I can leave. And without really thinking about doing this, I think this is why I haven't been back to the Gardner: it is intimidating. The loss of what was probably the first major painting to really hit me, to haunt and thrill me, is something I don't want to think about. And that feeling (applied more to the Vermeer) is what the film gets across - the shock and pain of losing something like that. I hope Whitey or whoever has them is enjoying it.