The Paperboy
Directed by: Lee Daniels
Written by: Lee Daniels & Peter Dexter (screenplay), Peter Dexter (novel)
Starring: Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman and John Cusack

The morning screening of Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy was greeted with loud boos as well as sincere applause at Cannes, embracing the inevitable debate that will likely follow it when it washes up in the U.S.  It is a highly stylized look at 1960s Florida that transports the fashion and the social constraints without laying it on too thick.

Daniels’ directs the hell out of the movie, deconstructing the typical murder thriller plot into something that deliberately denies the audience a satisfactory conclusion.  There are scenes that wildly break the tone and stick out like a sore thumb, like a decidedly awkward, sort-of sexual early encounter between Nicole Kidman’s Charlotte and her imprisoned flame Hillary (John Cusack) during their visitation in front of his lawyers.

Early on in the movie we’re taken on sort of a court procedural as big city attorney Ward James (Matthew McConaughey) and his partner Yardley Acheman (David Oyelowo) try to prove Hillary’s innocence.  Though that is meant to be front-and-center at first, the entire movie takes place from the perspective of Ward’s brother Jack (Zac Efron), which becomes clearer as the story takes its decidedly bizarre and very welcome shifts.

The best thing that can be said about The Paperboy is that it does not make that all-too-common mistake of distancing itself from the era and whitewashing its problems (i.e. The Help).  It is not a social issue drama; instead, the social issues act as obstructions for the characters.  The James’ black maid (Macy Gray) is rambunctious, sexual woman instead of the asexual stereotype; the macho role model character ends up being gay.

Other than those refreshingly new and campily named characters, The Paperboy has fairly uneven success as a story.  The imagery is beautifully rendered and tied together, with faded super-impositions and quick cuts set to a terrific soundtrack.  That being said, the story is quite a mess, intentional or not.  The ending is much too rushed and quickly tied together and there are a few scenes (one involving piss and jellyfish) that try to be taken seriously within the story but end up failing miserably.

Paperboy’s story may be out of control, but it seems as if Daniels knew this and instead focused on atmosphere and character.  Some of the performances, especially those of Kidman, Gray and McConaughey.  Efron breaks out of the High School Musical mold with a complicated role that he sort of pulls off.  You’ll take him as seriously as you can when he’s wearing nothing but underwear for large chunks at a time.

Part of the fun of this movie is how reckless it is.  It is a huge departure from Daniels’ Precious, which would’ve been horrendous had it not been so delicate and uncompromising.  Paperboy is certainly the latter, though delicacy is nowhere to be found.  It is a blunt, beautifully shot mess that (kind of) works when John Cusack isn’t on screen.

Grade: C+

Killing Them Softly
Directed by: Andrew Dominik
Written by: Andrew Dominik (screenplay), George V. Higgins (novel)
Starring: Brad Pitt, Scott McNairy, Ray Liotta and Richard Jenkins

Killing Them Softly is a blunt critique of modern American society set against the backdrop of the 2008 elections.  It takes place inside an organized crime syndicate whose true power is never really revealed.  What is revealed is that Brad Pitt is an enforcer, and that he is very good with a shotgun and telling people he’s going to kill them.

This movie is directed by Andrew Dominik, who also collaborated with Pitt in the much better 2007 movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.  Their latest endeavor is too vague to be revelatory and enjoys showing violence too much to say something with it.  It is highly stylized and wonderfully filmed, but ultimately empty.  It hinges on Pitt’s on-screen charisma, which is as in tact and tongue-in-cheek as always.

James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and especially Ray Liotta provide terrific supporting characters in an otherwise weak men’s club of a cast.  Liotta takes one of the most brutal beatings in recent movie memory after it is suspected that he set up the robbery of one of his own illegal poker games.  In fact, it was two beginning lowlifes (Scott McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn) looking for a quick pay day, as it often is in these kinds of movies.

Injecting snippets from coverage of the 2008 elections does little to heighten the story above its own self-made constraints.  Once the initial robbery occurs and the major characters are set up, it turns into Brad Pitt killing the various people involved with reckless abandon.  The only time the political angle pays off is in the terrific last conversation between Pitt and Richard Jenkins, where they discuss his payment for all the killing. Sure this scene ties together plot strands rather recklessly, but the whole thing seems thrown together rather recklessly.

Grade: C-

In Another Country

With all the serious, morbid narratives taking root of the festival imagination in places like Cannes, it’s refreshing to see an exceptional movie with a light touch and a very warm sense of humor.  In Another Country, from Korean director Hong Sang-soo, is exactly that.  It is the story of stories, an examination of how a narrative takes form and is altered and rearranged until it is the most effective.

A barely-seen Korean woman dictates these stories into a notepad.  All of them star roughly the same cast of characters, though their roles and importance often change.  Isabelle Huppert plays the main woman in all of them, always a wayward traveler in Korea looking around for a lighthouse and meaning.  There is also the woman she is staying with, an attractive young lifeguard and various other acquaintances along the way.

Though the movie stars a French actress and is directed by a Korean man, most of it is in English.  Despite this market advantage, it’s unlikely it will find a big audience in the United States because of its unusual narrative structure.  It’s not hard to follow and it is often very funny, but American audiences rarely respond well to weird little movies that wear their heart on their sleeve.

Sang-soo’s unadorned visual style lets the pretty little Korean village’s natural beauty blend in effortlessly with the stories.  The image of Huppert’s slightly different women walking along the same shore and bumping into the same people with different motivations really speaks to the way that movie characters are only as good as their narrative.

Whether she’s a venerable French film director, a wealthy housewife or a recently divorced wealthy housewife on holiday, Huppert brings crucial life to the fairly basic characters, all of them named Anne.  Sang-soo merges the wonderfully funny script with welcome visual humor. Much of the humor is drawn from minor cultural and lingual misunderstandings.  It is not the bitter xenophobia that manyRambo-esque action pictures but more curiosity-driven.

Anne is like a milder version of Poppy from Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, another whimsical little movie with something to say.  She is inquisitive, persistent and unabashedly free-spirited; she can also be quite annoying.  The best scene in the movie is a conversation in the third story between Anne and an old monk she requested to speak with.   She is the divorcee, questioning the man about her life and her recent depression.  The whimsy with which they come to the conclusion that life is a series of largely insignificant moments and let-downs is the closest it comes to drama.

Sometimes the movie lingers on its own cheeriness a little too long.  It’s a very accessible film despite its structural experimentation, but a few too many of the conversations travel an overly-long road to nowhere.  Though Anne is a character destined to forever wander, the stories sometimes exist a little too long to maintain the movie’s novelty.  The movie’s true pleasure is watching the narrative’s overt and subtle shifts.  It makes the movie imminently re-watchable, which is a huge asset in a foreign marketplace crowded with downers.

Grade: B

The relationship works both ways. Their stories and styles also influence the way we perceive places we haven’t yet been, or places we visit. Imagine going to the Empire State Building without thinking of scenes from King Kong or Spiderman. The Twilight series may be unbearable, but look what its done to romanticize our image of the Pacific Northwest and boost tourism in the region. Our idea of the Vegas strip wouldn’t be the same without great casino films like these.

This has been my personal introduction to our newest series: On location. In this series we will pick an iconic place and look at the movies that shaped our idea of that place as well as how the movie portraits the setting. First up: sin city.

Casino- The eighth and final collaboration by Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro is a true testament of their chronicle of work together. Their version of Las Vegas smolders the city beautifully into their style. More so than the other films on this list, art direction and aesthetics of the setting were carefully considered. The film gives the city a classic, glam-yet-gritty image we often see in similar crime dramas by Scorsese. Casino may be less iconic than their other work, but its impression of the city’s wealth war glory days is forever strong because of its efforts.

Ocean’s Eleven- While the 2001 remake by Steven Soderbergh is the one we will come to remember, the 1960 original casts an equal impression on Las Vegas as its invaded by rat pack capers. However, with a full franchise of films to tout, Soderbergh’s collaboration with… uh, most of Hollywood sits heavy in our heads. Visually and aesthetically it’s nothing remarkable, but throughout the series enough images of classic sites are filled with A-list starts, Armani suits and sharp quips, that this Vegas becomes a GQ photo-shoot weekend getaway for Californians.

Fear and Loathing of Las Vegas- While the film went under the radar when it was released, introduction to DVD and the Criterion Collection along with Depp’s rise to fame gave it recent cult status. Terry Gilliam’s take on the Hunter S. Thompson novel of the same name is far from ordinary depictions. To get the period of 70’s Vegas to look right, Gilliam and his art director used a series of tricks, including using rear-projection footage from the old TV series Vega$. Drugs, rock and the bizarre from this film did little to give an impression of Vegas, however, the film certainly alters perceptions of the city and takes you on a trip while watching.

The Hangover- The most recent Vegas film on the list is highly memorable for its male-driven, slapstick humor catering to a Facebook, YouTube generation of “what the hell happened last night?” millennials.  Here we see Vegas far less posh, far more wild and collegetown-ish. Because of the sheer size of this film’s box office success, its understandable the film has aided tourism and brought in a crop of eager frat guys looking for their own hangover narratives. Stereotypes of the city and what the strip offers (think of the city’s popular advertising slogan, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas”) have been reinforced heavily due to this film’s shenanigans.

Diamonds are Forever- The only way to ensure Vegas is more glam and ritz than it already is in film is to set a Bond film there. Add Sean Connery; add class. The 1971 Bond film is one of the more memorable (even if campy and humorous), thanks in part to Mr. Connery and its neon nights setting. Film crews had the advantage of real Vegas hotels and streets thanks to the collaboration of Howard Hughes, who was a friend of one of the film’s main producers. Usually filming in Vegas’ casinos can pose unachievable logistical issues, so the film benefited from these production values The result:Diamonds depicted a classic image of the city, like a sharp yet smoldering Lana Del Ray track that people would continue imitate for years.

Amour
Directed by: Michael Haneke
Written by: Michael Haneke (screenplay)
Starring: Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert and William Shimmell

Michael Haneke’s latest film is a good poster child for why mainstream movie audiences fear and avoid many foreign films; it is quiet, slow and relentlessly depressing.  After winning the Palme d’Or in 2009 for The White Ribbon, Haneke officially established himself as a “Cannes auteur,” a director whose latest work would forever and always have a place in the festival’s cannon.

Amour is wondrously, deliberately hopeless.  Its depiction of an elderly woman’s slow, painful crawl toward death after suffering a series of strokes is not peppered with melodrama or any sort of dramatic flourish.  Haneke seems to think this would make the situation too comfortable, too much like a movie.  The goal of this film is to show the situation in as realistic light as possible, but from a removed distance.

To pull off the kind of extended takes the movie calls for, Haneke of course needs actors up to the task.  He finds them in Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, who give the the kind of ego-stripped performances the script requires.  Much of the movie is motionless; existing simply as a slow crawl toward death.

The surprise of this casualty is also non-existent because it is shown to us in the beginning.  Haneke has made a career out of ruining the and subverting cinema’s “big reveal” from Cache’s decidedly vague conclusion to Funny Games’ horrific rewind.  His pay-off free cinema is a commentary on the way audience’s are often coddled and pandered to, which of course gives him a very niche market in the U.S.

Nothing will change with Haneke’s reputation after this latest film.  It is not peppered with intrigue to distract from its narrative innovation, and instead relies purely on its form to inject interest.  There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this approach, but it makes Amour impossible to enjoy.  It is, however, endlessly fascinating to think about afterward.

After the movie’s startling, spoiler prologue, we are shown a wide angle shot of a crowded  theater, much like the one many will sit in to experience the film.  This creates a mirror effect that forces us to scan the crowd for some sort of narrative action going on.  However, there is nothing really going on but typical pedestrian conversations.

Of course the focus narrows eventually, honing in on the elderly Parisian couple so much so that they are often the only characters on screen for much of the movie.  Anne (Riva) suffers a stroke, which cripples the right side of her body and leaves her in the care of her husband Georges (Trintignant).  They are occasionally visited by their successful daughter Eva (the wonderful Isabelle Huppert), who grows more and more concerned as her mother’s condition worsens.

Haneke doesn’t relent with just the illness, though.  He dives into the characters’ darker psychological impulses with no sympathy and disturbing casualness.  Other than a few hallucinatory dream sequences, he plays it fairly straightforward.  The distance he places the audience from the emotion of the story will turn off many looking for a payoff, and that’s sort of the point.  This is a story of human suffering, and there are no rewards.

Grade: B-

Beasts of the Southern Wild
Directed by: Benh Zeitin
Written by: Benh Zeitlin & Lucy Alibar
Starring: Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Levy Easterly and Lowell Landes

Let’s get this out of the way early: Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of the best films in recent years, and it is one of the greatest encapsulations of childhood consciousness that I’ve ever seen on a screen.  It captures a specific American subculture in the Louisiana bayou so effortlessly that its moments of fantasy should feel out of place, but because it is filtered through the eyes of such a poignant and ferocious young girl, everything flows together wonderfully.

That child is Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis), the daughter of a sick, widowed father  (Dwight Henry) who conjures up visions of gigantic beasts from folk lore to explain the destruction of her home and family.  She howls for her mother and glares at her dad when he yells at her, a wild thing in the vein of Max.

Benh Zeitlin is the director of this amazing film, and with one feature has established himself as one of the finest new talents directing today.  From the joyous opening festival to an ending that is equal parts hopeful and melancholic, his weaving, unstoppable camera captures Hushpuppy’s world with amazing narrative economy.

Filtering gigantic philosophical concepts through the eyes of a child is a technique that Terrence Malick employed in last year’s Tree of Life.  Zeitlin, however, does not take the point of view of a creator.  He is right along Hushpuppy and her father, and the beasts of the title are manifestations of how she perceives the natural disasters rampaging through her bayou home.  It recalls Where the Wild Things Are more so than Tree of Life, but its narrative is not nearly as abstract as either of those movies.  Hushpuppy learns of the melting ice caps in school as well as the legend of the large beasts, and she combines them into one story in her head.

When she sees the flooding begin, Zeitlin cuts to footage of glaciers fragmenting, and then shows a beast frozen inside one, though not for long. Associating the beasts with global warming allows for Zeitlin and co-writer Lucy Alibar to slip commentary into their script without becoming overly didactic.

Global warming is not the main issue tackled in the movie, but rather the attempt to tame a group and forcefully induct them into the American way.  That it is set in Louisiana and was made post-Katrina makes it even more poignant.  Hushpuppy’s father, known only as Wink, is as mistrusting of outside forces as they are of him.  When they come through and tell him to evacuate, he takes his daughter to hide and then throws broken objects from their dilapidated shed at them.

Of course, evacuation is not an option, and they are taken to civilization for shelter.  The image of Hushpuppy’s frizzy hair tamed and primped is made hauntingly effective by adding a turquoise dress while Zeitlin frames her sullen face alone in a crowd of other young girls as an official yells at her for being difficult.  Quvenzhané Wallis gives one of the greatest childhood performances in this role, though if trends continue she’ll either be totally overlooked (Pan’s Labyrinth) or given a “supporting” nod (True Grit).

Zeitlin’s movie was not made to be lauded by such an industry function as the Oscars, though.  Beasts of the Southern Wild is surely destined to be a film festival darling, especially since its conquest at Sundance and the loud roars it was greeted with at the screening I attended at Cannes.  It is a movie to discover and then spread word-of-mouth like wildfire; though if you don’t see it, it’s no one’s loss but your own.

Grade: A

Rust & Bone
Directed by: Jacques Audiard
Written by: Jacques Audiard & Thomas Bidegain  (screenplay), Craig Davidson (story)
Starring: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Céline Sallette and Bouli Lanners

The French drama Rust & Bone, from equally French director Jacques Audiard, assembles some of the most talented people in all filmmaking departments together to tell an emotionally and physically violent story about love and survival.  It could’ve so easily been Oscar bait if the writing and the performances weren’t so emotionally uncompromising.

Audiard made a huge splash in many film circles  in 2009 and 2010 with A Prophet, a  violent and uncompromising vision set at the genre crossroads of organized crime and prison films.  Rust & Bone, while still concerned with the loss of humanity and the repression of violent impulses, tells a decidedly weirder story about a homeless father and son and a whale trainer.

Marion Cotillard gives her finest performance since La vie en rose as Stéphanie, who after an accident at her whale park is left without legs.  Seeing one of the world’s most prominent and gifted actresses as an amputee is a quiet marvel of modern special effects, and allows Cotillard to do wonders with the role.  From the horrific realization of her condition to her ultimate acceptance of it, her performance is gargantuan and deeply affecting.

Matching her blow for acting blow is Matthias Schoenaerts, who gives a breakout turn as Alain that is worthy of any acting trophy you can think of.  The characters in Audiard and Thomas Bidegain’s screenplay are all warriors in one way or another, though Alain literally fights in an illegal circuit.  The gruesome sequences are heightened by the film’s visual style, which lies somewhere between splendor and grit.  There are just as many shots of sun-drenched beauty on the beach as there are of Alain spitting blood in a makeshift back alley fighting ring.

These two wonderful characters do meet and form a distinct bond.  They are not a couple, though they do have sex; they are lover and fighters.  Moments of very welcome humor pepper their relationship, saving the movie from becoming an overbearing exercise in miserabilism.  They each function as the other’s savior in a way, though they never become each other’s sole reason for being.

Alain has a son, and his relationship with him is the source of many of his flaws. It’s as if he doesn’t know how to relate to him, until near-tragedy strikes and forces them together.  One of the movie’s faults is in Alain’s interactions with his sister, which are milked for melodrama and over step their importance in the story.  Thankfully the rest of the movie  avoids this.

Rust  & Bone is about the avenues people will take to secure a physical outlet for their pain.  Left crippled by her accident, Stéphanie is forced to find new ways of doing this, while Alain uses fights as a way to escape while at the same time pushing himself to a breaking point.

The two most haunting shots in the movie show each of these characters separated from what they fear and love the most by a clear window of either glass or ice.  Stéphanie reaches her hand out lovingly and rests it on her side of the window; Alain pounds violently to break through it.  Their characters are so beautifully and succinctly captured in these moments that it burns in the memory long after the credits roll.

Many of Rust & Bones’ sequences stick, and the ones that don’t are never bad.  It also helps that the score is excellent  and outside music is used exceptionally well (even Katy Perry’s “Firework”).  Audiard is a good writer and an even better director, and he meshes all the vastly different pieces together to make a very good movie out of what could’ve been a colossal mess.

Grade: B

Moonrise Kingdom
Directed by: Wes Anderson
Written by: Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola (screenplay)
Starring: Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bill Murray and Edward Norton

Like every Wes Anderson film, Moonrise Kingdom is an aesthetically beautiful comedy fueled by angst and injected with off-beat charm.  Stylistically it is a definite building block off of his stop-motion rendition of Fantastic Mr. Fox,  and in many ways seems more like an animated film than that one.

Part of the appeal of Mr. Fox, as Owen Gleiberman pointed out in his review, was that Anderson had always seemed to be a director of animation and using the puppets and stop-motion animation had allowed him to finally make a great movie.  While The Royal Tenenbaums is still a beautifully rendered portrait of a family, I otherwise agree with Gleiberman.

Moonrise Kingdom is not a horrible movie; in fact the beauty of many of the images and and the masterful way that Anderson arranges them makes its overall averageness very palatable.  However, many will likely be persuaded that it is a great one because of Anderson’s polished charm.  He instills great care into the story of Sam (Jared Gilman) and Suzy (Kara Hayword), a pair of tween lovebirds whose innocent courtship sends an entire town in 60s New England after them.

Despite the two newcomers placed front-and-center, Anderson has assembled an ensemble of talent worthy of his other films, including long-time collaborator Bill Murray as well as Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis, Edward Norton, Harvey Keitel, Jason Schwartzman and Tilda Swinton.  Each has a character suited to their various acting talents.  McDormand and Murray mesh together very well as the concerned parents of Suzy, who along with the sheriff (Willis) and Sam’s scout leader (Norton) pursue the two children after they flee into the wilderness to get married and survive on their own.

For the most part, the movie progresses interestingly enough after a few awkward pacing patches in the beginning.  Anderson’s gift for economical storytelling is almost unparallelled, and he knows it.  Moonrise Kingdom begins and ends with smooth, rapid pans scanning Suzy’s family in their house as Sam narrates about assembling and disassembling the components of an orchestra.  Anderson views cinema in this way more so than almost any other director, making each element as distinct as any instrument.  The visuals are bright, crisp and very loud; the dialogue soft and often deadpan.

Emphasizing this clash has largely defined him as a director, and Moonrise Kingdom is his most distinct film in a catalog of very distinct films.   Those who hate him will find plenty to loathe in the countless awkward exchanges and angsty youthful problems.  Those who love him will find plenty to love in those same things, but also much that is different from his other films.

Though Sam is indeed the troubled son that has inhabited Anderson’s other films, there is no domineering father figure, no Royal Tenenbaum, that causes this.  Instead, it is the lack of a father figure, or parents of any kind, that troubles Sam the most.  He finds solace in the all-consuming affection of Suzy.  The innocent, awkward emotions of young, stupid love are a perfect fit for Anderson, though the seeming emotional coldness of their relationship is somewhat out of sync with what they say to each other.

This is the result of the awkward child actors, which seems a deliberate casting choice that just didn’t pay off.  Luckily, the more seasoned ensemble and Anderson’s polished filmmaking pick up their acting slack.  The last 20 minutes, where a storm brings organized chaos to Anderson’s neatly arranged world, are nearly perfect.

Anderson could perhaps do with a little imperfection, though; a little loosening up and improvisation in his orchestra.  When he builds up to a certain rhythm, as he does at the end here, it can be thrilling and extremely engaging.  At other times his knack for mumbling and his tendency to pander to his audience’s expectations can be annoying and pretentious.  He’s certainly found his filmmaking voice, but seems to keep singing largely the same tune.

Grade: C

Dark Shadows
Directed by: Tim Burton
Written by: Seth Grahame-Smith (screenplay), John August & Seth Grahame-Smith (story), Dan Curtis (TV series)
Starring: Johnny Depp, Eva Green, Michelle Pfeiffer and Helena Bonham Carter

Dark Shadows is a film inhabited by the Gothic art direction that has become Tim Burton’s staple in addition to the comic macabre his pale people act out.  Lately Johnny Depp has been the pale muse front and center in Burton’s productions, becoming just as much a staple of his work as those faded worlds. This latest collaboration is nothing really new for either of them; a vampire invading the gloriously tie-dyed era of the 1970s is a perfect example of a Gothic force imposing itself on a world of color.

The crux of the story is fairly simple.  Barnabas Collins (Depp) is turned into a vampire and imprisoned by the witch Angelique (Eva Green) after she kills the other woman he loved.  His suffering is extended for all eternity, so when he emerges from that chained-up coffin nearly 200 years later, he is a very bloodthirsty fish-out-of-water.  He meets up with the present-day Collins family, who happen to live in the same menacing, faded mansion as he did.

Upon arriving he meets the drunken butler (Jackie Earle Haley) and the grouchy matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer).  He explains his situation to her, she agrees to hide it, and they tell the rest of the family that he is a distant cousin.  Dark Shadows is based on a television show, though Burton leaves his distinct visual mark on the material.  He has always been more gifted at creating worlds than telling stories in them, and he does his best with the sloppy, seemingly aimless screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith.  Accenting the comedy was the right way to go here, and Dark Shadows is often very funny.  Depp and Green both give inspired, over-the-top performances as they continue their centuries-long magic duel in the era of Vietnam and hippies.

There is a fantasy much darker than the supernatural one operating beneath the surface of this latest Burton/Depp concoction, though.  The most troubling thing about Dark Shadows is not its sloppy storytelling but its disguised contempt for its plentiful female characters.  Angelique’s thirst for revenge is borne out of that male fantasy that a woman becomes so obsessed with him that she turns delusional and incoherent without his presence.  Then, of course, she must be scolded into submission or death.

This principle is also true for Helena Bonham Carter’s character, the psychiatrist Dr. Julia Hoffman.  She is a boozing, pill-popping psychiatrist who throws herself at Barnabus simply because he pays her one simple compliment.  As in Sweeney Todd, Bonham Carter’s character comes up short in her director husband’s increasingly cruel roles for her.

It’s hard to take such a lightheartedly demented film like Dark Shadows so seriously, but its troubling misogyny travels with Barnabus from the dark ages as well.  There are quips early on by Elizabeth and the new maid Victoria (Bella Heathcote) about women being vastly superior to men, but it’s not long until Barnabus arrives and they all more or less succumb to his various charms.

For a PG-13 film, the amount of sex and death that is hinted at or partially shown is somewhat startling.  In such a finely veneered world it can almost seem barbaric, and yet when Angelique and Barnabus actually do have “sex” they remain fully clothed as they toss each other around the room.  Burton remains in frantic close-up trying to avoid what must be the studio’s worst fear: actually showing something.  He breaks his tradition of well-composed shots because this movie is afraid of the sex it so blatantly wants us to know is going on.  In this respect it resembles the Twilight films more than anything, even if its vampire is more of the Nosferatu variety.

Grade: C-

A Separation
Directed by: Asghar Farhadi
Written by: Asghar Farhadi (screenplay)
Starring: Peyman Moadi, Leila Hatami, Sareh Bayat and Shahab Hosseini

Muslim culture, to put it mildly, is not something familiar to most Americans, and post-9/11 fears have done little to educate.  Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation is a tense, masterful film set in modern day Iran, and totally immersed in the often-feared culture of that “Other.”  Farhadi’s grasp of middle and lower class Iranian life is key to transporting us to this world. The focus is not on the explanation of the culture, though; above all else, A Separation is a study of family and religious ties, mostly their intersections and compromises with each other.

It begins with Nader (Peyman Moadi) and Simin (Leila Hatami) facing the camera speaking to an unseen judge.  She is asking for a divorce and custody of their daughter so she can move out of Iran; he only agrees to the first.  Putting us in the perspective of the judge encourages us to take sides, as does the rest of the movie.  Farhadi, on the other hand, deliberately avoids this.

Nader refuses to leave the country because of his Alzheimer’s-ridden father.  By placing their daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi) in the middle of this marital struggle, Farhadi is commenting on what exactly holds this family together, which is ultimately nothing.  The main conflict in the story is not in that marital separation but in various religious ones.  When Simin leaves, Nader hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat) to take care of his father.

One day, Nader comes home to find his father lying on the floor unconscious, his arm tied to the bed post and the maid and her daughter gone.  When she returns from her “private errands” he bickers with her and then pushes her out his door.  She was pregnant, and has a miscarriage. Her hot-headed husband sues Nader (she is not able to in Iran).

There is more, much more, to the film’s plot than that, but giving it away would lessen the impact.  Farhadi structures this story with a keen sense of suspense, leaving out key details until they would be most impactful and revelatory.  What’s fascinating about the movie’s story from an American perspective is how seamlessly it is integrated in Iranian culture.  The courtroom scenes are particularly thrilling.  Instead of a full courtroom spectacle, they are intimate office spaces, with a shockingly authoritarian judge able to decide the fate of the characters as he sees fit.

Each character is so masterfully written and acted that it’s easy to get lost in the film’s world and not notice Farhadi’s invisible filmmaking technique.  Family members often view each other through a slightly smudged glass when in their home, and the camera lingers on the young daughter just as much as her parents. She is, after all, the easiest way into the narrative.  As accusations and lies fly faster and more intensely, the young Termeh is ultimately tasked with making the major decisions in the film along with the audience.  Her father unfairly forces decisions on her that are well above her age and against her typical role in this society.

Much of the decisions that the characters grapple with become even weightier because of how they are impacted by Islamic doctrine.  Razieh is the most devout character, and Sareh Bayat’s devastating performance sticks out in an outstanding cast.  From how she restrains herself in the courtroom because of her gender to the subtle way she adjusts her Chador when she’s nervous, she is a perfect example of how well drawn-out every gesture and line of dialogue is in this film.

American movies are often afraid to end on a note of ambiguity, but A Separation certainly isn’t.  It leaves one final decision open for interpretation, and if Farhadi had made it for the audience he would’ve had a lesser film if still a truly great one.  This movie’s success at the Academy Awards signals its quality, but not as much as it signals American audience’s openness to a movie about a controversial “Other.”  It also harkens the emergence of a major filmmaking voice, and though much of its culture is foreign, its humanity certainly isn’t.

Grade: A