Friday, 13 October 2000

WEEKEND PREVIEW

It's a big estrogen weekend at the movies.

The Contender tells the story of the first woman to be just a confirmation hearing away from the vice presidency. Dr. T & the Women features Richard Gere as the maypole around which an entire city of women dance. (You know, it just occurred to me that Dr. T is, in a way, a reverse reflection of Woman on Top…hmmm.) Lost Souls is all about Winona Ryder's eyes. And The Ladies Man, based on a three-minute "SNL" sketch that may have gotten old at 2 minutes, 30 seconds, is about a professional skirt chaser.

Even the big indie film opening in some markets this weekend, Billy Elliot, has its share of macho estrogen. (Help me…have I ever reviewed Billy Elliot here or did he get lost in the Telluride-n-Toronto blizzard?)

I've decided to take Box Office Extra on this weekend and you should be able to find it here by 1 p.m. EST. But the battle should clearly be between The Contender and Lost Souls for second place behind Meet the Parents. The difference is that The Contender should be a bit leggy, and DreamWorks will position it for Oscar as best they can, while Lost Souls is a one-weekend and good-bye proposition.

THE GOOD: Well, I finally saw Requiem for a Dream. It's open in New York and will be opening here in Los Angeles shortly. I had missed the film in screenings, two festivals, and more screenings. Finally, a chance to see the revered. Would it be glory or would it be Dancer in the Dark? Well, it was a little of both.

Darren Aronofsky may be the first video/commercial director to go directly to features without getting smeared with the taint of being presumed to be an insubstantial stylist. But there is no immediate need, in my opinion, to hold Aronofsky far above video directors like Mark Romanek or Tarsem, except that Aronofsky has chosen to bring his talents to more substantive subjects.

Requiem for a Dream is about drug addiction. I haven't read the Hubert Selby Jr. book, though I bought it and planned to read it before the seeing the movie. But I assume that it was more complex than the movie. The story here is so simple that the ride one takes, care of Aronofsky's visual fireworks, is surprisingly rich. Two buddies (Jared Leto and Marlon Wayans) are junkies. One of them has a perfectly beautiful girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly), also a junkie, and a mother (Ellen Burstyn), who is sad, lonely, and 20 pounds overweight. Drugs take the young—one more beautiful than the other—exactly where a movie written by former Drug Czar Bill Bennett would take them. Ellen Burstyn, in a performance that is, I believe, a mortal lock for an Oscar nomination, goes somewhere unexpected…into an addiction of her own.

But Requiem for a Dream is not about storytelling. If it were, it would be an absolute loser. In the story of the young junkies, it is unbelievably linear and obvious. In the story of Mom, it is unbelievably unbelievable, using drug addiction as an overwrought metaphor that leads to an exploration of the loneliness that often comes with old age. Requiem for a Dream is about the ride. It's about the four colors of pills that Mom starts taking, not the illogic of her taking the uppers and the downers interchangeably, without regard to how either effects her. It's about Jennifer Connelly going The Full Julianne Moore in front of a mirror before reducing her magnificent body to a tool to feed her hunger. It's about the nightmare, not the waking hours.

I couldn't help to think about Aronofsky and the Batman Beyond project for Warner Bros. as I watched Requiem. Aronofsky's visual inspirations could clearly invigorate the character. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine Warner Bros. allowing a signature character to get as dark as Aronofsky and Frank Miller are likely to want to take him. And Aronofsky's storytelling skills are all about the roadmap of the mind, not really about story. So, in a way, it will be a necessity for Warner Bros. to loosen the reins a lot for this marriage to work at all.

The other thing I thought as I was watching the film was that I would really love to have a frame on the wall that could show 20-second clips from this film as living paintings. Aronofsky is on of the most skilled photographers on the movie scene today. The image of Connelly in a fetal position in her bathtub and finally emerging for a breath is like a series of beautiful paintings. Some of the moments with Ellen Burstyn are like great German expressionist paintings at 24 frames per second. Even the most simple imagery in the film seems like stuff that other filmmakers dream of achieving.

Yet…what is this movie about? Really. Get down to the core and what have you got? Beautiful junkies who go two acts of being beautiful until they dissolve into sludge in the third act…a woman who is desperately alone and gets caught up with diet pills until they lead, absurdly, to shock treatments…a world where the South is not only as racist as ever but even more racist than it's been in years…a medical establishment that is every bit as dangerous as addiction…characters so out of context that there is no exploration of why they fell into addiction except that it is somehow cool. These are, my friends, stereotypes. If a director who was less visually skilled indulged in them, he would be crucified by the media (see: 28 Days). If a director who indulged in them but had more money to indulge himself came along, he would be crucified y the media (see: The Hunger, The Cell).

It would be unfair to say that Darren Aronofsky doesn't make you feel something while watching this movie. It would be unfair to say that the audience doesn't have an experience with these characters that is, in its way, magical and overwhelming. It would be unfair to say that there is a single bad performance in the movie or that Aronofsky isn't responsible for using his camera to convey emotion as much as the actors do. But is this a great movie? No. In another generation of criticism, this would be called a great guilty pleasure. There is no great insight into addiction here. There is NOTHING new here, as regards the story. Throw the movies Frances and Pennies from Heaven into a blender with some uppers and some heroin and you've got Requiem for a Dream.

But as a second film…Aronofsky is still a trickster. He's still more interested in getting our attention than he is in giving us any insight. But in time, who knows?

THE BAD: It would be hard to put Lost Souls in the "Ugly" section, since the movie is so damned pretty. Janusz Kaminski makes beautiful pictures. But the skills that Darren Aronofsky uses to make art, flawed though it may be, Kaminski uses to excess. Sound and fury signifying nothing has never been a more appropriate tag.
The sad part is that this was the role that Winona Ryder has needed for a long time. She finally got a chance to spin out of her recent history of playing victims to play a former victim who now takes her life—and the lives of others—into her own hands. I assume that she was looking for that edge when she took the roll in Alien 4 and it was here. I haven't liked Ryder this much in a long time.

Too bad my enthusiasm was wasted by a script that is even more redundant than the camera work. Whoever wrote this has a remarkable facility for nonstop expositional redundancy in the dialogue. I didn't write down an example, but if I had, it might go something like this:
Int. Church
Joe and Josephine look at a dead body that is draped, bloody, over the alter, with a giant pentagram shoved through the corpse's chest.
Joe: So much for that lead.
(a beat)
Josephine: He's dead! I can't believe he's dead! And the people in league with the devil were the ones who did it!
(a beat)
Joe: He was the only one who had the information.
(A beat)
Josephine: Yes, he could have told us who had let him into the back room with plans for murdering that baby who was there as a symbol of Christianity in the modern age. And there he is…dead…with a symbol that is often used to represent the devil's minions…and bad things are going to happen because of that.

Okay, so it's a bit exaggerated. But, it was pretty close. The visual and a brief line of dialogue from a lead character would tell the audience everything they needed to know and then, a moment later, a secondary character would clarify the situation unnecessarily. Combined with Kaminski's visual excesses, it was like watching the movie in 3-D…it looked cool, but it was always a little out of focus and eventually it gave me a really bad headache.

The other thing that was remarkable about Lost Souls was that it was a reflection (read: theft) of almost every other "devil's coming" movie ever made. I started making up alternate titles as the movie progressed. "Rosemary's Boyfriend," "The Sexy-xorcist," "Reservoir Priests" (named for a series of sequences of priests walking in slow motion; alternate title, "Die Noon"), "Stigmata 2, The Devil 0," "End of Days 2: Even More Dazed," "Glad We Didn't Also Make the Ninth Gate" and "Damn 5th Avenue Yankees."

Your additions are welcomed.

Page 2 > "Requiem for a Dream & When ROTDs Attack!"