December 8, 2003

That was a looooooong weekend… but not really long enough

Chats about screeners, the final week of campaigning before the HFPA, BFCA and NYFCC all finalize their nominations, Cold Mountain & Lord of The Rings: Return Of The King and a return to Mystic River were just a few of the highlights.

Most interesting, I suppose, was a sit-down with Anthony Minghella about Cold Mountain. Simply put, I have not been on the Cold Mountain bandwagon. But Miramax execs still seemed to think it was a good idea to put me at a table with the director, of whom I am an unabashed admirer. An odd conversation ensued, as we tried to discuss my issues with the film without putting Minghella in a position where he felt he was making excuses for the work that he has spent so much of his physical and emotional spirit creating.

Minghella is a deft and charming conversationalist. I like the guy. I have for years, even if I am but the tiniest speck on his radar. And as we talked, the situation became clearer… I was looking for a way into Cold Mountain that I had not found in earlier screenings. People who have been reading me for a while know that I have spent a lot of time lingering over films like Eyes Wide Shut and The Matrix Reloaded, looking for answers that I felt but could not express. The colors are the key into Eyes Wide Shut. Mythology, religion and history were the keys into The Matrix Reloaded, whether you found the usage profound or banal.

The key into Cold Mountain, it seems, is nature and emotion that lurks beneath the surface. Minghella offers Malick’s The Thin Red Line as one of the inspirations for his work on this story. (The other title, which I had not seen, I have forgotten and will try to get for you – and more importantly, for me – in the next day or two.) It was one of the elements that drove many people crazy about Malick’s film, but the presence of nature in the midst of man’s war… the human failure that came of that disconnection… was at the heart of what makes The Thin Red Line a work of true genius.

And so, I am going to return once more to Cold Mountain. And we’ll see whether the key opens the door.

The reason I am telling you this is because I think you deserve to know the process I am working through. It won’t mean much if it turns out that I still do not connect to this movie. But it will be enormously important if I do, as keeping it behind closed doors would make me worry about my own pliability. As with any movie, I want to like what I see. And God knows, I feel a connection to Minghella’s work and wonder how we could separate so distinctly. I want to remove any dark corners in which to escape judgment if my view of the film does change. I’ll report back to you later this week.

INTO THE MYSTIC – Two months after last seeing Mystic River and set upon by a relentless push for this film by a significant portion of the media, I took my “Movie Money” from Warner Bros. and went to a public screening of Mystic River at The Arclight here in Los Angeles this Saturday. Ironically, the crowd for the matinee was exactly the same size as the group that actually voted for Mystic’s Nation Board of Review award last Wednesday. 12.

The first thing that stuck me, even more than in earlier viewings, was how specific Eastwood’s directorial voice has become. You could take almost any minute out of this film and show it to me – had I not seen it – asked me to identify the director and gotten an accurate answer. There was a time when credit was always given to the influence of Don Siegel on Eastwood’s work. But he’s grown beyond that now. It’s been 25 years since Eastwood was in a Don Siegel movie, over 20 years since Siegel made his last film and over a decade since Siegel passed away. Is it a coincidence that Eastwood’s real career as a director started with Bird in 1988, years after Siegel retired and just before his death?

The 12 films of this period, from Bird to Mystic River, include no fewer than five very special films, in my opinion. Bird, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County and Mystic River are all extraordinary examples of an auteur’s voice. None ends particularly happily. That is part of the voice. All five includes an unexpected, unusual and unusually powerful love. Part of the voice. Each involves an exploration of a troubled character that explores their sense of who they are. The voice.

Mystic River is an interesting story, exceptionally well told. Do I think it is one of the greatest movies ever, as so many critics seem to? No. Ironically, the very quality of Eastwood’s work is what tends to make his best films masterpieces of a minor key. The reason that Unforgiven stands out so is that is his only work of true deconstruction, though he seemed to be moving that way in Sudden Impact, as Harry Callahan offered “Go ahead… make my day” in a way that was so arch that one could assume that he was pushing the character beyond his own sense of reality and into a dark satire of the character he had created. In any case, Unforgiven re-examines the western, both good guys and bad, in a way that was not completely new to true fans of westerns (the way that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon doesn’t seem as special to Hong Kong cinephiles), but which came together for the first time for a wide range of moviegoers. That thin line between good and evil was crossed and re-crossed and the audience felt the power of ambivalence.

Mystic River is, undeniably, the darkest tale of Eastwood’s career. There have been characters more villainous and victims more vulnerable, but never has an ending been as unrelentingly black as this. I think that some of the passion for the story is built on the ability of viewers to convince themselves that there is some ambiguity… that there are questions that haven’t been answered. But Eastwood has done a thorough job. The ending is completely clear, now that I have seen it three times. We are looking, no doubt, into the faces of the worst tendency of human evil…. the ability to delude ourselves… manifested in the worst possible ways.

I now believe that film critics have talked and talked and talked this film into the likely final five of the Academy Awards. This fine work does not belong there, in my eyes. Ironically, there are a group of filmmakers who have had the same kind of courage that Eastwood has been showing in the last 15 years, but without the shield of Eastwood’s celebrity. Vadim Perelman and his House of Sand & Fog… Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and his 21 Grams… even Tim Burton and Big Fish and Ron Howard and The Missing… they are reaching for what Eastwood has already done. But their themes, of family and honor and self-aware sacrifice trump this story of a long-broken friendship ripped open yet again.

Sean Penn and Tim Robbins’ work is truly exceptional to me. Eastwood’s score is remarkable. And Brian Helgeland did do a terrific job adapting the book. Wonderful, top shelf work. Masterful. But better than Peter Weir or Peter Jackson or Burton or Sheridan or even the precision disheveled work of Sofia Coppola in Lost In Translation or Stephen Frears’ work in Dirty Pretty Things or Neil Jordan’s The Good Thief? Not for me.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t win the Oscar.

READER OF THE DAY: HUFFY BIKE writes: “Your take on the showing of THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST to the public at Harry's BNAT party is interesting in this central thought: it seems that you think that Gibson actually has plans to screen this movie for the critics. Isn't it clear by now that he has no intention of doing so until right before its release? The piracy issue you bring up would make sense if Gibson were dealing with a "legitimate" critical source. But it's not. AICN may be powerful, but as a legitimate review outlet? Even regular readers take the reviews that show up there with a grain of salt.

Let's follow the patterns here. Gibson first screens it for evangelical leaders who love it. Then it's shown to hand-picked groups. Amongst those who've seen it are those like Michael Medved who says that Jewish leaders should leave well enough alone. Gibson doesn't follow the time-worn "sneak peek" route for the biggest media organizations. Now Gibson shows it to the true test audience: a bunch of geeks who prefer hobbits and Jedi and Uma Thurman in a tracksuit to passion plays. You can't tell me that they don't want to see the reactions of a moderate, perhaps even liberal, movie-loving audience to this gory epic in dead languages.

These are the people that Gibson wants to see this film. Gibson wants the average person to go into the film and be awakened by it spiritually. He doesn't care what the critics think because most will have pre-judged the movie already. For crying out loud, Jeff Wells has already taken him to task for the "not truly authentic" way Christ hangs on the cross, and that's one of the milder rebukes. The expressions we're seeing are not the minds of film criticism; they are minds of political positioning. Gibson realizes that most of the critics will hate, hate, HATE this movie. (Of course, it's not politically correct to use that word, but forgive my lapse.)

So why bother going that route? If Gibson can get the evangelical community in the US to come out to see this movie, he'll make his money back, and if the movie proselytizes some viewers, all the better. Gibson realizes that bad reviews will kill a movie only if the outcry is prolonged combined with bad word of mouth. So he'll build the interest level as long as possible

and save the reviews for the last minute. At least, if I were him, that's what I'd do.

E- ME: Interesting… not sure that I agree in the least with the notion that film critics will hate this movie. But interesting parsing. How do you choose to consider film in this day and age? One viewing and it all has to be there? Multiple looks? In some unique perspective?