My Answer to the Latest Criticwire Survey: Best Non-2013 Culture You Discovered This Year

Q: What's the best piece of non-2013 culture you discovered in 2013?

As a film buff, I always feel like I’m playing catch-up – there is so many great or at least worthwhile films in history that it is impossible to have seen everything, so I’m always trying to see as much from the past as I can. This past year was no exception.

Some of the films I “discovered” for the first time this year include Barbara Loden’s wonderful Wanda (1970), Nicolas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle (1933), and Vincente Minelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town (1962) – all of which I loved.

This year, I really did try and catch up on some of the greatest short films ever made – and made some great “discoveries” there as well - Yuriy Norshteyn’s wonderful Tale of Tales (1979) is among the greatest animated works of all time, I caught up with, for the first time, some of Stan Brakhage’s work, and it mystified and fascinated to the same degree. Peter Tscherkassky’s wonderfully weird Outer Space (1999) is a masterful cinematic destruction of a horror film. The best though was probably two works by Bruce Conner – A Movie (1958) and  Report (1967) – the first a look at how editing and music change the perception of what we watch, and the later being a fascinating look at the Kennedy Assassination, from tragedy to just something else to sell. I wish I could track down more of his work.

Movie Review: Her

Her
Directed by: Spike Jonze.
Written by: Spike Jonze.
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix (Theodore), Scarlett Johansson (Samantha), Amy Adams (Amy), Rooney Mara (Catherine), Chris Pratt (Paul), Matt Letscher (Charles), Olivia Wilde (Blind Date), Portia Doubleday (Surrogate Date Isabella), Brian Cox (Alan Watts), Kristen Wiig (SexyKitten), Spike Jonze (Alien Child).

My least favorite part of my weekdays is those minutes after I get off my commuter train and have to make my way through Toronto Union Station to the subway. Thousands of people are trying to do the same thing I am doing, so it’s always been hectic, crowded and slow moving. But in the nine years I have been commuting, it has gotten much worse for one reason – now when I walk through the crowds, I have to dodge people who are oblivious to everyone around them – who are moving slowly and have their head down staring at their phone – often with headphones on so they can simultaneously listen to music, which makes things even worse because now they not only do not see the people around them, they don’t hear them either. This started slowly, but has become commonplace – more and more people seem completely incapable of putting down their phone for a few minutes – to disconnect. You can tell these people on the subway as well – they’re fidgety – the subway is probably the one place they do where they don’t have reception – and it’s killing them.

Spike Jonze’s brilliant new film Her takes place in the not too distant future, but is still very much a movie of this time and place. The main character is Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) – a sensitive sad sack, still reeling from his divorce (which is final in all but the strictest legal sense, since he hasn’t signed the papers yet). He used to work for LA Weekly – but like all traditional media, that died – so now he works for a website called “Beautiful Handwritten Letters” – which does precisely what it sounds like – which is write people’s most intimate letters for them. Theodore is desperately lonely – and when a new Operating System – OS1 – is released promising real artificial intelligence that grows and learns and adapts over time – he buys it. This is how Samantha (the wonderful voice of Scarlett Johansson) enters his life. She’s his operating system first, then his friend and finally his girlfriend.

It would have been easy to make a comedy out of this movie – and mock poor Theodore. Hell, The Big Bang Theory did an episode a few years ago where lonely Raj falls in love with Siri. But while Jonze does have some fun with some of the more ridiculous elements of his subject, for the most part the film plays it with absolute sincerity. Theodore really does develop a deep connection and love with Samantha. He develops that comfort level with Samantha where he can tell her anything. While Samantha may not be “real” – she seems like she is. She becomes a thinking, feeling presence in the movie, who can react to everything Theodore says and does – and learn from it, not in the way Siri does, but in a more human way. What’s amazing about the movie is how Samantha really does become a real character that we get to know, and yes, love. She keeps evolving however – and sooner or later, she may evolve past Theodore. Human may have created Samantha, but as time passes she and the other Operating System find they don’t humans as much as they need them. They don’t rise up like in the Terminator movies – but they do band together.

A lot of credit for the success of the movie has to go to the cast. A year after delivering the best performance of his career in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Phoenix delivers an equally good, and completely opposite, performance here. Freddie Quell was an angry, violent man searching for meaning – Theodore is a sad, lonely guy searching for a connection – and when he cannot find it in another person, Samantha is just as good. In many ways, his performance is – for long stretches anyway – just as solitary as Sandra Bullock’s in Gravity or Robert Redford’s in All is Lost. Phoenix’s performance may in fact be all the more impressive, since he’s by himself, but still has to react as if he isn’t. For her part, this very well may be the best work of Johansson’s career – even if we never see her. Her magnificent voice is suggests both the computer part of her, as well as a portion of humanity and depth of feeling and thinking. Her voice suggests a physical presence that is not there – but feels like it. If we do not buy the central relationship between these two, the movie falls apart. But Phoenix and Johansson are brilliant.

The rest of the cast works as well – from Amy Adams as the ever supportive best friend, who refreshingly is given a life and problems of her own. Rooney Mara has a very difficult job as Theodore’s wife – who exists mainly in wordless flashbacks of memory, where she has to suggest an entire history of love and exasperation between the two of them. Her one big scene in the present is the most devastating in the movie – a scene that strips Theodore bare, and exposes him in a way he doesn’t want to be. In two marvelous one scene performances Olivia Wilde and Portia Doubleday play two women who may want Theodore – but in very different ways, for very different reasons.

The triumph of the Her though is Jonze’s. After his first two films – Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002) there was a critical debate over who the real “auteur” of the films were – Jonze or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman – with Kaufman emerging as the consensus pick, in part because while Jonze took seven years to make another film (the wonderful Where the Wild Things Are in 2009) Kaufman did the best work of his career without Jonze – collaborating with Michel Gondry on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and making his directorial debut in Synecdoche, New York (2008). But Her makes clear that Jonze is a singular talent in his own right – it’s very much a part of his filmography so far, but also the most mature and sensitive film of his career to date. His collaborations with Kaufman – as brilliant as they were – were never as deeply felt and moving as Her is. This is one of the very best films of the year – and surprisingly, far and away the best romance of the year.

Movie Review: The Lone Ranger

The Lone Ranger
Directed by:   Gore Verbinski.
Written by: Justin Haythe and Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio.
Starring: Johnny Depp (Tonto), Armie Hammer (John Reid), William Fichtner (Butch Cavendish), Tom Wilkinson (Latham Cole), Ruth Wilson (Rebecca Reid), Helena Bonham Carter (Red Harrington), James Badge Dale (Dan Reid), Bryant Prince (Danny), Barry Pepper (Fuller), Mason Cook (Will), JD Cullum (Wendell), Saginaw Grant (Chief Big Bear), Harry Treadaway (Frank), James Frain (Barret), Joaquín Cosio (Jesus), Damon Herriman (Ray), Matt O'Leary (Skinny), Stephen Root (Habberman).
 

I regret missing Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger on the big screen this summer. Based on the horrendous reviews, and poor box office (for a movie this size), I didn’t feel it was necessary to take time I didn’t really have when the film opened to ensure I caught it before it left theaters. Watching the film at home, I have to admit I was kind of mystified that out of all the blockbusters this summer, that The Lone Ranger was the film critics all seemed to pile on. The film is far from perfect – it’s far too long and has some sudden tonal shifts that don’t feel natural – but it is also among the most ambitious blockbusters of the year. Is it a good movie? I’m not sure, but it certainly doesn’t come close to being the disaster so many people seemed to think it was when it was released.

The film stars Armie Hammer as John Reid – a big city lawyer returning to his small Western town to become the head prosecutor. When we first meet him, on the train home, he doesn’t even believe in carrying a gun. He wants to do everything by the book – to civilize the West in other words, take it out of the hands of the thieves and murderers, and into the hands of normal people. It’s on that train ride that he first meets Tonto (Johnny Depp), who in this version of The Lone Ranger isn’t just a sidekick beholden to The Lone Ranger, but a man on a quest for redemption for the sins of his past – if anything, Reid becomes his sidekick, not vice versa. This change of Tonto – from one note comic relief, into a fully rounded out character, is one of the biggest (and best) changes in this new Lone Ranger.

It is also on this train ride, that Reid will first meet Butch Cavendish, an unrepentant murderer and criminal, who is being transported home so that he can be hanged. Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson), the most powerful man in this town, and representative of the railroad which will transform the Wild West, wants to make an example of Butch. So, of course, Butch will escape. And, of course, Reid’s big brother Dan (James Badge Dale) is the local ranger in town who heads off into the desert, his men (and little brother John) in tow to capture him. And, of course, Dan is married to Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), the woman John was in love with before he left town to become a lawyer. And, of course, things in the desert won’t go as planned, and Tonto will have to rescue John – who will eventually decide to take on his iconic persona and get the bad guys.

The actual plot of The Lone Ranger is probably its single weakest aspect. At two-and-a-half, the plot creaks and lurches at times, and like the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (the first three directed by Verbinski), the film is overstuffed, and runs way longer than it really needs to. It’s hard to sustain any sort of momentum in a film this size for that long, and The Lone Ranger doesn’t. The fact that most of the characters are merely archetypes doesn’t help very much.

But there is also a lot in The Lone Ranger to admire – including the action sequences, several involving trains, which are expertly crafted by Verbinski and company. There may be too many of them, and like the movie itself, they may run on a little too long, but it’s still rare to see an action movie that can handle action sequences of this size, and make them thrilling, and coherent – Verbinski doesn’t like the shaky handheld camera work and rapid fire editing that so many contemporary action directors prefer – and his action sequences are better for that. The sequences reference directors like Spielberg and Buster Keaton – and if they aren’t up to quite those levels, that’s understandable – few movies are. What’s admirable is that Verbinski isn’t just coasting, and doing the same thing as everyone else.

Perhaps the best thing about the movie is Johnny Depp. After so many years of mugging his way through movies – from the Pirates sequels to Alice in Wonderland to Dark Shadows and most others in recent years – I was expecting another exceedingly eccentric performance from Depp, but that isn’t what I got. I’m not going to argue that he’s subtle in any real way in The Lone Ranger, but he certainly is less manic than in much of his recent work. His Tonto moves and talks slower than Depp has in years – he is seemingly calm, even when he is also seemingly crazy. It’s the best work I have seen from him in quite some time.

The rest of the cast isn’t quite so good. Hammer is pretty good as The Lone Ranger – who the movie uses at times for comic relief because he is so square and rigid on the rules – he is too much of an idealist for much of the movie, until he learns his ideals do not match reality. He does, at times, get buried by Depp, but that’s almost to be expected. The rest of the cast are fine in their roles – but they aren’t given much to do – Fichtner snarls, Wilkinson telegraphs his untrustworthiness, Helena Bonham Carter shows up to an add another eccentric to her resume, Ruth Wilson fades into the background as the damsel in distress, etc.

Perhaps the reason why critics piled onto so much heavily on The Lone Ranger was because of its content concerning the massacre of Native Americans. Is a $200 million tent pole action film from Walt Disney really the correct venue to address such concerns – especially since it seemingly comes out of nowhere in the middle of the movie? Isn’t this supposed to be a fun movie, and not something more serious? It’s true that The Lone Ranger doesn’t integrate this material into the rest of the movie as well as it should have – but the other option would be to ignore it all together, and once again portray Tonto as little more than the Noble Savage we see him as in the museum in 1933, where, while wearing Little Big Man inspired makeup, he encourages a young boy to not buy the official version of history. There is an element of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in the film’s view of history – “When legend becomes fact, print the legend” – that movie has a character say. Tonto tries to get the young boy to not look at the legend, but at the fact. It may not be a subtle message, and it may not quite fit in with a summer blockbuster, but I find it preferable than not addressing it at all.

I’ve spent much of this review defending The Lone Ranger, so I now feel obliged to make it clear that I have extremely mixed feelings on the movie. I had fun with much of the movie – you could have great fun playing a game of spot the references in the film, of which there are many – and I enjoyed the action sequences, and Depp’s performance as Tonto. I also have to admit that the film is far too long - it drags mightily in the long middle portion of the movie. And while I admire the fact that movie didn’t simply ignore the massacre of Native Americans by white settlers, I also have to admit that it wasn’t integrated all that well into the rest of the movie, and made for some bizarre tonal shifts the movie doesn’t handle very well. I’m not sure if The Lone Ranger is a good movie or a bad movie (thank god I stopped assigning star ratings to films, because I would have no idea what to give this one). What I do know if that it is an ambitious movie – a $200 million dollar blockbuster that takes risks. They don’t all pay off but I prefer a movie that swings for the fences, even if it comes up short, to a movie that plays it safe and gives you precisely what you expect. When critics complain that Hollywood doesn’t take many chances in their tent pole movies (and believe me, they will) remember their reaction to The Lone Ranger. This may not be a great movie – it may not even be a good movie – but it takes chances. For that, if nothing else, I admire it.

Movie Review: Ain't Them Bodies Saints

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Directed by: David Lowery.
Written by: David Lowery.
Starring: Rooney Mara (Ruth Guthrie), Casey Affleck (Bob Muldoon), Ben Foster (Patrick Wheeler), Keith Carradine (Skerritt), Kennadie Smith (Sylvie Guthrie), Jacklynn Smith (Sylvie Guthrie), Nate Parker (Sweetie), Robert Longstreet (Cowboy Hat), Charles Baker (Bear), Augustine Frizzell (Sissy), Kentucker Audley (Freddy), David Zellner (Zellner), Turner Ross (T.C.), Rami Malek (Will).

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints begins where most movies of its ilk end. The film has been compared to Terrence Malick’s Badlands – with good reason – but that film concentrated on its young lovers on the run from the law. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints has barely begun when the robbery committed the young lovers at its core, Ruth (Rooney Mara) and Bob (Casey Affleck), and their cohort, has gone awry and ends in a shootout with the police. Ruth ends up shooting one of the cops, but because she has told Bob she is pregnant, and he is head over heels in love with her, he tells her to blame the whole thing on him. It works – he’s hauled off to jail, and the sends love letters to her, telling her that he will come to her and their daughter, and she has raise their child on their own. This is where most movies would end – but the majority of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints takes place a few years later – when Bob has broken out of jail, and is slowly making his way back home. The two lovers spend most of the movie apart – although we still feel their connection.

Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is more about mood than about plot – the movie would perhaps be even better had it jettisoned even more of its plot than it already has. The film has a dreamy romantic feel to it – especially when the film is concentrated on Bob – he has a one track mind to get home to Ruth and his daughter, and his letters (spoken in Malick-like voiceover) express an almost delusional level of romantic love towards his family. In some ways, he’s more akin to the Sissy Spacek character in Badlands – she narrated that movie, and one of the more striking things about Badlands is the difference between how she describes what is happening, and what we actually see (she glosses over just how violent things become). In many ways, Bob is like that as well – despite the fact he is now an escaped convict, hunted by police over all Texas, not to mention three paid assassins out to get his money and/or kill him, he still recklessly heads towards Ruth with determination. He’s not so bold as to go straight to her house – but he does have a plan that struck me as something a lovesick teenager would come up with – because in many ways, that’s just what he is.

Mara’s Ruth has been forced to live in the real world since Bob went to jail. She has to work to support their daughter, and even that wouldn’t be enough to keep them afloat if Skerritt (Keith Carradine), the father of their killed accomplice, didn’t supply them with a house to live in. While Bob has only gotten through prison by thinking about Ruth, she has not had that option. In those short, early scenes, both Affleck and Mara appear to be wildly, passionately in love – and while that love never fades for Bob, the movie, Mara’s impressive performance, makes us question whether the same is true for her. Having a child has forced her to grow up – and Bob represents the kind of life she has left behind. Meanwhile, Patrick (Ben Foster), the cop who was shot, makes it clear that he also likes Ruth – and her daughter. He’s a responsible, down-to-earth, dependable man – and even if he suspects that Ruth may have been the one who actually shot him that somehow only strengthens the attraction. This is a remarkably subtle turn by Foster – an actor known for going over the top, and it’s the film’s best performance. It also adds a mounting dread to the movie – what is Bob going to do if he shows up, especially if Ruth decides she would prefer Patrick to him?

The film justly won the cinematography award at Sundance this year – much of the movie seems to set during the twilight hours, which is perfect for this movie, because it can make for dreamy, romantic moments, but also hints at the impending darkness in the story. Yes, it does feel like something Malick would have made in the 1970s – but Malick is not the film’s only inspiration. The early 1970s work of Robert Altman can also be glimpsed here – in particular Thieves Like Us (1974) – and not just for the presence of Keith Carradine (although his presence makes the connection impossible to ignore), and in its depiction of violence, McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

It’s too bad that writer-director David Lowery included the three assassins in the movie at all – there presence of course brings on the climax of the movie, but they don’t really fit in with the rest of the film, and to me, robs the ending of the power it otherwise could have had.

But that’s a small complaint about an otherwise stellar movie – with four excellent performances, gorgeous cinematography and a romantic sensibility that we do not often see in movies anymore.

Movie Review: The Family

The Family
Directed by: Luc Besson.
Written by: Luc Besson and Michael Caleo based on the book by Tonino Benacquista.
Starring: Robert De Niro (Fred Blake / Giovanni Manzoni), Michelle Pfeiffer (Maggie Blake), Dianna Agron (Belle Blake), John D'Leo (Warren Blake), Tommy Lee Jones (Robert Stansfield), Jimmy Palumbo (Di Cicco), Domenick Lombardozzi (Caputo), Stan Carp (Don Luchese), Vincent Pastore (Fat Willy), Jon Freda (Rocco).

Luc Besson was once a reliable action filmmaker – with films such as La Femme Nikita (1990), The Professional (1994) and The Fifth Element (1997) on his resume – all of which are visually stunning and extremely entertaining. Somewhere along the way though, he seems to have lost his touch – it started with his misguided Joan of Arc film, The Messenger – and continued with three animated Arthur and the Invisibles movies (of which, I have only seen the first) and his rather dull angel film Angel-A. To a certain extent, it makes sense for him to team up with Robert DeNiro – who was once one of the best actors in the world, who has been slumming it for more than a decade now, with the occasional The Good Shepherd or Stone or Silver Linings Playbook to give us fans a glimpse of the actor he once was. The two of them teaming up to make a Mafia movie sounds like good idea to get them both back on track. Sadly, The Family seems like just another paycheque for both.

DeNiro stars as Giovanni Manzoni, once a high ranking Mafia man, who turned stool pigeon and entered witness protection with his family – wife Maggie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and kids Belle (Dianna Agron) and Warren (John D’Leo). They are now living in France with the boring name of Blake – and much to the chagrin of their handler Robert Stansfield (Tommy Lee Jones), they keep getting into trouble and have to be relocated. The Mafia still wants Giovanni’s head – a $20 million bounty has been placed on it – and they are scouring Europe to find them.

The film is essentially a fish out of water comedy, with the brash New York Mafia family running afoul of everyone in their small, provincial French town. The Blakes don’t do anything quietly – and they do not handle rejection well – if you insult Maggie for wanting to buy peanut butter, she just may blow up your little grocery store. If you’re a plumber who tells Giovanni something he doesn’t want to hear, you’ll end up in the hospital. Even the kids behave badly – as Belle sets her sights on an older teacher, and Warren starts his own racket right there in high school.

The problem with The Family is that it wants to be a comedy – but it quite simply isn’t very funny. To give DeNiro credit, he doesn’t seem to be sleepwalking through the film like he has often done in the recent past – he’s trying, and he has a few good moments (discussing GoodFellas with a French audience is a highlight), but this is another role that doesn’t really challenge DeNiro – doesn’t force him out of his comfort zone. The rest of the cast are basically playing stereotypes – one note characters who are not given much to do. Pfeiffer and Jones are pretty much wasted – which is a shame, because at least the film gives DeNiro a chance to play with his Mafia image a little bit (even if he’s returned to that well a little too often) – but the film misses the chance to play with the Pfeiffer of Scarface or Married to the Mob or the Jones of The Fugitive. When you have actors this good, it’s a shame to waste them – but the movie does.

 
Of course the film ends with an action climax – which is well handled by Besson, but also a little too by-the-numbers. Besson did some of the best action sequences of the 1990s, and while he hasn’t completely lost his touch, it does feel like he’s going through the motions. In fact, that is what the entire film feels like – a one joke comedy that doesn’t really go anywhere, and wasn’t that funny the first time.

Movie Review: Camille Claudel 1915

Camille Claudel 1915
Directed by: Bruno Dumont.
Written by: Bruno Dumont.
Starring: Juliette Binoche (Camille Claudel), Jean-Luc Vincent (Paul Claudel), Robert Leroy (The Doctor), Emmanuel Kauffman (The Priest), Marion Keller (Miss Blanc), Armelle Leroy-Rolland (The Young Novice).

Director Bruno Dumont is known for his films that take faith and religion seriously, even if he has stated he wants art to replace religion (good luck with that one Bruno). His films are typically filled with long, static shots, populated by non-professional actors, often contain shocking acts of violence and/or sex and have events that cannot be fully explained – at least not by Dumont. More often than not, he leaves it up to the viewer to decide what actually happened.

His latest, Camille Claudel 1915 differs from his previous films in two important ways – one makes the film better, and one worse. The first way it differs is that he has cast the wonderful Juliette Binoche in the title role. Dumont must have realized that the demands of the role would be too much for a non-professional, and he was right. While often his films go long stretches with no one saying a word, Camille Claudel delivers more than one lengthy monologue in this film that would undo most professional actors – but Binoche handles well. Unfortunately, it is the other difference between Dumont’s previous films and this one that ultimately undoes the film. Most of the time, Dumont makes complex movies, that either have no answer at its core or at least leaves it to the audience to decide. In Camille Claudel 1915, he has clearly made a film about an injustice – and leaves no real room for ambiguity. The film is far more simple and straight forward than most of what we normally get from Dumont.

The film centers on a few days in the life of Camille Claudel – an artist in her own right, but one perhaps best known as the longtime lover, muse and collaborator of the infamous Auguste Rodin. The 1988 film, Camille Claudel (unseen by me) tells the story of her life with Rodin in a more conventional, biopic form (and earned Isabelle Adjani an Oscar nomination – a rarity for a foreign film) – and ends before this film even begins – which is 20 years after her relationship with Rodin ended, and two years after her stay in a mental asylum, where she was placed by her family- represented here by her little brother Paul (Jean-Luc Vincent). The film deals with just a few days in her life as she waits for Paul to arrive, confident that he will see she doesn’t belong there, and take her away.

The film makes is abundantly clear that Camille does not belong there at all. True, she is a little paranoid but that’s about all. But compared to the rest of the residents of the asylum, she is clearly healthy. Dumont’s penchant for using non-professional actors is present in the film – as Dumont films in an actual asylum and used actual residents there to highlight the difference between them and Claudel. To a degree this is effective – it clearly highlights the difference between Camille and the other residents of the asylum. But to me, it took me out of the movie, as I could not help but think Dumont was exploiting these poor people, who quite clearly have little to no idea what is going on around them.

The reason to see the film is Binoche – who is wonderful as Claudel. Yes, she is paranoid, but she in no way belongs in the asylum where she is placed. Twice – once near the beginning and once near the end – Dumont gives Binoche long, impassioned monologues where she pleads her case for her own insanity – only to have those pleas fall on deaf ears. Binoche lays herself bare in the role, and she delivers a wonderful performance. Unfortunately for her, the rest of the movie does not match her level of excellence.

It’s clear from the beginning of the film that Claudel does not belong in the asylum. The movie makes this point over and over again, as it really has no other point to make. We sit around and wait for Paul to arrive, so we can have the big confrontation the movie is building to, yet when he does arrive, the movie grinds to a halt. This is because we are introduced to Paul, and have to sit through his own long monologue (a voice over of what he’s writing at first, and then his long prayer as he kneels by the side of the road). Paul is precisely the type of religious figure Dumont usually avoids in his movies – a one note fanatic, who is easily dismissed because his sense of religion is so dogmatic and unyielding. We know Camille has no chance convincing Paul to sign her release papers – but she holds out hope in vain.

I suppose one could argue the movie is effective. Dumont’s point is to make us feel as claustrophobic as Camille herself – confined to her small room, with no privacy, no distractions from the drudgery of her day-to-day existence, surrounded by people who either cannot or will not listen to her or treat her as a normal person. And he does that. And Binoche, as always, is wonderful in the lead role. But Camille Claudel 1915 left me somewhat cold. It didn’t engage me intellectually like most of Dumont’s films do, because everything in the film is so straightforward and simple. Camille Claudel didn’t belong in a mental institution, but was put there anyway where she suffered for 30 years. That’s a tragedy to be sure, but Dumont’s film is too cold to be effective. It is precisely the type of film he doesn’t usually make – and now we know why.

Movie Review: Museum Hours

Museum Hours
Directed by: Jem Cohen.
Written by: Jem Cohen.
Starring: Mary Margaret O'Hara (Anne), Bobby Sommer (Johann), Ela Piplits (Gerda Pachner).

I have to admit, I’m somewhat at a loss when it comes to trying to review Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours. I cannot think of another film quite like it. It is part art history lesson, part travelogue, part a story of an unlikely friendship, part rumination on death, and part philosophical rambling. The film is beautiful to look at, and for some may be a profound rumination on art, and what it all means. The film has already been a huge critical hit – but the whole thing left me rather cold.

The film takes place in and around the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Johann (Bobby Sommer) is a security guard there – perhaps the last stop on his career path that also included managing rock bands and teaching woodworking. The voice we hear most often in the film is Johann’s – mainly in voiceover, and he tells stories about his job – his co-workers and the many people who come through the museum. He is bemused and philosophical – he’ll tell you what he thinks of the masterpieces that hang on the walls of the museum by Rembrandt, and especially Bruegel, who is a favorite of his, and the movies. It is in the museum that he meets Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) for the first time. She’s a Canadian woman, who we first see on the phone asking to borrow money so she can travel to Vienna to sit by the sickbed of a distant cousin who has fallen into a coma. Why did Anne feel the need to visit this cousin for the first time ever now? And who is she asking for money? We never really find out.

Johann and Anne develop a friendship through their interactions at the museum – he’ll eventually act as her translator in dealing with the doctors, and her tour guide – through the museum, yes, but also through some of the sites – both tourist traps and not – in and around Vienna. The friendship never develops into a sexual relationship as we might think – Johann is gay after all – but their connection certainly runs deep, and there is real intimacy between them. This speaks volumes about the two performances by non-professionals O’Hara and Sommer – as the film doesn’t often give them too much to say to each other. We feel the connection between them, more than hear it.

The movie is often very quiet, as is fitting for a movie set in a museum. Cohen’s camera often takes in the artwork much like a patron of the museum would – at eye level, lingering over the details. In perhaps the film’s best scene – or least my favorite – an art historian tries to explain the different symbols and meanings in one of Brueghel’s paintings to skeptical tourists – who do not quite believe her when she tells them that just because the painting is entitled “Conversion of St. Paul”, that St. Paul may not actually be the focus of the painting. Cohen’s camera makes it clear what side of the debate he’s on.

Museum Hours is an interesting movie – I liked Cohen’s camerawork quite a bit, and there is always something interesting to look at or listen to. Does the film add up to all that much? I’m not entirely sure – I didn’t think so when I was watching it, as the structure of the film often felt random. As I think back over the film though, the pieces start to fall into place. I’m still not quite sure what it all means, or even if I liked it very much – but I’m glad I saw the film. For some, it will be a masterpiece, as exciting as going to the art museum itself – for others, it will be as dull as going to art museum itself. You know which one you are, right?