TIFF Review: Synecdoche, New York

You are reading this because you want to know if Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a good film, and perhaps you want me to compare and contrast it with the great screenplays he has written, and hopefully in the process provide a categorical frame to this new commodity. What must a press screening of such a film look like, what sort of deadening halt could be felt, to pens and paper, to stillborn thoughts, as the anarchy of Kaufman’s imagination marched mercilessly through its two hours? What language other than the poetic can one even begin to articulate the activity of that fugue?

Rest assured, this ‘review’ will not give away anything, for it would be as pointless as describing a blob of colour carefully set within a Monet landscape, or quoting a line from a Beckett play, the activity of this story is one of patterns. It may take your mind an hour or two, or even days to adjust to the pattern recognition required to make sense of what Kaufman is doing with this story. So is the possible genius of the work; I’m still uncertain what happened, what I even feel about it. The dense narrative works not in scenes, nor arcs, nor traditional transitions, but everything both real and unreal, past, present and future coming together on the same cosmic stage. I was unable to understand it in the fashion I am accustom to, but after awhile the pervading ideas and emotions emerged like one of those 3-D illusions, the dissociative details forming a lived-in impression of loneliness, heartache, and death. The Russian doll ellipses, apparently random tangents, and gaping time lapses, provide just the right amount of disorientation to evoke the revelation, to have the sadness of life creep up on you and inhabit you.

As the synapses fire blanks, a new seeing emerges, the seeing not of characters and story on a separate stage from us but as us, surveyors of our own lives, inhabitants of insecurities and absurdities that brush shoulders with one another in unscripted indecencies, all loose ends that are felt beyond the academic rigor of existentialism or the theatre of the absurd. As characters in the film perceive fictionalizations of themselves we perceive the characters, and perceive ourselves watching the characters. As the puzzle of perception unfolds, deeper and deeper into the time lapse, any remnant of analytical thought is exhausted by the onslaught of highly stylized quasi-subconscious details that run through, and in the flurry of all these simultaneous assaults on the mind, one either tunes out or tunes in to a whole new wavelength.

The originality of the film is staggering, even by Kaufman standards. Its unparalleled sophistication of storytelling is something only a Beckett or Kafka could imagine, not even Lynch, I suspect, could have the patience for this well-laid detonation of meaning. Kaufman’s directorial debut is aggressively auteur, it is, as Cameron Bailey noted in his introduction to the film, the purest distillation yet of the mind of Charlie Kaufman.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is a theater director whose ambition to capture the true meaning of life escalates into citywide sets of thousands of actors all on his cue. This review is now over.

TIFF Review: Goodbye Solo

[Regular reader Michael Sloan, known around these parts as simply ‘rot’ is also making the TIFF rounds and he has offered to share with the world his take on a few films.]

There is a certain kind of film that I seek out when going to the film festival; foregoing the list of talent that I feel compelled to see on name recognition alone, there ends up being three or four films which seduce me with their promise of real pathos. These films tend to be foreign, and tend to slip under most people’s radar due to their sheer lack of novelty. Call me old-fashioned but my favorite genre remains the straight up drama. My whole ambition is to empathize with the characters depicted and be transported on an emotional level to their faraway reality. This year I have earmarked a couple of films with the hopes that they will do just that; they include Sugar, Linha de Passe, Afterwards and Goodbye Solo.

Of the films I have thus far seen at the festival, Goodbye Solo has left the deepest impression. Granted that is not saying a lot considering the poor films I have seen, and Ramin Bahrani’s film is not a complete success, but it was the one that at least extinguished the festival pomp and circumstance and transported me to the disparate world of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to care about the modest ambitions of a Sengalese cab driver, Solo, and his fare, a deeply wounded Texan, William. Bahrani had the audience teary-eyed before the film even started with his touching dedication to a friend that had recently died of cancer and had helped him with finding the locations for the film. In the same introduction we learned that Goodbye Solo had won an award at the Venice film festival, and this only add to our interest in what was to come.

From my interpretation of the synopsis I had anticipated the story to be reminiscent of My Dinner with Andre, one uninterrupted conversation between cab driver and customer, touching upon important life altering and philosophic topics, but I soon discovered this not to be the case. Within the first minute of the film the premise is set: William asks Solo to take him to the top of Blowing Rock in a week, no questions asked, to which Solo suspects suicidal tendencies and spends the remainder of the film trying to inspire William to live on. Rather than being a contained one set narrative the story persists through the week as Solo comedically ingratiates himself into every aspect of William’s life with a buoyant attitude that contrasts sharply with William’s dour mood. Actor Souleymane Sy Savane steals the show as the ever persistent Solo, doing everything in his power to correct his new friend’s destructive path. What may seem as an unlikely premise is made plausible through his effortless sense of benevolence, and when the fateful day comes his character arc rings true in a way one least expects. The same goes for William, whose laconic existence becomes elevated by a few scratched lines in a journal, all minimal but nicely played.

While I enjoyed this story and could appreciate the reluctance Bahrani took from being overly expositional in his story, in the end I longed for something more, and maybe that is a defect in me, speaking more of where I am in my life than about the characters, wanting to be shaken into something more violent then which is ultimately presented. That said, Goodbye Solo is a fine film and has inspired me to look into the director’s back catalogue, the lauded Chop Shop and Man Push Cart.

TIFF Review: Religulous

[Regular reader Michael Sloan, known around these parts as simply ‘rot’ is also making the TIFF rounds and he has offered to share with the world his take on a few films.]

Organized Religion is a very easy target for ridicule, it consists of a group of individuals each keeping the other in check over a list of doctrines and rituals that have no intellectual authority of their own, but which much like a child’s game of make-believe, insist upon the mutual imagination of one’s playmate. It becomes all the more concerning when children are raised with the belief that these activities and beliefs are more than just cultural curiosities, but are in fact steadfast conclusions about your very being in the world that you cannot escape nor challenge. This pursuit to, as Kirk Cameron says in a choice clip, circumnavigate the intellect, is the core problem for atheist crusaders like Bill Maher and Larry Charles, the creators of Religulous, who try everything in their power to persuade the faithful to account for inconsistencies in their reasoning. But not even theme park Jesus was having any of that.

Focusing on the three biggie religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) this thinly veiled stand-up routine of a documentary goes for the laugh at the expense of the lesson virtually every time. The fringe faiths of Mormonism and Scientology are kicked around as well so as to add to the bounty of foolish ideas proposed under the assumption of a higher being. For Maher and Charles, it seems the stranger the better, and while they claim to have a fourteen hour cut of the film which perhaps nuances the debate, this lean and mean ninety minute version is as pensive as a South Park episode. I say this as a fan of Maher’s HBO show and of the open dialogue he affords about all topics, including religion, but with this film he has done a great disservice to the atheist argument. The believers who feel belittled by someone with big ideas about what is logical will feel more the same, the continual undercutting of what they say in this film with cheap jokes, gag reels, subtitles, does nothing but make a farce of any kind of debate.

The film begins with Maher discussing his religious childhood and using it as a platform for discussing dissenting views, trying weakly I may add, to ingratiate himself with the likes of the average person; instead he inevitably comes off looking as a Borat of the West Coast, waiting for an opportunity to insert a punch line as the interviewee comes off as someone more willing to debate than he. It was as if Larry Charles told Maher to behave more like Borat in his interviewing techniques, with cringe worthy remarks like the one to the ExChange representative, a former gay man who converted to being straight for his religious cause: “so you were gay, but now are straight and married a former lesbian and have three kids, of which the jury is still out on them”. These kind of cheap jabs give reprehensible people like those at ExChange the perceived moral high ground because for five or so minutes they are ritualistically victimized with unnecessary jokes.

That said, I did laugh, there was enough funny material in the film to make me recommend it as a comedy but unfortunately it is at the expense of deepening the trench between believers and non-believers. In the film he does interview some scientific-minded individuals, who of course are not challenged with comic barbs but should just as well; however, the clips of the neurologist or astronomer were fleeting, and barely sticking to any kind of factual evidence but used as a segue way to the next object of ridicule. Occasionally, as if by accident, the film does hit a nerve and attempts to shake up the foundations of religion, when for example the myth of Jesus is shown to be one told long before he was born (granted all to the music of Walk Like an Egyptian). But before this sort of information can be fully appreciated we are on to the next reincarnation of Jesus who dresses like a pimp and has a twinkle in his eye. More a freakshow than an actual exposé into the issues, Religulous resoundingly preaches to the choir.

TIFF Review: Me and Orson Welles

[Regular reader Michael Sloan, known around these parts as simply ‘rot’ is also making the TIFF rounds and he has offered to share with the world his take on a few films.]

During the Q&A of his film Tape, Richard Linklater remarked that it took a lot for a story to grab him and that when mining literary material for cinematic possibilities he was particularly selective, looking for that new voice to make the filmmaking exercise worth doing. It was 2001, and he had just finished Tape and Waking Life, two unique projects that held firm to this principle. Had you asked me then of whom did I consider to be the five greatest directors still working, his name would have certainly come up. But something has changed, in me perhaps, but I feel it also in his more recent work, this palpable shift in principle, with certain projects that he has chosen clearly suggesting a disinterest in the ‘new voice’ he so fondly spoke of before. Films like Bad News Bears, Fast Food Nation, even School of Rock, and now added to the list, Me and Orson Welles.

What I find so contemptible about such a film as Me and Orson Welles is not that it is a bad film but rather that it is so middling in its efforts, so willing to be conventional in every way and let a consistent state of déjà-vu infect the presiding of yet another backstage thespian story. Even more contemptible because it is Richard Linklater at the helm, someone fresh off of A Scanner Darkly, someone whose talents need not be wasted.

Visually and performance-wise there is a lot to enjoy about this recreation of a period in Orson Welles career when he helmed a lauded production of Julius Caesar at the Mercury theater in New York. Here we have a Welles prior to his many successes as a movie star and director, yet still admired for his radio and theater work, a colossus of talent around which everyone encircled, patiently waiting for him
to begin. The main occupation of the Mercury theater is to wait for Orson, and as the production teeters on the edge of collapse, we watch an artist in his element take from the chaos that which makes greatness in art. We watch from a particular point of view, that of a budding thespian, Richard Samuels, who spends his time learning about the theory of the world in high school only to have it materialize at the Mercury. The film is intended to be a love letter to actors, and an affectionate look at a time and place when the business and the world around it felt bursting with possibilities, everything tinged in nostalgia (unfortunately never going for more than soft light admiration).

While full of some nice comedic bits at the expense of a sometimes cartoony impression of a brutish dictator in Welles, the ambition of recreating a sense of the world behind the play felt incomplete, relying too much on archetype characters doing archetype things and lacking any of richness of detail that something like Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy was in abundance of. Everything felt conveniently laid out, and the love story was completely telegraphed from the very first scene, and in this respect of relying so heavily on conventions I feel disappointed with this latest effort.

But really I can sort of understand why it was done, and anybody who sees this film will within the first ten minutes come to the same realization: Christian McKay IS Orson Welles. Now I know we have all seen our share of imitations, Cate Blanchet as Katherine Hepburn, Jamie Fox as Ray Charles, but let me say definitively, and once again, Christian McKay IS Orson Welles. He does not just nail the voice, he without any prosthetic nose or such looks like a dead ringer of him! How do you find someone who looks like the man, sounds like the man, and on top of it all can genuinely act? Christian McKay is a miracle, an oddity, a freak show that one delights in with ever second he is onscreen. It seems fitting that for a story about the craft of acting that the one great achievement of the film is the meta-admiration of a real actor doing otherworldly things. There can me no doubt that no matter how inoffensively average this film is, Christian McKay will be nominated at next years Academy Awards and likely win.