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| Shame in the Princess of Whales Theatre: front row balcony, dead center. |
One of the biggest continual to-dos you have to deal with when you’re attending a film festival is the mad dash to the theater seats. People line up for hours in front of the theaters, and then, all at the same time, everyone is allowed in about a half hour before the screening starts. That’s when the fast walking begins. The more people in your party, the harder it is for you to stake out property. Everyone wants to be as close to the screen, as close to where the filmmakers will be answering questions on stage, as possible. The quickest squat on the best spots, and then they leave one person behind to save seats while everybody else goes to the bathroom, gets drinks, etcetera. That’s when the hovering starts. The people who weren’t so quick now have to hover around the area that’s already been picked clean and try to find scraps. Is that one open? How about those there? If somebody moves down is there enough room for all three of us? The experience of having people hover over you, eyeballing the seats next to you suspiciously, ready to strike, can be more than a bit uncomfortable. Not to mention the fact that you’re forced to answer the same stupid question over and over. Yes that one is taken. Yes that one is as well. Yes I’m certain.
Instead of dealing with all this I handle the seating dilemma a different way. While everyone is walking around in circles, looking lost like a tribe of persecuted folk stuck wandering in the middle of the desert, I just walk in and go immediately to the balcony. This is a good idea for several reasons. Firstly, it’s going to afford you the best view of the screen in the house. Sitting on the floor where the seats are barely sloped is just stupid, and being pulled back a bit from the giant screens in these big theaters offers the best perspective. Secondly, you don’t have to deal with the hoverers for nearly as long. Sure, eventually the weakest of the pack all make their way upstairs and start to look for seats there, but by that time the movie is about to start anyways, so you only have to deal with about five minutes of people who brought their twelve cousins to a movie and they all need to sit together staring at you. Thirdly, you can stand in line about half as long as the people who get themselves right up in the front row, and have a better view of the film than them to boot.
The only downfall is that all the way up in the balcony you’re less likely to be picked out of the crowd and have your inane question about what the meaning of the film was not get answered by the director. You won’t get to hear the star say “great” when you ask them what working with the director was like. You probably won’t be close enough to get a clear picture of crying Gerard Butler’s face so you can post it on Facebook and let everyone know that you live a charmed life and are constantly graced with the presence of celebrities. Can’t do something like that up in the balcony. I don’t know why anyone would sit up there. The only way it would make sense is if you were here to see the movies or something.
Day three of watching movies and resisting the exotic lure of a Tim Horton’s on every corner brings us looks at the new Todd Solondz freak show Dark Horse, a movie about the guy from 300 saving African children from a civil war, Machine Gun Preacher, and director Steve McQueen’s new collaboration with Michael Fassbender Shame, a haunting look at sex addiction.
Dark Horse
Dark Horse opens with diamond encrusted title cards and a bunch of Jews dancing to club music at a wedding. It’s an irreverent start to a funny movie, and it put me at ease immediately. I was a little scared to watch this after Solondz’s last film Life During Wartime was such an insufferable bore, but I needn’t have worried. Dark Horse is mostly about the dark comedy, and it kept me giggling all the way through. The lead character Abe (Jordan Gelber) is one of those emotionally stunted man-children that is a ridiculously popular figure to make comedies about these days, but he’s not like the ones that you’ve seen in films like The 40 Year Old Virgin; he’s not sweet at his center but a little too awkward. This is a Todd Solondz movie, so Abe is a deluded, selfish, contemptible curmudgeon. He lives in his parents’ house, takes money from his mother, and performs poorly at a cushy job given to him by his dad. Despite this, he’s horrible to the both of them and blames them both for every one of his life’s woes; whether that be the fact that the local toy store (not Toys R Us) won’t let him return one of his recent purchases, or the fact that his older brother lives on his own and is viewed as a success because he graduated from Med School and became a doctor.
Abe is a fat slob, he wears annoying joke t-shirts, he collects action figures, he drives around a yellow Hummer out of which he blasts ridiculous teen pop music; he’s basically the most annoying person you’ve ever met in your life. So much so that he feels more like a character made for the movies than anyone you’ve ever met in real life. I mean, what action figure collecting nerds have you ever met that would be caught dead listening to teen pop music? Solondz loves his difficult protagonists, and in Abe he has created a doozie. It must have been hard keeping an audience engaged with such an unrelatable, unlikable character, and for a little bit there in the first act Solondz was losing me, but eventually he managed to pull it off and keep me with Abe and his struggles until the end.
The way he does this is by slowly slipping in more and more fantasy sequences that give us a glimpse into Abe’s inner psyche. Unlike most people, Abe isn’t the King in his subconscious. It’s here where he admits to himself what a lazy bum and idiot loser he is, and that bit of vulnerability and self awareness kept the film from just becoming an exercise in gawking at a freak show. Eventually Abe’s fantasies, which become increasingly more sexual and which allow Mia Farrow to show off more and more charm as the focus of his subconscious self-flagellating, Phyllis, start to overpower the film to the point that it’s hard to tell what is fantasy and what is reality. They were a really great way to add some intrigue to the film, and keep you following along to see what happens next. And when the film wraps itself up, in a typically depressing Todd Solondz fashion, I was happy to see how he wrapped up the fantasy sub plot as well. Ultimately, they became more important than what was happening in reality (a mostly boring doomed romance that Abe tries to cultivate with a hilariously depressed Selma Blair).
This film is a little weird. It doesn’t really tell a typical story, it’s character are all pretty awful people, and every once in a while you find yourself wondering if it’s going to go anywhere at all; but ultimately it was a success for me because it kept me laughing. There’s some really sharp digs thrown at depression and the depressed that I enjoyed a lot. Ridiculous lines like, “I just had a long Skype with Mahmoud,” come out of nowhere and put you on the floor, and lots of little moments manage to ring true despite what a cartoon character Abe is most of the time. I especially liked a scene where he sat alone in a movie theater looking at bad local ads and solving depressingly easy celebrity related word jumbles. Oh man, have I been there.
Machine Gun Preacher
A lot of the first act of Machine Gun Preacher feels like you’re watching a bad action movie from the early 90s. From the soundtrack, to the costuming, to the subject matter, this movie was giving me serious Brian Bosworth starring in Stone Cold vibes. The film is the real life story of a Pennsylvania man named Sam Childers (Gerard Butler), who started off life living as a drug addicted, frequently incarcerated, criminal, but who, after successfully finding where Jesus was hidden, turns his life around and becomes a man who dedicates his life to helping others.
My problems with this film started pretty quickly, when after being one of the most irredeemable pieces of crap I’ve ever seen for the first twenty minutes of the film, the Childers character then makes an immediate turn in his life and becomes one of the most selfless, noble men I’ve ever heard about, just because his wife dragged him to church one night and he got baptized. There is no transitional period, we’re not shown Childers learning any lessons; he just completely changes in a matter of seconds due to the magic of getting your head dipped in Wizard’s water. Maybe that’s how it really happened to the guy in real life, maybe that one moment was a flashpoint for him that immediately changed the way he thought about everything, but that’s not good storytelling. And it doesn’t make for a good movie.
From it’s jailhouse beginnings, to it’s scenes of depravity, to scenes of people being saved in church, to atrocities being committed to little children in Sudan, Machine Gun Preacher is a film full of nothing but big moments. There are no quiet scenes where you just spend time with a man and his family. Everything is big, everything is world changing. Seeing as where the story goes is following Childers on a series of trips into war torn Africa where he builds an orphanage, saves hundreds of children from kidnapping and slaughter, and becomes something of a freedom fighter, I guess that was inevitable. But it sure plays cheesy. To tackle a real life story like this that is so dramatic and so horrific while at the same time keeping things subtle and understated would take the assured hand of a master artist. I’m sure the man is many things, but director Marc Forster doesn’t manage to be that. In his hands this material, which admittedly is real life melodrama, just plays out as being melodramatic. And that’s a bad thing. Once again, this may be how things really happened in real life, but that doesn’t necessarily make for a good movie.
I don’t feel like this really is how things happened though. There are a lot of big, ridiculous action movie moments in this film that would have been pretty awesome in a big, ridiculous action movie, but that felt completely inappropriate in a movie that is largely about atrocities being committed in Sudan. One second the film is trying to make you cry and preach to you about getting active in third world matters, and in the next Butler is popping up in a hero pose with a rocket launcher over his shoulder as generic sounding action movie music blares. Watching Machine Gun Preacher feels how it would to alternate back and forth between ten-minute segments of Darfur Now and Rambo. Separately they’re both worthwhile filmgoing experiences, but mash them together and they look ridiculous. Machine Gun Preacher just looks ridiculous. It’s like a P.S.A. by way of Conan the Barbarian, and presenting this sort of material with a cheesy action movie touch even manages to feel a bit disrespectful.
Shame
The experience of seeing a movie like Shame, before it’s been hyped to you online, before it’s been marketed to death, when you can go into it relatively fresh and without expectations; that’s what attending film festivals is all about. Shame is the kind of filmgoing experience that leaves you breathless, that makes a theater full of 1700 people file out in silence after the end credits, still fully enveloped in its world. It really is high art and everyone involved, especially director Steve McQueen and stars Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan, should be commended.
Before stepping into film directing, McQueen was an artist in other mediums, and that influence shows in the way he is willing to experiment with the camera and break from the usual way of shooting movies. The frames of this movie are all gorgeous, but they never feel blocked or staged. McQueen just sticks to the strategy of hiring talented actors, letting them go, and experimenting with the best ways to capture what they’re doing. It feels like he’s doing the visual version of an Apatow movie’s improvisational dialogue. With his first film Hunger it became clear that this was a director more interested in telling his story visually through his camera work and through his actor’s physical performances than he was through dialogue, and that approach carries over to Shame. This is a film that has long stretches of silence, but every second something important is happening on screen.
McQueen is a photographer willing to let his camera sit still on a subject and let a scene play out. He had that 20 some minute still shot of two men talking at a table in Hunger, and he goes back to the still shot well here, once again to great effect. Doing lengthy still shots takes balls and it takes patience, and if McQueen keeps going back to it too much it might become something of an annoyance over the course of his career, but so far I’ve enjoyed all the choices he’s made very much. He’s picked the right moments to linger on, moments essential to the heart of the stories he’s telling, and the additional attention of a still shot is able to give them the appropriate focus. Not many people could pull this off.
The film is a character study, focusing on a man named Brandon (Fassbender) who is almost crippled with sexual compulsion. He watches pornography constantly, hires prostitutes regularly, visits dingy sex clubs, and sizes up every woman he comes across every second of the day as potential prey. His is a story that could only be told in modern times, where our relationship with sexuality has been warped by the too ready availability of too explicit pornography on the Internet. Brandon bombards himself with graphic sexual images all day long, he numbs himself to them, and then he tries to recreate them as best he can with whores and random hookups. His home is a pristine shrine to sex and masturbation, never disturbed other than by faceless partners. When Brandon tries to have a sexual relationship with a woman he’s had a meal with, a woman he’s talked to and worked alongside, it doesn’t work out. And when his masturbatorium is disturbed by his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) looking for a place to crash, the challenge of having someone around that he has to relate to in a non-sexual framework causes Brandon to have a mental breakdown and a series of frustrated outbursts.
Fassbender’s focus and intensity in this role is nothing to ignore, but comes as no surprise. Very quickly he is establishing himself as one of the best currently working actors, and with McQueen he’s found a director willing to use his talents as the centerpiece of gorgeous productions. This film is, top to bottom, all about Fassbender’s performance, where he can take us emotionally, and how he can engage us fully in his character. Mulligan, another of this new generation’s very finest actors, is also predictably engaging as Sissy. She’s very open and vulnerable in this role, in direct opposition to the way Fassbender’s repressed Brandon interacts with people, and it becomes clear from the second that she steps into the story that her openness is going to get her hurt and cause a break in Brandon’s very particular routine. While this story is Fassbender’s, his interactions with Mulligan are an important part of how Brandon develops and where he ends up going in his journey, and I can’t imagine two more perfect actors being cast in these roles. When Brandon reaches his crisis point, and when you get indication that something major has changed inside of him by the film’s end, you buy it; you buy it completely.
My one complaint about the film lies in Fassbender’s series of sex scenes. We get a lot of them, and much of this movie is very graphic, but their inclusion wasn’t my problem. My complaint is in how legitimately sexy they were. Fassbender and this series of prostitutes were having hot, satisfying sex. While he is able to convey his character’s extreme focus during sexual situations, he seems to relish his encounters far too much. I felt like they should have been more robotic and dispassioned to convey how far into addiction he had slipped. The sex scenes we get seem like they were meant more to make the audience feel shame than Brandon.
One footnote, I would feel bad if I didn’t mention the one scene where Brandon goes out on a date. It is one of the most subtle, masterful comedic pieces I’ve seen in a film in as long as I can remember, and all of the humor comes from the fact that they have a very bad waiter. The jokes are so subtle that many people might not even notice that they’re there, and very little spotlight is put on them at all. But they’re hilarious, and whoever played that waiter should be commended. The whole scene felt like something out of the Coen brothers’ more screwball playbook.
