Category Archives: Drama

Highway 61 revisited: Mud ***1/2

September 15, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 27, 2013)

There’s a lot of mystery in Mud, writer-director Jeff Nichols’ modern-day Tom and Huck adventure-cum-swamp noir…not the least of which is how a 14 year-old Arkansas river rat named Neckbone came to be in possession of a Fugazi t-shirt (these are the little throwaway details in movies that keep me up nights-I’m pretty sure I need medication). However, that isn’t the central mystery; this tale is chuck-full of characters with Dark Secrets murkier than the black waters of the Mississippi that burble and roil throughout it.

The aforementioned Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) plays second fiddle to our young protagonist Ellis (Tye Sheridan). Ellis and Neckbone, who grew up together in a clannish riverbank neighborhood, kill time exploring their environs in a motorboat. While scouting a tiny island in the middle of the Mississippi, they happen upon a boat that has been stranded high up in a tree (now there’s a mystery).

Assuming that the wreck is abandoned (and being 14 year-old boys) they declare dubsies and agree to keep it a secret between the two of them. However, further exploration reveals dismaying evidence that “someone” may already have laid claim to this one-of-a-kind tree house. When they return to their own boat, fresh footprints indicate that while they were up in the tree, “someone” else was also doing some recon. Enter “Mud” (Matthew McConaughey).

Although somewhat gaunt and feral in appearance, Mud turns out to be disarmingly laid-back and soft-spoken in countenance. He is also quite the raconteur, soon regaling the impressionable lads with his tale of woe. While it may appear that he’s been living by his wits on this veritable desert island for an indeterminate amount of time, it seems that he has but recently returned to the area with a Special Purpose: to reunite with his long-time ladylove, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).

So why doesn’t he simply make the 20-minute boat ride into town and hook up with her? Well, there’s this slight hiccup. You see, since they were last together, Juniper left him for this other guy, who turned out to be an evil, physically abusive dirt bag. So Mud ended up sort of, well, killing him. And now, the guy’s congenitally felonious family (headed by veteran hillbilly heavy Joe Don Baker) is hot on his trail and gunning for vengeance. So Mud has to lay low. Despite the preponderance of red flags, Ellis and Neckbone offer to help Mud in his righteous quest.

What ensues is a hybrid of Stand by Me and Whistle Down the Wind, with a touch of Tennessee Williams (the presence of a startlingly grizzled Sam Shepard lends additional Southern Gothic cred). I also got the feeling that Nichols was striving to create a sort of mythic American folk tale, in the mold of Glen Pitre’s woefully underrated 1986 gem Belizaire the Cajun; particularly in the way he immerses you in a unique regional subculture, which in this case appears to have changed little since the days of Mark Twain.

While the director’s reach may exceed his grasp at times (due in part to his busy mishmash of character study, family melodrama, coming-of-age tale, love story, mythic folk tale and suspense thriller), the strong sense of place (Adam Stone’s cinematography artfully captures the sultry atmosphere of a torpid backwater), compelling music score (by David Wingo) and excellent performances add up to a perfect Sunday matinee movie.

Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Walden pondering: Upstream Color ***

September 15, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 20, 2013)

You know all those Weekly World News-type stories about people allegedly kidnapped by aliens, who perform horrible experiments on their hapless captives before returning them to their original upright position behind the wheel of their car, now mysteriously relocated in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in Iowa? While they may have vague recollections regarding anal probes and such, these folks are generally a bit fuzzy on details. In Upstream Color, writer-director-actor Shane Carruth may be offering an explanation. At least that’s one explanation that I can offer for this fuzzy cipher.

To say this film is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma is understatement. To say that it redefines the meaning of “Huh?!” may be more apt. A woman (Amy Seimitz) is jumped in an alley, tasered and then forced to ingest a creepy-crawly whatsit (all I know is that it appears to be in its larval stage) that puts her into a docile and suggestible state.

Her kidnapper however turns out to be not so much Buffalo Bill, but more Terence McKenna (I believe the original working title of this film was When Ethnobotanists Attack!) As he methodically cleans out her financial assets over a period of several days (with her “willing” cooperation) while encamped at her house, he next directs her to commit passages of Thoreau’s writings to memory (it was either that or waterboarding).

What happens next is…well, what happens next is, erm…OK we’ll just say it’s the creepy, fuzzily recollected part involving anal probes and such. All I know is that it takes place at a pig farm and fuzzily reminded me of that really creepy part of O Lucky Man! where Malcolm McDowell inadvertently stumbles into a top secret government medical research lab, where he’s tortured and then the next thing he knows he’s coming to on a gurney next to some poor wretched creature that appears to be half man and half sheep.

Anyhoo, the next thing the woman knows, she’s back behind the wheel of her car, parked alongside some cornfield off the interstate, and spends the rest of the movie slowly retrieving memories of her bizarre experience in bits and pieces. Oh, and along the way she meets and falls in love with this sullen dude (played by Carruth) who may have had the same exact experience! Wild and woolly metaphysical/transcendentalist hi-jinks ensue.

While I will give Carruth some points for originality (the closest I can come to a tagline for this one is A Man and a Woman meets Eraserhead) and find it admirable that he is making such an earnest effort to be compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, unfortunately he’s falling short, just this side of a glorified Twilight Zone episode.

This seems to be the latest entry in a burgeoning sub-genre that I have dubbed “emo sci-fi” (alongside the likes of Another Earth and Safety Not Guaranteed). That being said, if you are predisposed toward such challenging fare, I wouldn’t dissuade you from checking it out. And don’t feel bad if you don’t “get it” the first time you see it. I didn’t get it the second time I saw it, either.

Cop on the Edge, Drama, Family Issues, Neo-Noir

Schenectady, NY: The Place Beyond the Pines ***

September 14, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 6, 2013)

It’s official. Ryan Gosling is the McQueen of his generation. He has already aced the Taciturn Pro Driver (in the 2011 film Drive) and now with this weekend’s opening of Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, Gosling can add the Taciturn Pro Biker to his Steve cred.

Judging from the chorus of dreamy sighs that spontaneously erupted all about the auditorium when Gosling first appeared onscreen, perhaps “taciturn, ripped and tattooed” would be a more apt description of Luke Glanton, a carny who makes his living charging around the ‘cage of death’ on his motorcycle. When we meet him, the carnival is nearing the end of a run in Schenectady. Killing time between performances, Luke runs into Romina (Eva Mendes) a woman he had a fling with the previous time the carnival blew through town.

Romina is reticent to re-connect with the flighty Luke, for two major reasons: 1) The new man in her life (Mahershala Ali), and 2) A 1-year old bundle of joy named Jason that resulted from their fling. She doesn’t tell Luke about item #2, but he soon finds out anyway.

Now, Luke is determined to “do the right thing” and provide for his son. He promptly quits the carnival gig, accepts a job offer from a shady auto repair shop owner (Ben Mendelsohn) and sets about ingratiating himself back into Romina’s life (choosing to ignore that whole live-in boyfriend thing).

However, minimum wage isn’t fitting in with Luke’s timetable. In lieu of a raise, his boss helpfully suggests that he try robbing a few banks for supplemental income (a sideline that the auto shop owner himself has dabbled in on occasion). With his special skill sets, Luke discovers that he has a knack; soon earning himself a nickname in the local media as “The Moto-Bandit”.

Luke’s reckless approach to his newfound criminal career puts him on a karmic path with that of another young father with an infant son, a rookie cop named Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), and it is at this point that the film takes some unexpected turns. Without giving much away, we’ll just say Luke’s story is prologue for what evolves into a more sprawling, multi-generational tale in the Rich Man, Poor Man vein.

It can also be viewed as a three-part character study, with Officer Cross’s story taking up the middle third, culminating with a flash-forward 15 years down the road involving a tenuous relationship that develops between the now high-school-aged sons of the two men (Dane DeHaan as the older Jason and Emory Cohen as AJ Cross). There’s also a noirish subplot with echoes of James Mangold’s Cop Land; in fact one of its stars, Ray Liotta, is essentially reprising the same character he played there in Cianfrance’s film.

While it’s tempting to label Cianfrance’s screenplay (co-written with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder) as too sprawling at times (tossing everything into the mix…from classic film noir cycle tropes to Sirkian subtexts) he earns bonus points for coaxing uniformly excellent performances from the cast (particularly from Gosling, Cooper and the Brando-esque young Cohen), and for keeping true to its central themes: family legacies, the sins of the fathers, and the never-changing machinations of small town American politics.

Drama

In the pines: Therese *1/2

September 6, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on September 7, 2013)

First comes love, and then comes marriage. Or does it always necessarily occur in that order? For example, according to Wikipedia, a “marriage of convenience” is defined to be

…contracted for reasons other than the reasons of relationship, family or love…such a marriage is orchestrated for personal gain or some other sort of strategic purpose.

“I’m marrying you for your pines…I’m not ashamed of that…you love my pines, too. Only natural.” That’s our eponymous Therese (Audrey Tautou) pitching woo to her fiancé, Bernard (Gilles Lellouche).

Not the most romantic basis for a pending marriage, but apparently it was the neighborly thing to do for those living on adjoining estates in the bucolic pinewoods of southwest France in 1928. “So many ideas in your head,” Bernard teases, “…like everyone, a few wrong ideas.” To which she enigmatically retorts, “It’s up to you to destroy them.” Well, you know what they say…love is a many-splintered thing.

Thus Therese embarks (no pun intended) on a new life, replete with those free-spirited “ideas” in her head. If the prospect of a provincial marriage to a narcissistic dullard who cares more about preserving family cachet than attending to his wife’s happiness or respecting her opinions sounds depressing, you would be correct.

One of the “ideas” that married life cannot “destroy” concerns Therese’s feelings toward sister-in-law Anne (Anais Demoustier), with whom she has been friends since childhood (the prologue offers a montage of idyllic summers suggesting Therese may harbor unrequited feelings for Anne).

This could explain why Therese sabotages Anne’s passion for a hunky suitor and then begins her own downward slide into a permanent sulk over her unsatisfying marriage. Eventually, she can only see one way out. Certain plot elements recall Hitchcock’s Rebecca, yet the film conveys no sense of Hitchockian suspense.

Therese is the final work by director Claude Miller (The Accompanist, Alias Betty), who died in April of 2012 at age 70. Miller co-adapted with Natalie Carter from Francois Mauriac’s 1927 novel, Therese Desqueyroux (previously filmed by Georges Franju in 1962). The novel was inspired in part by the trial of one Madame Canaby, who was tried in Bordeaux back in 1906 for attempting to poison her husband (she was acquitted, but convicted on a lesser charge of forging prescriptions).

The romanticist in me desperately wishes I could pronounce the director’s swan song as a fine piece of work, but unfortunately this film is as dull and lifeless as Therese and Bernard’s doomed marriage. The locale is lovely, the cast gives it their best shot, but the film is undermined by one too many dangling narrative threads…leaving the viewer unable to see the forest for the trees.

Big Money, Drama, Family Issues

Our vines have sour grapes: You Will Be My Son **

September 6, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on September 21, 2013)

You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family. C’est le vie. That’s the gist of Gilles Legrand’s You Will Be My Son, an oft-told story of a dysfunctional family; in this case a vat of seething resentment fermenting in the confines of a Bordeaux region heirloom vineyard. I may not know a bottle of Batard Montrachet 1990 magnum from a boxed mountain Chablis in a taste test, but I do know my whines, and this vintage-style melodrama has a fine woodsy bouquet of neuroses; albeit with a rather predictable finish.

The relationship under examination is between father and son. Paul (Niels Arestrup) is a successful winemaker and owner of an estate valued at 30 million Euros. His son Martin (Larant Deustch) lives on the estate with wife Alice (Anne Marivin) and helps with office duties. Martin yearns to be given more responsibilities that will groom him for taking over the mantle , but the demanding and domineering Paul (a classic narcissistic personality) views Martin as the not-so heir apparent to the family business. Paul mocks his son when Martin reminds him about his college degree in wine making, telling him you must “have the palate” for it; he can only learn by doing.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to assess that Paul’s daily nitpicking is taking a psychic toll on Martin (“Do something about those nails,” Paul berates him at one point, grabbing his hand, “It’s unbecoming for a man.”). While Martin continues to sublimate his growing anger at his father (much to his wife’s chagrin), all those poisons that lurk in the mud are about to hatch out after Paul’s longtime family friend/estate manager Francois (Patrick Chesnais) reveals that has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

When Francois’ son Philippe (Nicolas Bridet) who has a stateside gig as “Coppola’s chief winemaker” comes home to spend time with his dying father, Paul’s mood palpably brightens. It turns out that Philippe, with his wine making talents, business savvy and personal charm, has all the requisite attributes of Paul’s idealized heir. Paul’s wishful thinking moves beyond the academic when he consults with his lawyer about the plausibility of adopting Philippe as his son. To Paul’s surprise and delight, it turns out to be doable (“It’s a wonder of our civil codes,” his lawyer says, glibly adding: “It’s led to many marvelous family feuds.”)

While it takes a while for the narrative to catch fire (the script, co-written by the director with Delphine de Vigan and Laure Gasparotto could have benefited from tightening), I was pulled in enough to develop a morbid curiosity as to which character was going to take the most shrapnel when this emotional powder keg inevitably made its earth-shattering ka-boom. I should warn you that none of the players in this soap opera are particularly likable, so it could be an uphill battle all the way for some viewers. Like some wines, you could store this one in the cellar to uncork when the mood dictates.

Action, Drama, Sports

Mano a mano: Rush ***

September 6, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on September 28, 2013)

I’ll admit up front that I don’t know from the sport of Formula One racing. In fact, I’ve never held any particular fascination for loud, fast cars (or any kind of sports, for that matter). If that makes me less than a manly man, well, I’ll just have to live with that fact.

However, I am fascinated by other people’s fascination with competitive sport; after all, (paraphrasing one of my favorite lines from Harold and Maude) they’re my species. There’s certainly an impressive amount of time, effort and money poured into this peculiarly human compulsion to be the “champion” or securing the best seats for cheering one on; even if in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t mean shit to a tree.

So what is it that motivates a person to squeeze into the cockpit of what essentially amounts to an incendiary bomb on wheels to go screaming around tight curves and through mountain tunnels at speeds up to 350mph? Well, aside from the intense adrenaline rush, the international fame and glory, the piles of dough and the unlimited sex (alright…perhaps I haven’t completely thought this through).

Apparently, back in the 70s, there was a “merciless” mano a mano sports rivalry (even sexier than the one betwixt Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky?!) involving a pair of European F1 drivers. Now, I’m taking director Ron Howard and screenwriter Peter Morgan’s word for it, because prior to watching the Frost/Nixon team’s latest fact-based drama Rush, I had never heard of Austrian race driver Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl) or his professional nemesis James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) who hailed from the UK. The two were a classic “oil and water” mix. Hunt was the reckless rock star type, reveling in all the hedonistic excess at his disposal. Lauda was decidedly more reserved and methodical, in both his professional and personal life.

The one thing that these two men did share in common was their lofty opinions of themselves. The precise origins of the rivalry are not made 100% clear; so I assume it’s your typical scenario of two males with high-T levels jockeying for the alpha position (don’t the sports announcers routinely refer to the drivers whizzing around the racetrack en masse as the ‘pack’? “He’s pulling ahead of the pack!”

As one might expect, there’s a lot of ear-plug inducing scenes involving loud cars navigating dangerously narrow roads at suicidal rates of speed, as the two rivals chase each other on assorted Grand Prix courses all around Europe and Asia.

What you might not expect, however, is the compelling dual character study that lies at the heart of the film. The “rivalry” reveals itself to be more of a relationship borne of a begrudging mutual respect; taking on an even more interesting dynamic following Lauda’s near-death experience in a horrific fiery crash on the deadly Nurburgring circuit in 1976.

Bruhl and Hemsworth both give commendable performances (each actor also bears an uncanny physical likeness to his respective real-life counterpart). Bruhl (who played the Nazi sniper “hero” in Inglourious Basterds) is proving himself a versatile character actor, and Hemsworth’s infectious energy and brash scenery-chewing recalls a young Peter O’Toole. The excellent Alexandra Maria Lara (The Baader Meinhof Complex) plays Lauda’s devoted wife Marlene, and Olivia Wilde appears as Hunt’s supermodel trophy wife, Suzy.

I found Howard’s film reminiscent of Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer, another sports movie that isn’t really so much about sports per se, as it is an examination of the obsessive nature of a person who strives to be a “champion”. In that 1969 character study, Robert Redford plays a talented but arrogant athlete who joins the U.S. ski team, immediately butting heads with the coach (Gene Hackman), his teammates and pretty much anyone else he comes in contact with (OK, he’s a dick). Like Hunt and Lauda (at least, as they are dramatized here), the Redford character only seems truly fulfilled when he’s “winning”…everything else is superfluous.

I also see a corollary with Howard and Morgan’s previous collaboration, suggesting a diptych. The adversarial dynamic between David Frost and Richard Nixon is similar to Lauda and Hunt’s. Frost was handsome, outgoing and had a rep as a “ladies man” (like Hunt) and Nixon was brooding and stand-offish, yet quietly crafty (like Lauda). Frost and Nixon circled each other warily, like two boxers vying for the champion’s belt. I’m not sure how I got from Formula One to politics. Say, is there some kind of trophy for what I just did?

Drama, On Politics, War(s) on Terror

Like drama for Dramamine: Captain Phillips **1/2

September 6, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on October 12, 2013)

In his “New Rules” segment on HBO’s Real Time program last week, Bill Maher issued an important advisement: “Before seeing the new Tom Hanks movie, Captain Phillips, liberals in the audience must be warned that yes, the bad guys in the movie are black…and we apologize.” Apology accepted, Bill. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not going to mention the teensy-weensy hint of colonial stereotyping I detected while watching the latest “ripped from the headlines” docudrama from British director Paul Greengrass.

Of course, I understand that Mr. Greengrass had no control over the fact that the pirates who hijacked the U.S. container ship Maersk Alabama and took its captain hostage back in 2009 happened to be Somali nationals. Or that the Navy Seals came riding in (technically…rowing in) like the US Cavalry (along with seemingly half of the American fleet in the region) to take out three pirates and rescue one white guy. I mean, you couldn’t fantasize a more perfect mash-up for a director who specializes in real-world-based political dramas like United 93 or taut thrillers like The Bourne Supremacy.

And Greengrass does indeed run with it, enlisting screenwriter Billy Ray (State of Play, Breach) who co-adapted from the real-life Phillips’ autobiography, A Captain’s Duty along with the author and Stephan Talty, as well as relentlessly utilizing his signature “I think I’m gonna hurl” pseudo-cinema verite shaky-cam (you’ll feel like you’ve been on a raft for three days by the end of the film).

There’s very little point in giving you a plot summary, as anyone who watched the events unfold on the nightly news will remember how it went down. Even someone too young to remember can logically assume that since it is based on the protagonist’s personal memoir about his ordeal with his captors, he doesn’t like, you know, (spoiler alert!) die at the end.

So the key to the success or failure of any such film dramatization lies in the artistry of its execution and/or visceral entertainment value; and from that purely cinematic standpoint, Greengrass does an expert job at ratcheting up the tension and the thrills (although I wish he could have kept that goddamned camera still long enough for me to regain my purchase at some point before the credits rolled).

In its best moments, the film recalls Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, in the way Greengrass uses the claustrophobic staging to present a cross-sectional microcosm of (in this case) the effects of globalization on impoverished third-world nations.

To his credit, Greengrass at least takes a stab at examining the sociopolitical factors fueling the pirates’ actions, particularly in several brief but well-played exchanges between Phillips (Hanks) and the Somali leader (Barkhad Abdi), but it feels perfunctory. Truth be told, Cy Enfield did a more effective job humanizing the “enemy” and reforming antiquated colonial stereotypes of Africans in his 1964 historical drama, Zulu.

Okay, the entertainment value is there, the acting is fine…so what’s my problem? I’m so glad you asked. It’s the same “problem” I had with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. While I’m proud to be a ‘murcan and all, and thank (insert local deity here) everyday that there are dedicated men and women much stronger and braver than I putting their lives on the line protecting “our” interests around the world 24/7, I just really get uncomfortable with this whole booyah kill mission thing that we do so (disturbingly) well.

Greengrass tries for a hole-in-one, but drives his movie ass-over-teakettle into the same fist-pumping for the death squad sand trap Bigelow did. I guess I’m tired of expecting a Secret Decoder Ring, only to discover at the end of the day that it’s just another crummy commercial…in this case, for American exceptionalism.

Anyone for a nice cup o’ hubris? Ovaltine?

Behind the Music, Drama

Low country + western: The Broken Circle Breakdown **

September 5, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on November 23, 2013)

The Kingdom of Belgium is renowned for its Flemish painters and chocolatiers, but its thriving bluegrass scene has been perennially overlooked. Until now. Once meets Scenes From a Marriage in a generally well-acted but somewhat overwrought 3-hankie mellerdrama called The Broken Circle Breakdown.

If you love the sound of banjos, mandolins, and fiddles, topped off by them good old-timey close harmonies, you may be more receptive to this little ditty ’bout Jack and Diane…I mean, Kris and Rita…sorry, Elise and Didier, two Flemish kids livin’ in the low lands.

One fateful day, Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) a banjo player in a bluegrass band, waltzes into a tattoo parlor, where he Meets Cute with the fetching, well-inked proprietress, Elise (Veerle Baetens). When he asks her who the “greatest musician of all time” is, she says Elvis. Pshaw, says Didier, the correct answer is “Bill Monroe”. Who? she says…and they’re off.

Technically, I’m getting ahead of myself, as director Felix Van Groeningen (who co-adapted the screenplay with Carl Joos) elects to use the flashback/flash-forward device we’ve seen in similarly non-linear romantic relationship narratives like Two For the Road, Annie Hall, (500) Days of Summer and the aforementioned Bergman film.

We strap in and join Elise and Didier for a ride on the roller-coaster of Love, Marriage and Parenthood over a period of 9 or 10 years, through sickness and health, good times and bad times, joy and sorrow (mostly accentuating the sickness, bad times and sorrow).

The musical performances by Elise and Didier’s bluegrass outfit (The Cover-Ups of Alabama) are heartfelt (I’m curious if the actors actually did their own singing and playing). Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the drama.

The story runs wildly off track once someone has a grief-induced onstage meltdown, resulting in a bizarre political rant that seems to have party-crashed from a wholly different narrative. I’m not the world’s biggest country and/or bluegrass fan, but in this case, I could have used less soap-and more Opry.

Drama, Family Issues, On Politics, War(s) on Terror

Homeland insecurity: Torn ***

September 5, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on November 23, 2013)

In the wake of the recent LAX shooting, The Islamic Monthly ran an interesting piece by its Senior Editor Arsalan Iftikhar, who made this pithy (and prescient) observation:

Now, the same right-wingers who would shout “terrorism” from the rooftops if the LAX airport shooter was a Muslim will likely avoid using the word “terrorism” at all since the shooter was a white Italian dude from Jersey. They will characterize this non-Muslim terrorist as a crazy kooky loner whose undiagnosed mental-health issues or work-related stress probably led to the attacks.

Also, these same right-wingers who always call for the “racial profiling” of Arabs and Muslims after every terrorist attack will now be silent since they would now have to call for the racial profiling of every 20-something white dude from New Jersey.

As if on cue, there’s a new indie called Torn (running in limited engagements) that tackles that meme head on. Set in a quiet Bay Area bedroom community, Jeremiah Birnbaum’s modestly budgeted drama opens with a dreamy, lazily-focused montage of pure, tranquil suburban-American imagery: shoppers at the mall, doing what shoppers do.

Shortly after the segment dissolves into heavenly white light (rarely a good sign), we learn through a TV news bulletin that Something Terrible Has Happened. There’s been an explosion at the mall (possibly a gas line), and there are fatalities.

The TV is in the home of an upscale Pakistani-American couple, Maryam (Mahnoor Baloch) and her husband Ali (Faran Tahir), both just home from work and setting the table for dinner. On their answering machine, they hear a message from their son, telling them he’s headed for the mall after school (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to tell you what that portends).

As the couple begins to deal with their soul-shattering grief in the days following the tragedy, Maryam forms a bond and strikes up a friendship with a woman named Lea (Dendrie Taylor), a divorced, financially-strapped single mother who has also lost a teenage son in the incident.

However, Maryam and Lea’s burgeoning relationship is about to hit a major roadblock. Police investigators discover irrefutable evidence that the explosion was caused by a homemade bomb. The detective in charge of the investigation (John Heard) informs Maryam and Ali that their late son is the prime suspect, and that the FBI has been called in.

Suspicion weighs even more heavily on the family when the local media dredges up the fact that Ali himself had been picked up and interrogated after 9/11 (although never charged). Lea gets caught up in the rush to judgment, lashing out at Maryam and then giving her the cold shoulder. Lea’s moral superiority is short-lived. It turns out another teenager killed in the explosion had been bullying her son; he had vowed revenge and is now being investigated as well (the shoe is now on the other foot).

Despite the setup, the odd red herring and the fact that there is a “reveal” in the final shot, Birnbaum’s film is not a “whodunit” so much as a “why do we?”. Why do we rush to judgment? Why do we always fear the Other? And why do we always find it so difficult to look in the mirror?

Screenwriter Michael Richter wisely keeps the police procedural elements on the back burner, instead focusing on these central questions, via the shifting dynamics of Maryam and Lea’s relationship.

In other words, by handing each protagonist a glass house and a bag of rocks, he is leveling the playing field; thereby he is daring the viewer (by proxy) to cast the first stone after examining his or her own fears and prejudices. And for the most part, this device works quite well, thanks to strong performances from Baloch and Taylor. The message has been proffered many times before, but until it finally “catches on”, perhaps it cannot be repeated enough.

Drama, Dystopian, Fantasy

SIFF 2013: Die Wand **

September 4, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on May 25, 2013)

Adapting first-person narratives like Marlen Haushofer’s dystopian novel Die Wand (The Wall) for the screen can be a tricky affair. Consider Julian Roman Polsler’s film, wherein our heroine (Martina Gedeck) wakes up one morning and finds that an invisible, encircling “wall” has confined her within the perimeter of an Alpine lodge, with only a dog, a cow and woodland animals for company. As she adapts to her Robinson Crusoe lifestyle, she begins keeping a journal. Since she has no one to converse with, we get voice over narration. A lot of voice over narration. Gedeck (a skilled actress) is left with little to do but stare into space. There’s a lot of staring into space. Atmospheric, nicely shot, but ultimately it is little more than a picture postcard-festooned exercise in tedium.