Shooting Down Pictures

TSPDT all-time top 1000 rank #597
TSPDT 21st Century rank #3

This is the first of a series of entries reviewing candidates for a list of best films of the decade.

Even though this is just the first entry of a year-long project that will consider dozens of other films for my end of decade top ten, I’ll be damned if Yi Yi doesn’t make the final cut. Watching it this time (my third viewing, first since I saw it twice in the theater back in 2000), it is still the proverbial Movie I Wish I Could Make, as it embodies so much of what I love about movies.  It’s simple yet expansive, using the story of one family, the Jians, as the nucleus around which a world swarms, menacingly at times, in all its vast complexity. Not only is it a film about a world, but it’s a film about having a worldview; literally, how to look at the world.  For that, it’s a truly cinematic work, one of the few films of the past several years which, after watching it, you may find yourself looking at the world with a fresh pair of eyes.

The cinematic tag is something worth fighting for with this film, as no less a film critic than J. Hoberman once gave it the backhanded compliment of amounting to “great television,” a film that he claimed gained something from being watched on a small screen. Now I’m not one of those that considers television inferior to cinema, certainly not after experiencing the best of television dramas from this decade.  But there are qualities to Yi Yi that deserve, if not demand, a large screen to be truly savored.  What’s very un-television about Yang’s eye is its insistence on viewing action from a middle to wide distance:

Certainly these wide shot compositions are calling out to be admired in their own right, but they’re more than just impeccable objects of admiration. They reflect a way of seeing that’s practically Hitchcockian in its voyeuristic insistence on detachment, while remaining highly attentive to what’s going on within the frame.

Yang achieves a distancing effect with shooting through windows, literally reflecting a world that’s much bigger than a single direct gaze would otherwise suggest, while also drawing attention to our own everyday acts of voyeurism. With all respect to In the City of Sylvia, this film is a virtual lexicon in modes of people watching:

These filters and refractors do not so much eschew emotional involvement with the characters as complicate it by bringing a degree of awareness to our own act of witnessing their travails.  In other words, it gives us the space to reach out and embrace these characters of our own accord.

While much of these principles of looking at the world are implicit within the style of the film, the movie does locate these issues within the characters as well, especially with Ting Ting, the young daughter of the family who arguably experiences the most personal growth in the film due to her tumultuous experiences with family illness, friendship and romance. In one terrific sequence we get to share her worldview for a moment as she collects garbage from her apartment balcony.

She and we overhear her new neighbor on the phone –

:

then a cut to the neighbor’s daughter and her estranged boyfriend walking down the street far below –

and then a cut back to Ting Ting, whose matching shot implies her gaze at the couple, intrigued by their mysterious liaisons, a romance she has yet to experience for herself.

This mastery of the middle-to-long distance is maintained through nearly all of the film’s three hour length. There are barely a dozen close-ups, many of which involve (indirectly as well as directly) the Jian’s frail grandmother, who never speaks a word. Her close-up, the film’s first, provides the film with an elusive, fragile and soulful presence that haunts the rest of the film.

After grandmother suffers a debilitating stroke, rendering her unresponsive, the other family members are called upon to spend time talking to her in hopes of reviving her. These one-on-ones amount to revealing confessionals in which the characters basically offer a mirror glimpse into their hopes and fears.  It’s also visually the closest glimpses we get at each of them:

The art of seeing people becomes something explicit with the son Yang Yang’s fixation on capturing things that others can’t see, leading him to take photos of the backs of people’s heads:

One’s appreciation of the film’s visual ability to communicate meaning deepens when one realizes how much of the dialogue in the film amounts to the characters expressing despair or self-deception, barely able to connect with the words coming from others’ mouths. Which makes my favorite sequence all the more magical, one of the great depictions of the formation of friendship in all of cinema.  NJ (Wu Nien-Jien) meets with a prospective Japanese partner Ota (Issei Ogata) on a business dinner. They only share rudimentary English conversation skills, yet somehow they hit the same wavelength, thanks in part to Ota’s curious lack of inhibition mixed with a Zen-like wisdom (in a sense he’s Taiwan’s Japanese answer to the Magical Negro). They bond over a shared love of classical music, leading to a night at a karaoke bar whose anything goes mood, generated by Ota’s impulsive song selections, from Japanese pop to Beethoven, is the possible inspiration for NJ to call his long-lost sweetheart. It’s a sequence whose logic is subterranean yet intuitively on target, letting the mood of one moment wash into the next.

I haven’t even begun talking about the other brilliant nuggets of design to be found in this film’s script and editing, its dovetailing and doubling of character arcs and incidents along themes of art vs. commerce, individuality vs. conformity, and love lost, found and re-found.  There’s an almost scientific precision and modularity to its construction: it begins with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and a birth is celebrated exactly at the midway point. In some ways it’s one of the easiest films (for me at least) to admire and explicate its brilliance, like an ingeniously designed piece of programming code (I’m consciously invoking Yang’s IT background): hone in on any ten minutes and marvel at how pieces are laid in one scene to set up the next, or the one after that. And yet this film’s remarkable parts does not fully account for its overall effect, one of wonder, wisdom and the formation of personal values through hard experience and attentive engagement (visually, mentally, socially) with the world.

Obscure bonus trivia: I’m curious if anyone can name the scene in Yi Yi that has an audio reference to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (a film that Yang watched during production and loved). Impress me and I’ll see what I can do to reward your erudition…

Apologies to anyone trying to access any of the video essays for Shooting Down Pictures. It may not be until I get back from Asia and figure out a solution that they’ll be accessible again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Shooting Down Pictures #932: …And God Created Woman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP6-2pABXXs

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I’ve had some other non-Shooting videos removed by YouTube, but this consitutes my first creative effort being pulled from the site. Does anyone have any thoughts as to what options I have? Fight, flee, other?

I’m heading to Asia for ten days tomorrow, so I thought I’d tie up some loose ends and set a couple things on the table going forward…

We’re a week into the new year and neck deep in top ten lists cluttering the blogosphere, but I’d might as well put on record on this site that my top ten list for films released in 2008 can be found on IndieWire as part of their annual poll of critics.  I’d also like to mention how proud I am to take part in this annual poll, given the caliber of critics participating, some of the finest voices covering mainstream and specialty cinema in the alternative press and the blogosphere.  I’ve followed this poll ever since it kicked off in 1999 when it was run by Dennis Lim at the Village Voice. Sadly, the first several editions of the poll are no longer online. Too bad since I was counting on referring to those poll results for another project I have warming up for this year – more on that further below.

In addition to the ballot I submitted to IndieWire, here’s an alternative list covering the ten best films I saw in 2008, regardless of their distribution status. Again the criteria I stick to is “how much do I wish I had made this film?”

1 – Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh) – If this world were fair, this movie would be getting the distribution and box office of any given Judd Apatow flick.  It’s as funny and funky as anything Apatow has done, but a heck of a lot smarter and genuinely thought-provoking about the role that happiness plays in one’s life and its impact on one’s social interactions, sometimes as much for the worse as for the better.  And it has a female character and a performance that should shame Hollywood for not coming up with anything as smart, funny,  and loveable for its own immense pool of actresses starving for a good role.
2 – The Class (Laurent Cantet) – I’m disappointed that this film hasn’t been getting more attention in the US – I think Sony Pictures Classics is screwing up the campaign for the film, despite it being the French submission to this year’s Foreign Film Oscar competition. It’s really one of the smartest, most immersive depictions of the process of institutional education. It’s funny, it’s dynamic, it’s amazingly naturalistic, and it has an equanimity towards all of its characters unique beauties and frustrating flaws that would make Jean Renoir proud.  With all due respect, it makes Half Nelson look half-baked.
3 – Wall-E (Andrew Stanton) - I’ve heard the backlash towards the film: how it supposedly “celebrates the end of culture” (Armond White) and its dumbed down, feel good take on an environmental apocalypse that is very much at risk of becoming reality.  People can be as demanding or implacable as they want, but as far as I’m concerned this film is a breakthrough in terms of articulating a social crisis and a moral ethos in a language that is eloquent, meaningful and yes, simple enough that an 8 year old can understand it.  And a big part of that has to do with how cinematic it is.  One day when I was comparing top ten lists with Richard Brody he commented that our appreciation of cinema shouldn’t be confined to films in their whole form, but in moments that sear themselves into our mind forever, which occur in any number of films, not just masterpieces.  Well my favorite movie moment of 2008 is from a masterpiece, and it’s the scene where Wall-E and Eva dance among the stars, a breathtaking expression of the lyrical in what’s probably the most musically constructed film of the year.
4 - Serbis (Brilliante Mendoza) - Give me this funky, lively, lived-in redefinition of the “flophouse” movie over the airless formalism of Goodbye Dragon Inn anyday. My original review at Slant
5 – The Last Mistress (Catherine Breillat) - Breillat’s enters into a “mature” phase, and I think she’s the better for it. As I wrote in my original review, “Breillat brings her indelible mix of braininess and rawness; mixing verbal and physical sexual exchanges, she aims both high and low where other films settle for a tastefully soft-core middle”
6 – Tony Manero (Pablo Larrain) – Can’t believe this still doesn’t have a distributor.  Wickedly smart and uncompromising, it takes the Dardennes Brothers’ aesthetic to slap them in the face for everything they pretty much stand for, which at this point in their career, they kind of deserve.
7 – Tulpan (Sergey Dvortsevoy) – Despite its jaw-droppingly choreographed long takes, this one kind of crept up on me in terms of its overall impact, but I simply cannot deny its lasting power. I guess if it weren’t for Wall-E this film would get my vote for Moment(s) of the Year.
8 – Taking Father Home (Ying Liang) – full disclosure: my company dGenerate Films is the non-theatrical distributor of Taking Father Home. I can’t think of a better film to come out of China to describe the spiritual dysfunction afflicting so many of that country’s people in the wake of go-go capitalism. One of the decade’s best debut films, it’s scorchingly raw yet beautifully composed.
9 – Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle) – “It romanticizes poverty and makes it seem fun” the critics say.  Bollywood has been turning poverty into joyous cinema for over 60 years, so you know what, get a clue. This film honors that tradition, taking Bollywood’s penchant for fabulous, borderline credible narrative incident as an occasion to hit audience’s aching wish fulfillment smack between the eyes, and does as good a job at it as any of the classics.  And frankly it’s amazing to have a film that so blatantly depicts the injustices and suffering of an entire people in such wide distribution. For that, those tears of joy at the end are very much earned.
10 – Trouble the Water (Carl Deal, Tia Lessin) – The best doc released in the US this year, the audience-pleasing but fairly pointless Man on Wire be damned. Though I did see at least a couple of even better documentaries from China, as part of my duties as programmer for dGenerate, but I can’t disclose what they are at this time. It sucks because I feel that I’m in a position to advocate for their release, and yet due to my position I have to keep mum until my company has resolved its interest in these titles.  Hopefully this year, you’ll be hearing a lot about these films, and soon.

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I should also mention that I was tapped this week to select my least favorite film of 2008 by the New York Magazine Vulture blog. And so I obliged – the resulting paragraph was quite cathartic to write, I must say.

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Next, to celebrate the conclusion of another year of the Shooting Down Pictures project, I’d like to highlight my ten favorite films out of the 48 that I watched for the project in 2008.

Wild River – the last Shooting Down Pictures film that I saw in 2008 may very well have been my favorite.
Night of the Demon - with an amazing video essay contribution by Chris Fujiwara, author of Jacques Tourneur: a Cinema of Nightfall
The Art of Vision
Murder by Contract
El Verdugo
Days and Nights in the Forest - with two video essays by filmmaker Preston Miller
Two English Girls - with video essay by C. Mason Wells of IFC
La Region centrale
Grey Gardens - with video essay by Vadim Rizov, the Kevin Durant of film critics
The Outlaw Josey Wales - with video essay by the one and only Matt Zoller Seitz

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Finally, I want to announce (somewhat tentatively) that, in anticipation of the inevitable onslaught of “best of the decade” lists towards the end of this year, I’m planning to watch several dozen films from the ’00s as I prepare my own list. It will be a combination of catching up with highly lauded titles I haven’t seen, revisiting favorites of each year to reassess their value, and reassessing films that were highly lauded but that somehow didn’t do it for me (i.e. Inland Empire).

First up are a few films by Taiwanese directors, in commemoration of my upcoming trip to Taiwan.  One is Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (which last time I checked was my favorite film of 2000), and then a couple by Hou Hsiao Hsien: Cafe Lumiere, which is probably my favorite Hou film of the decade, and Flight of the Red Balloon, which, as good as it is, feels like a European variant with more expressive acting, but essentially seems to overlap a good deal with its predecessor. That didn’t stop the IndieWire critics from voting it the best film of 2008 - and I would wonder if those elements had everything to do the film – Hou’s first shot in the West – being the first of his films to claim top prize in a critics poll.  I don’t begrudge the film or its supporters (of which I am one – indeed, I was quite shocked when I listed 10 films I liked more than Flight of the Red Balloon; not a bad year for movies at all) anything; the film deserves the praise it’s received. I just wonder why an earlier, and to my mind better film of his didn’t fare as well.

Maybe it’s just the accumulation of Hou’s reputation over recent years, vaunted especially by the Hou 101 primer known as Three Times that gave people what I consider to be easy gateway into understanding his aesthetic.   The “problem” – for me at least, is that all this praise lavished on Hou’s recent work seems to overshadow his earlier work, which to me is more unique and challenging in terms of how it constructed a new dialect of cinema not found elsewhere, not even in the cinema of Yasujiro Ozu, to which he is often compared.  The recent stuff, especially from Millennium Mambo onward, is still uniformly great, but it strikes me that Hou has taken his aesthetic in a direction that feels more in line with a global art festival aesthetic of masterful choreographed long takes helmed by the virtuoso Mark Li Ping-Bin.  It wasn’t always like this – one could argue that the most amazing thing about early Hou wasn’t his use of long takes, as beautiful as they were, but his astounding and at times even confounding editing schemes, where the sequence and emphasis of narrative events would be distorted to create a wholly new approach to storytelling that mimcked and shed light on how the human mind constructs memory (and without resorting to the easy tricks found in Christopher Nolan’s Memento).  So I hope that in the midst of all the hoopla surrounding Flight of the Red Balloon, viewers might dig back a little and check out films like A Time to Live and a Time to Die, City of Sadness, or The Puppetmaster, which as a trilogy offers many times more depth and genuine sense of time, place and cinema than Three Times.

Despite these protestations, I’m not opposed to reconsidering my position. And so I’ll be watching Cafe Lumiere and Flight of the Red Balloon back to back in the next week or so, helping to kick off what I hope will be a year-long rundown of the decade’s best (and supposedly) best films.

This is the thid (and my personal favorite) of the video series I produced based on a roundtable conversation with several film critics on the films of Clint Eastwood. 

We generally recognize Eastwood as a director of great films – but is there a distinctive Eastwood aesthetic, a look or a shot that distinguishes him and gives definition to his world? This video attempts to answer that question:

WARNING - possible spoilers contained within video.

The second installment of the video series I produced based on a roundtable conversation with several film critics on the films of Clint Eastwood. Today’s is on <i>Gran Torino</i>.  Unfortunately YouTube and Warner Brothers have blocked embedding on this video – so you’ll have to click here to view it. In that case you’d might as well rate it or leave a comment on the clip’s YouTube page, or leave a comment here.

I’d also like to include some comments to the video that someone left me on Facebook, which I haven’t had the opportunity respond to yet until now:

“While I appreciate the critical take on Gran Torino as *racist*, I do think that overlooks a level of complexity built into the film.  Perhaps it is yet further playing into stereotypes of Asians as model minorities, etc., and the minority that it is still safe to mock, but I do think that misses the mark.  There’s likely a reason that Eastwood/screenwriter chose the Hmong community, as opposed to say a Chinese, Japanese, or Vietnamese community, given that the Hmong in Americans have faced greater levels of poverty and have not fit so neatly into the model minority category.

It also seems to me that this film cannot simply be dismissed as racist and focused entirely on a white, authoritarian savior.  This is the only major American film I’ve seen this year that gives a complex treatment to the lives of relatively poor Asian-Americans.  The final scene, in my opinion, with Thao driving the Gran Torino with Daisy by his side. is one of the most compelling visions of what it might mean to “become American” that I’ve seen in years.  Thao takes his place behind the old American vehicle, with an American dog at his side, driving into the sunset.

Walt comes to play a part in Thao’s family reluctantly, and perhaps, in a perfect world, we wouldn’t need the white central character to draw mainstream audiences into this kind of story.  (I guess we could refer to Slumdog at this point.)  But it strikes me as moving, and extraordinary — and not in a condescending or racist way — that Eastwood decided to take on this story, about this community, at this late, perhaps final stage in his career.  The entire film seemed to me to be trying to show how America is changing today, in the way it has always changed (as Kowalski became American, as his Irish and Italian friends became American).  The message of the film seemed to present a bracing, generous, and inclusive view of what it means to be American – a view that seemed fresh and welcome in a mainstream Hollywood movie.

I agree that the ending was somewhat fairy tale and pat, but I didn’t find it off-putting.  I agree that it was Eastwood playing through characters he’s played before, and the archetypes those characters built on, but there was an interesting renunciation of violence (in the film’s own martyred vision) by Walt after a lifetime of being haunted by his own violence in Korea.  (The parallels to Eastwood’s own film career and the roles he’s played in the past are unavoidable.)

The greatest weaknesses of the movie were probably its reliance on Walt’s spoken commentary to tell us what he was thinking, and the somewhat uneven performances from the largely amateur cast.

In any event, I did feel that this was a great American movie, and, as many have said, the first movie of the Obama generation. By that I mean that this is a film that changes the mainstream Hollywood view, and mainstream America’s view, of what it means to be American.”

I certainly appreciate – and agree in part – with this response, and I’ve taken into consideration to what extent the film is not racist but about racism, depicting racism as a sort of rite of passage for how American men come to estabish a unique, somewhat perverse rapport with each other, a tradition into which the Hmong kid gets initiated. This certainly speaks true of my own life experience, especially when I was a kid doing blue collar summer jobs.  I agree that the film’s meditations on violence – and the Eastwood character’s ultimate act – makes for a poetic rebuttal against how Eastwood’s screen persona has traded in violence for most of his career, and if you consider that this may be Eastwood’s final film, the effect is incredibly moving. 

It’s interesting that the Asian American community, from what I’ve been able to gather at least among friends, has for the most part embraced this film as a fair and honest depiction of racism towards Asians in America, and one that gives sufficient prominence to its Asian characters and culture.  All the same, I stand by my complaint that the film ultimately disempowers the Asian characters for the sake of emphasizing the Eastwood character’s melodramatic sacrifice. It’s a post-colonial trope that is already looking stale in the 21st century.  In that sense, I don’t think it’s so much the first movie of the Obama generation as the last movie of the McCain generation – it’s told more from a McCain than an Obama point of view.  A truly Obama movie would tell the story from the Hmong kids’ point of view, not from the creaky old racist man on his last legs. Hopefully the last shot of the Hmong kids riding Eastwood’s car has a symbolic resonance to it – that minorities will have more opportunities to drive Hollywood movies in the near future.

And even if Gran Torino is ultimately more of a McCain movie than an Obama movie, I still prefer its wacky, brutal but unexpectedly self-deprecating honesty over the square seriousness we’re seeing in decidedly Obama-era cinema: Rachel Getting Married, Wendy and Lucy and Milk, films that, while well-meaning and competently executed, have almost nothing in them that challenges their own safe liberal worldview.

WARNING – possible spoilers contained within video.

Some time ago I had the pleasure of sitting among some of my respected colleagues to discuss the films of Clint Eastwood, who had another remarkable year in 2008 with the release of both Changeling and Gran Torino.  The round table was hosted by Evan Davis of Film Comment and included:

• Ed Gonzalez, Film editor, Slant Magazine
• Akiva Gottlieb, Contributor, The Nation & Slant
• Kent Jones, Editor-at-large, Film Comment
• Karina Longworth, Editor, SpoutBlog

To listen to the entire audio podcast, visit the Filmlinc blog.

I took choice segments of the commentary to produce three short videos on Clint Eastwood. Today I present the first of them, on Changeling.  Have a look and listen, and if you like it well enough, please rate it. also, see if you can figure out which of these critics picked Changeling as their worst film of 2008:

For this video essay, I’m especially pleased to have as guest commentator someone who I’ve known for almost as long as I’ve been discussing movies on the internet.   Back when I was a frequent visitor on the iMDb Classic Film board, I considered Christianne Benedict - known there as Chris-435 – to be one of the most readable and down-to-earth participants around.  Chris’ enthusiasm for movies really comes through in her writing, especially when it comes to horror.  You can find many of Chris’ writings at krelllabs.blogspot.com

If you like this video, please rate it!

The end is in sight.  After pushing hard through the holidays, we have now reached the magical 950 mark. With 50 films to go, I am poised to complete this project (assuming I can find access all the remaining titles) by the end of the year, at the rate of one film per week. There’s no guarantee that I’ll be able to keep that pace through the entire year (despite averaging two a week for the past two months), but it’s a reasonable goal for the year.

What’s heartening is that despite the recent binge of viewing and reviewing for the project, I feel that my ability to describe something vital and essential about each film has held.  Posting my latest entry on Elia Kazan’s Wild River prompted me to revisit my entry on Kazan’s America, America from over a year ago, to see if there have been any developments in my writing.  The Wild River write-up is longer than my usual entries; lately I’ve taken a lot of pleasure in packing as much evocative detail into as few words as possible. But one thing I hope is evident by comparing the two reviews is a moving away from auteurist assumptions, reading into films as saying something about their maker, as if I were their shrink.  I’m much more interested these days in getting to concrete descriptions about how a film works and how it feels to watch it.  The third paragraph of the Wild River review is what I want to do more of, trying to get as precise as possible with what’s happening. It may very well eventually lead to just writing about moments as opposed to films. We’ll see.

I haven’t posted a video essay lately, partly because of the increased pace of text entries, but I certainly have not been idle on the multimedia front. This week there will be four video essays posted here, one on a recent film entry and the other three as the video version of a critics roundtable in which I recently participated.  And I’m hoping that the video content will get more interesting and unique as the year goes on.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share the films that are remaining on the project (barring another shuffling of the deck by the list master). There may come a point when I ask for assistance in locating some of these titles.  Stay tuned…

TSPDT Rank – Title – Director

511    -    Hart of London, The    -    Chambers, Jack
610    -    Heimat [TV]    -    Reitz, Edgar
646    -    Hitler: A Film from Germany    -    Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen
683    -    Limite    -    Peixoto, Mario
740    -    Lusty Men, The    -    Ray, Nicholas
798    -    Plácido    -    Berlanga, Luis García
829    -    Under the Bridges    -    Kaütner, Helmut
865    -    Getaway, The [1972]    -    Peckinpah, Sam
866    -    Rocker [TV]    -    Lemke, Klaus
897    -    Yesterday Girl    -    Kluge, Alexander
898    -    Starship Troopers    -    Verhoeven, Paul
900    -    Lucifer Rising    -    Anger, Kenneth
903    -    Devil in the Flesh    -    Autant-Lara, Claude
905    -    Shin heike monogatari    -    Mizoguchi, Kenji
907    -    Sur, El    -    Erice, Victor
909    -    Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, The    -    Buñuel, Luis
910    -    My Apprenticeship    -    Donskoi, Mark
915    -    King of the Children    -    Chen Kaige
919    -    Bienvenido Mister Marshall    -    Berlanga, Luis García
920    -    Luna    -    Bertolucci, Bernardo
925    -    Female Trouble    -    Waters, John
926    -    Bad Timing    -    Roeg, Nicolas
928    -    Second Breath    -    Melville, Jean-Pierre
930    -    Song of Ceylon    -    Wright, Basil
931    -    Pillow Book, The    -    Greenaway, Peter
934    -    My Friend Ivan Lapshin    -    Gherman, Alexei
939    -    Sign of Leo, The    -    Rohmer, Eric
944    -    Heaven Can Wait [1943]    -    Lubitsch, Ernst
945    -    Moonrise    -    Borzage, Frank
947    -    Seven Brides for Seven Brothers    -    Donen, Stanley
948    -    Tout va bien    -    Godard, Jean-Luc & Jean-Pierre Gorin
950    -    Passion of Anna, The    -    Bergman, Ingmar
955    -    Maskerade    -    Forst, Willi
957    -    Letter to Three Wives, A    -    Mankiewicz, Joseph L.
958    -    Far Country, The    -    Mann, Anthony
962    -    Lost Horizon    -    Capra, Frank
964    -    Dark Eyes    -    Mikhalkov, Nikita
965    -    Blast of Silence    -    Baron, Allen
966    -    Central Station [1998]    -    Salles, Walter
968    -    California Split    -    Altman, Robert
971    -    One, Two, Three    -    Wilder, Billy
970    -    Ladies’ Man, The    -    Lewis, Jerry
974    -    Strangers When We Meet    -    Quine, Richard
975    -    Toute une nuit    -    Akerman, Chantal
978    -    Bells of St. Mary’s, The    -    McCarey, Leo
986    -    White Shadows in the South Seas    -    Van Dyke II, W.S.
991    -    People on Sunday    -    Siodmak, Robert & Edgar G. Ulmer
994    -    Time to Love and a Time to Die, A    -    Sirk, Douglas
995    -    Dracula [1958]    -    Fisher, Terence
999    -    My Love Has Been Burning    -    Mizoguchi, Kenji

Screened January 3 2008 on DVD in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT #896  IMDb Wiki

I generally groan at the creakily subjective categorizing of film directors employed by Andrew Sarris in his American Cinema, but in the case of Elia Kazan I tend to agree with his label of “less than meets the eye.”  The often hysterical displays of moral angst and sexual neurosis among his Method ensemble in A Streetcar Named Desire [TSPDT #356], East of Eden [TSPDT #583] and On the Waterfront [TSPDT #104] (where the most histrionic performer is Leonard Bernstein’s score) may have broken taboos in the Eisenhower era, but today they come off as Oscar bait bordering on camp, offering more heat than light.  In contrast to these films, Wild River is a revelation, both even-handed and even-headed, foregoing steroidal drama for the sake of taking in the full registers and rhythms of a way of life on the way of being literally drowned out of existence.

Kazan’s empathy for his subject matter is embodied in Montgomery Clift’s Tennesse Valley Authority agent charged with evacuating a prideful matriarch (Jo Van Fleet, magnificent) from her soon-to be submerged island on a newly-dammed stretch of the Mississippi. Clift occasionally succumbs to Method ham with a halting line delivery or twitchy mannerism, but mostly his eyes convey his character’s liberal earnestness in trying to win through patient, reasoned conversation.  Similarly, Kazan’s town hall pacing gives time for practically every contending point of view to have its say, and his autumnal location camerawork achieves an authenticity of place and way of life that’s hardly to be found elsewhere in his oeuvre.

For once, Kazan’s theater-bound allegiance to script and performance give way to moments of cinematic lyricism worthy of Ford, particularly in scenes between Clift and Lee Remick’s wistful young widow, whose exchanges are performed with such exquisite timing that it’s breathtaking.  For once, the pscyhological and romantic strife of Kazan’s characters are largely internalized with nuanced body language, and expressed as equally by the film’s masterful light. Clift and Remick’s casual introduction elides into a wordless riverside passage where the distant sounds of hymns being sung over the current’s gurgle, conveying a romanticism so subtly natural that it stealthily sets up a knockout blow in Remick’s dilapidated house, where Remick’s heartbreak and sexuality quietly arise among increasingly looming hues of sunset and shadow.

The film was an immediate flop upon release, its concern with the Depression-era South seeming hopelessly unfashionable, its quiet treatment of sex insufficient to arouse audiences. In retrospect, its measured concern with social progress in the South, especially in its attentiveness to racial politics, gives it a rare prescience towards the civil rights struggle that would dominate the decade to follow.  But above all, its sensitivity and beauty tower over much of Kazan’s other work, and American cinema.

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