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Nine - PG-13 - 110 min - Scope
A = Auditorium
S = Screening RoomRob Marshall's flawed but frequently dazzling Nine is a hot-blooded musical fantasia full of song, dance, raging emotion and simmering sexuality. We get to watch British acting dynamo Daniel Day-Lewis be Italian as Guido Contini, a genius director of the swinging Sixties (ciao, Federico Fellini) struggling to put the movie in his head up on the screen. That movie concerns the women in his life — mother (Sophia Loren), wife (Marion Cotillard), muse (Nicole Kidman), mistress (Penélope Cruz), reporter (Kate Hudson), colleague (Judi Dench) and whore (Fergie). With an indisputably gifted actor playing ringmaster to such feminine life force, what's not to like? You could argue that Nine, a 1982 Broadway hit spun off from Fellini's own 1963 psychodrama, 8 1/2, and revived in 2003, was never the equal of its source. But Maury Yeston composed a score of surpassing beauty. The challenge for Marshall, following his Oscar-winning Chicago, was to bring another hallucinatory musical to the screen without repeating himself or dimming the material's blazing, untamed theatricality. By my score card, Marshall hits more than he misses. Those who hated his music-video editing in Chicago will hate it here. He errs by cutting three great songs ("Getting Tall," "Be On Your Own," "The Bells of St. Sebastian") for three inferior ones. "Cinema Italiano," sung by Hudson, is a tacky, overproduced misfire. He also shortchanges the influence of Catholicism on this man-child, and keeps Guido's nine-year-old alter ego too much in the shadows. Otherwise, his work is visionary and electric. And the script, by Michael Tolkin and the late, much missed Anthony Minghella, is uncommonly witty. Guido begins the film at a press conference telling reporters that to talk about a movie is to spoil its mystery. So I won't intrude except to say that Day-Lewis (who replaced an exhausted Javier Bardem) handles his two songs in high style and acts the role like the maestro he is, even if he looks as Italian as Big Ben. The women are smashing. Kidman tosses off her big number ("Unusual Way"), but Fergie sells hers ("Be Italian"). Dench is a sassy delight. Cruz does wonders as the mistress, sizzling in a rope dance ("Who's afraid to kiss your toes, I'm not") and going on to break your heart when Guido breaks hers. Best of all is Cotillard as the wife, baring her soul in "My Husband Makes Movies" and her body in a new number ("Take It All") that lets her throw the bum out. Cotillard, beautiful and bruising all at once, is perfection. As Marshall gathers his cast together for a finale with cinematographer Dion Beebe, costume whiz Colleen Atwood and production designer John Myhre working at their highest capacity, Nine fires on all cylinders. As Guido sings, "What's a good thing for if not taking it to excess?" Prego. Review by Peter Travers, rollingstone.com
A Single Man - R - 99 min - Scope
A = Auditorium
S = Screening RoomThe face of grief that the actor Colin Firth wears in “A Single Man” is crumpled and gray. There is little movement in the face initially: it’s a beautiful and gently furrowed mask, not yet old, despite the small brushstrokes of white at the temples. You might think that gravity alone was tugging at its mouth. But George, the middle-aged professor and single man of the title whom Mr. Firth plays with a magnificent depth of feeling, has had his heart broken, and the pieces are still falling. The film, directed by Tom Ford, follows the outlines of the landmark 1964 novel of the same title by Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986), the openly gay British-born author whose story “Sally Bowles” was turned first into the play “I Am a Camera” and later the musical and movie “Cabaret.” An intensely, at times uncomfortably, intimate work of fiction, “A Single Man” condenses George’s story — much of his very life — into one emotion- and event-charged day. What makes the day special, and the book too, is George’s existential condition. George is single. And he is a man. But he is also a homosexual, which helps set him and his lusting, fading body apart from almost everyone in his life. But other things distinguish George, including his profound grief over the death of his longtime lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), seen in intermittent flashback. The film opens with an image of George slowly sinking naked in water, a vision suggestive of rebirth and fatal submersion. This is immediately followed by a starkly different image of him slowly entering, as if in a trance, a disquieting tableau in which Jim and a terrier lie dead in a snowy field next to a wrecked automobile and a large, vivid blot of blood. Carefully, George lowers himself next to his dead lover and tenderly kisses his mouth, a gesture that seems to cause George — who had actually been sleeping and presumably dreaming — to wake in his bed. Numbness follows, as do routine, work, sorrow and perhaps another kind of awakening. Set in 1962 — news of the Cuban missile crisis crackles through the air — the film tracks George from the brutal loneliness of his morning through his day and transformative night. Along the way, he passes in and out of the Los Angeles area college where he teaches Huxley to bored students who stare at him with curiosity when the subject turns to invisible minorities and fear. He crosses paths and wits with a flirty student, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), and a charming hustler, Carlos (Jon Kortajarena), while also making time for his close friend, Charley (Julianne Moore), a British expat like George. At one point, he buys some bullets. It’s axiomatic, at least for Chekhov and a lot of Hollywood directors that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third. Mr. Ford, who shares screenwriting credit with David Scearce, introduces a gun largely because the novel has so little obvious dramatic tension. The gun is a matter of narrative convenience that sometimes works, if sometimes not, with the bits Mr. Ford borrows from Pedro Almodóvar and Wong Kar-wai. Mr. Ford, for instance, partly frames George’s encounter with the hustler in front of a billboard for Hitchcock’s “Psycho” featuring a wild-eyed Janet Leigh, an image that recalls a similar shot in Mr. Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother” and invokes the unsettlingly sexual menace of “Psycho.” Bringing Hitchcock and Mr. Almodóvar into the picture is risky because it creates a ridiculously lofty level of expectation. O.K., show me, you think. (It also intimates that the director and the audience belong to the same cine club, which can seem like a form of pandering.) But Mr. Ford, one of the most famous names in fashion and in luxury branding — he was the longtime creative director of Gucci — has taken an enormous chance just by taking on “A Single Man,” a foundational text in modern gay literature. The novelist Edmund White, for one, called the book “the first truly liberated gay novel in English.” That kind of legacy would have intimidated a lot of inexperienced directors, but Mr. Ford betrays few signs of intimidation. Mr. Firth’s delicately shaded performance no doubt helped steady Mr. Ford’s nerves. Certainly, the director knows how to exploit his actor’s reserve to terrific effect, as when he sets the camera in front of Mr. Firth’s face in one critical scene and just lets the machine record the tremors of emotion cracking the facade. It’s hard to know if Mr. Ford’s most flamboyant visual flourish, the use of a changeable palette to show shifts in George’s mood — the character’s normally gray face floods with color in the presence of another life force, like Kenny — was born out of a filmmaking conceit or a lack of confidence. Whatever the case, while the color changes are initially distracting, Mr. Firth’s performance soon makes you forget them. Mr. Ford has excellent taste in lead actors — Mr. Goode and Ms. Moore are very fine — and in cinematic influences. But he hasn’t fully learned how to work inside the moving image plane, a space in which people and objects must be dynamically engaged rather than prettily arranged, as they occasionally are here. And at times his taste seems too impeccable, art-directed for a maximum sale, as in a black-and-white flashback that brings to mind a perfume advertisement. In a film by Mr. Wong, whose influence is evident in the visuals and on the elegiac score, a luxuriant bloom, a curlicue of smoke and the curve of a lover’s back express what the characters themselves cannot, rather than the filmmaker’s own personal style. The composer Shigeru Umebayashi has written music for several of Mr. Wong’s films and contributed to this one. That Mr. Ford has placed so much weight on Mr. Firth suggests that he knows how valuable his actor is to his first effort. And while “A Single Man” has its flaws, many of these fade in view of the performance and the power of Isherwood’s story. Part of the radical importance of Isherwood’s novel is its insistence on the absolute ordinariness of George’s life, including with Jim, whose relationship together is pictured only briefly in both the novel and the film, and yet reverberates deeply (then as now). Mr. Ford’s single man might be less common than Isherwood’s, a bit too exquisitely dressed. But with Mr. Firth, Mr. Ford has created a gay man troubled by ordinary grief and haunted by joy, a man apart and yet like any other. Review by Manohla Dargis, nytimes.com
Fish Tank - NR - 123 min - DVD
A = Auditorium
S = Screening RoomHere's what interests the supremely talented British director Andrea Arnold: ordinary people's lives, poised between transformation and despair; the dire landscapes of sub-middle-class contemporary existence; dirty, dangerous and exceptionally hot sex. Given all that, it might seem surprising that Arnold has virtually no profile in the United States: Her debut feature, the terrific Glasgow-set erotic thriller "Red Road," came and went briskly in 2007, and her new "Fish Tank," which may be even better and has piled up various British and European awards, is likely to go almost unnoticed amid the blizzard of imports on the IFC Films slate. I'm telling you here and now to seek out "Fish Tank," either at a big-city theater or via VOD, because it's absolute dynamite. As cheesy as this is, you could say it combines the best elements of "Precious" and "An Education," and not be cheating. It's an explosive female coming-of-age story set against a dreary backdrop of poverty, abuse and neglect -- in this case the grim suburban housing developments on the working-class outer fringes of London (the title refers to a certain blocky style of glass-fronted apartment) -- with an astonishing breakout lead performance from Katie Jarvis, its teenage star. But while those two films, each of them admirable in its way, are legitimate Oscar contenders, "Fish Tank" is more likely to be a furrin-cinema footnote, too confrontational, too hardass and too implacably British -- in the gritty, contemporary, non-period sense -- for Yank art-house customers. Perhaps more to the point, Arnold's combination of dense London-dialect slang and hand-held camerawork, along with her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize her characters or deliver an easily digestible moral or message, makes "Fish Tank" a steep mountain to climb for many viewers. But that stuff is also exactly what makes it so great. Fifteen-year-old Mia (Jarvis) is indeed a misunderstood loner, derided by her slutty boozehound mom (another tremendous performance, from Kierston Wareing) and pursued by well-meaning but moronic social workers, who dreams of stardom as a hip-hop dancer. She's also a bottomless fount of poorly managed rage and emotion, a skinny wraith clad in track suits, too much bling, bad makeup and what my mother once called (in reference to a teenage girlfriend) "that stepped-on look." Furthermore, when Mia gets a look at Connor (Michael Fassbender), the genial, muscular Irish dude her mum has dragged home from somewhere -- well, let's just say that in her two features so far Arnold has breathed new life into those feminist film theories about the "female gaze." Arnold has an ecumenical appreciation for both male and female hotness, to be sure -- we see plenty of the curvaceous Wareing in her Frederick's of Hollywood-knockoff underthings -- but she provides Mia, and us, with a hugely lascivious serving of the impressively shirtless Fassbender, jeans barely hanging off his ass, as Connor sleepily makes tea in the kitchen. As for the Irish-German Fassbender, previously known for playing Bobby Sands in Steve McQueen's "Hunger," he's both a fine actor and a major star waiting to happen. This movie presumably won't get him there, but this guy is going to cause spontaneous combustion among numerous women, and no doubt quite a few men too. His Connor is simultaneously a likable character and a borderline-sinister one, which is a difficult combo to pull off. His avuncular interest in Mia is genuine, at first, and innocent enough given the context of the alcohol- and estrogen-infused apartment Mia shares with her mom and younger sister. But she keeps pushing at it and pushing at it, finding opportunities to touch him, picking fights and making up, staring at him with unbridled teenage lust. Hey, what's a guy to do? No, I'm not suggesting that what happens between Connor and Mia is her fault -- he's an adult, at least nominally, and she isn't. But the fact that it's a terrible idea to sleep with your mother's 35-year-old lover, whose provenance and background are unknown, doesn't mean that Mia doesn't want to. In Arnold's view, both in "Red Road" and here, human sexuality is an explosive device that doesn't defuse easily, and when it goes off its ripple effects can be negative, positive, surprising and devastating. (Be prepared: She's also disturbingly frank about the fact that illicit or forbidden sex is often the hottest -- however we may feel about it seconds or hours later.) On one level, "Fish Tank" tells a familiar, even archetypal, story, one that's been told in different social settings by Thomas Hardy and Henry James -- the seduction and disillusionment of a young girl -- but once again Arnold uses this familiarity as a source of strength. While the filmmaking world is awash with low-budget hyperrealism these days, few directors at any level have Arnold's gift for mounting suspense and powerful emotion, or her flair for thrilling, immediate images. (The terrific cinematography is by Robbie Ryan.) If what happens between Connor and Mia is in some sense predictable, it's because the mistakes they've made are so recognizable, and we understand the tragic or near-tragic territory where they're likely to lead. But I don't think "Fish Tank" is entirely or principally about that story. It's about Mia, one of the truly memorable, deeply flawed movie heroines of recent years, as she wanders across this exurban wasteland in her pose of aggrieved nobility, head-butting rival chicks on the playground or futilely struggling to free a half-starved horse tethered in a junkyard. It's about her startlingly moving hip-hop dance numbers, performed to borrowed CDs in a vacant apartment. (As in "Red Road," Arnold makes marvelous use of pop music, including Bobby Womack's heartbreaking cover of "California Dreamin'," which comes to stand for the impossible dreams Mia must give up.) Most magical of all is the fact that Arnold believes in the possibility of deliverance, even in a life apparently as closed-down and barren as Mia's. If I can borrow another feminist-theory term, Arnold argues for Mia's "agency," for the fact that her decisions are her own and that even the worst ones -- which get pretty bad, worse than I've told you -- contain the possibility of transformation. There's a scene at the end of the movie when Mia and her sister, in defiance of all plausibility, end up dancing to Nas' "Life's a Bitch" with their mother, who for most of the film has been a bitter, drunken harridan. (One of the film's ironies is that Connor is a much better and more loving parent -- at least, you know, up to a point.) There's no way Arnold should be able to pull off such a stereotypical chick-flick move in this universe, but something about the contrast between the driving nihilism of the music and the unexpected tenderness of the image totally destroyed me. Of course we recognize that this moment of reconciliation and female solidarity is fleeting, but it still unlocks a secret to this wonderful, challenging movie: None of these characters, as trapped by economics and psychology and low expectations as they may be, is doomed to do tomorrow exactly what they did today. What has not killed Mia -- and girlfriend is tough to kill -- has made her stronger. Review by Andrew O'Hehir, salon.com
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