Daily Archives: Tuesday, October 13, 2015

  • 99 Homes

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ramin Bahrani (2014)

    It’s good to have Andrew Garfield back after his Spider-Man exile.  In 99 Homes, he plays single parent Dennis Nash, a construction worker in Orlando, Florida.  A court confirms the foreclosure of the mortgage on Dennis’s house, where he lives with his mother, Lynn (Laura Dern), and his early teenage son, Connor (Noah Lomax).  They are ordered off what’s no longer their property and, after fruitless negotiation with the men evicting them, grab what possessions they can fit in their car and leave.  They find grotty rented accommodation, in a building full of people who’ve lost their homes for the same reason.  The man supervising Dennis’s family’s eviction is Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), a real estate broker who buys up properties vacated as a result of foreclosure.  Carver is assisted in his heartless house clearance work by police officers and a team of workmen, and both groups address him as ‘boss’.  To add insult to injury, Carver’s workmen appropriate the tools of Dennis’s trade; he goes to Carver’s business premises to insist on reclaiming them; the fuss he kicks up there catches Carver’s attention and he offers Dennis employment.  Dennis initially refuses but he’s desperate to get his home back and building jobs are hard to come by in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  Dennis goes to work for Carver, initially doing repairs on his recently acquired properties.   In a short space of time, he’s becomes Carver’s right-hand man.   Not much later, Dennis realises that Carver is not only a cold-blooded operator but an illegal one too.

    His first piece of work for Carver comes about when Dennis does what none of the other workmen on the team is prepared to do.  He enters a vacated house in which there’s sewage backup, holds his nose and clears the blockage, even though the stink makes him throw up.  This is an obvious yet effective foreshadowing of the story that follows.  The film’s moral scheme is familiar:  a conscientious but cornered man, in order to achieve what he sees as right, does wrong.  And Dennis Nash, in 99 Homes, must shoulder alone the ethical burden of corrupt behaviour that the director Ramin Bahrani implies is widespread in present-day America.   The story is nevertheless distinctive.  There have already been plenty of US movies featuring characters struggling with the aftermath of the global recession – Up in the Air, The Company Men and Blue Jasmine, to name but three.  I can’t, though, bring to mind another film in which the practical consequences of the financial crisis for homeowners are the dramatic centre in the way they are here.

    Ramin Bahrani conveys, in a series of eviction scenes, a powerful sense of what it must mean to lose the home you own; as Dennis Nash discovers for himself, getting to own a place different from the home you lost isn’t proper recompense.  When the people the other side of the front door plead for more time, Carver, the police officers who assist with evictions and, later in the film, Dennis explain that the property is now legally owned by the bank that foreclosed on it.  We see the fear and confusion of families; and, most poignantly, the shame that breadwinners, ordered to leave the premises immediately, feel in the presence of their incredulous dependants.  The playing in these eviction scenes is flawlessly naturalistic:  each brutal sequence is so well done that you look forward guiltily to the next one and another dramatic treat.  The evictions carried out by the empathetic, morally conflicted Dennis are the most upsetting.

    The screenplay, by Bahrani and Amir Naderi, relies on a couple of improbabilities.  Dennis’s mother asks no questions about the work he’s doing and, while it’s believable that Carver wants to give him a chance as a repair man, it’s harder to credit that Dennis would be entrusted with the crucial role he gets in the fraudster’s financially ambitious enterprise.  What is convincing, however, is that Carver is motivated to offer a hand-up to Dennis by the same anger that animates his whole life and his pathological if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them spirit; Michael Shannon gives Rick Carver the arresting combination of dead eyes and underlying urgency.  Richard Brody in the New Yorker describes Carver as ‘the Devil incarnate’, who ‘gets the best lines’.  I didn’t read the character so simply although Brody is right about the lines.  Carver’s big denunciation of ‘the system’ – ‘America doesn’t bail out the losers. America was built by bailing out winners … by rigging a nation, of the winners, by the winners, and for the winners’ – reads like (and is) too much but Shannon delivers this tirade expertly.  And Bahrani’s and Naderi’s less purple writing is often good:  as when Dennis asks Carver, about the racket he’s running, ‘Is it worth it?’, and Carver replies, ‘As opposed to what?’

    Dennis, after collaborating in doing bad and doing great harm to others, finally makes a very public confession – one that is cathartic both for him and for the film’s audience.  This outcome, although it’s predictable, is more qualified and downbeat than finales often are in crisis of conscience parables on the screen.  By this stage, Dennis is estranged from his family and he’ll now lose his freedom too but Ramin Bahrani is more ambiguous about the fate of Richard Carver.   Andrew Garfield is very convincing as a decent man undone by circumstance.  Pace Richard Brody again, the protagonist doesn’t quite sell his soul:  he remains both likeable and ambivalent but Garfield manages to make Dennis seem gradually more diminished, hemmed in by a guilty conscience.   He’s given fine support by Laura Dern, who’s especially impressive when Dennis’s funny, loving mother discovers what her son’s been up to:  Lynn doesn’t say much at first but Dern’s bright eyes are suddenly metallic and the set of her sunny face hardens with them.  Noah Lomax does well too as Dennis’s son – again not saying a great deal, but taking it all in.  Antony Partos’s score, although sometimes superfluous, has the good taste to avoid crass underlining of the moral of Ramin Bahrani’s compelling story.

    1 October 2015

  • The Death of Mr Lazarescu

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Moartea domnului Lazarescu

    Cristi Puiu (2005)

    4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, set in the last years of the Ceausescu regime, impressively balances recreation of the time and place with the creation of characters who are realised as people – as more than products of the particular setting.   The Death of Mr Lazarescu, the last Romanian film before 4 Months to achieve significant commercial as well as critical success in Western Europe and North America, is set in the present day;  but it shares this ability to make social and moral points without compromising the individuality of the people on the screen.  The plot is very simple:  Mr Lazarescu is a widower in his early sixties; he’s been suffering from a bad headache and sickness for several days; in the middle of one evening, he phones for an ambulance.  It takes time to arrive (real time in the film).  Once the ambulance – containing two paramedics and Lazarescu – sets off from the block of flats where he lives, the film becomes an odyssey, as a succession of Bucharest hospitals examine the elderly man and decide that he would be better off in a different hospital.  In the course of the night (the film ends in the early hours of the following morning) the patient’s condition deteriorates; a blood clot on the brain is diagnosed – as is terminal liver damage.

    As he drifts towards unconsciousness, what Lazarescu says – and of course he has to explain his symptoms repeatedly – makes less and less sense, to the doctors and nurses anyway.  The jumbled phrases make almost increasing sense to the audience:  we have been hearing about the illness from the point at which, although he may have drunk more than is good for him, Lazarescu is fully compos mentis.  The film – especially these exchanges with the medics – is extraordinarily well and sensitively written (by Cristi Puiu and Razvan Radulescu).  In the middle of one of his verbal rambles, Lazarescu says, ‘It’s a question of mortality’.  This is perfectly convincing as a lone sentence that happens to make sense; because it’s convincing in this realistic way, it also conveys Puiu’s principal theme with tremendous force.   The film is about the ebbing away of an individual life, as well the deficiencies of a national health system;   those deficiencies are more shocking because you’re made so intensely aware that Mr Lazarescu is, as Philip Larkin describes his own impending death, ‘spiralling towards extinction’.   The Death of Mr Lazarescu runs 154 minutes but it’s so relentlessly absorbing that it feels long only because of the sympathy that you feel for Lazarescu’s endless wait for the right treatment.  Puiu is remarkably subtle in the way he alters our perception of who is the central consciousness.  The first fifteen minutes or so are virtually all Lazarescu (and the cats who share his apartment).  His neighbours are introduced, then the paramedics; gradually, Lazarescu and Mioara, the woman paramedic trying to find the right care for him, become a double act.  HeHHe gets more ill and less vocal and the point comes when you suddenly realise that she has become the heart of the story.  (You’re as outraged at her treatment by senior medics as you’re distressed that Lazarescu’s voyage threatens to have no ending.)   Finally, Mioara goes off duty – she and the ambulance driver disappear, taking the well-used (soiled) stretcher with them – and Lazarescu moves back into focus, as he is shaved, stripped and prepared for the operating theatre.

    Cristi Puiu’s achievement in presenting characters as trapped in their situation but not defined by it is perhaps most brilliant in his depiction of the various hospital staff.   When they’re introduced into the story, you’re nearly always struck by their brusqueness and lack of kindness (this includes even Mioara’s first appearance); then, in most cases (there are two rebarbative exceptions), they say things and reveal facets that complicate them; their behaviour is made, if not likeable, at least understandable – it becomes not just hard to condemn them but difficult to be sure how else they could behave, in their working circumstances.  As a result, Mr Lazarescu is able to offer a much more powerful critique of public health care than would be possible if the doctors and nurses were shown as simply, heroically battling against inadequate resources.  Most of the hospital staff are not unconcerned about Lazarescu but humaneness is severely rationed; you get the sense that they have to develop distancing strategies to keep sane and keep the service running at all.  There’s next to nothing in the script and direction that’s surplus to requirements.  Puiu is highly aware of his ingredients and does different and resonant things with them:  for example, Lazarescu is accused of being a drunk by most of those he encounters but the last reference to alcohol – as it’s applied to his shaven head before his operation – has an ironically sacral quality.  Perhaps, though, the protagonist’s names – Dante Remus Lazarescu, repeated at each new port of call – are a bit too symbolically suggestive for the film’s good.  (There are also references to a character called Virgil.)

    The performances in the two main parts are almost beyond praise (and many of those in the supporting cast are very fine too).   You never catch these actors acting – yet they’re never submerged in documentary.   Ioan Fiscuteanu is a heavy-set figure; his obdurate masculinity gives a sustained astringency – and a very distinctive pathos – to Lazarescu’s decline.  The real name of the actress playing Mioara is even more appropriately symbolic than that of the eponymous hero.   She is called Luminita Gheorghiu and she is luminously expressive.   Mioara doesn’t stay with Lazarescu purely because she’s altruistic and loyal;   she has a strong sense of what she thinks is right but she’s also bloody-minded.  She’s only a few years younger than her patient; she’s not in great physical health herself (and she sometimes lets the hospital staff know that).    There is an amazing moment in the ambulance when Gheorghiu lets you see the warring questions in Mioara’s head.  How did I get into this situation?  How can I stand it any longer?   How can I leave him?

    15 October 2008

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