Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • My Own Private Idaho

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gus Van Sant (1991)

    It’s a fine title and a famous film but My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s third feature, now seems dated and jejune.  (I don’t know how it seemed twenty-five years ago:  I’d not seen it before.)   Van Sant’s screenplay draws on an unusual combination of sources:  City of Night, a 1963 novel by John Rechy about young gay hustlers, and Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays (plus a bit of Henry V).  The two main characters are partly inspired also by street kids whom Van Sant himself got to know in the late 1980s.  This pair are sharply contrasted.  Mike (River Phoenix) is poor and comes from a broken home.  He’s on a continual search for the mother who walked out on him.  His biological father, Mike realises, is his elder brother Richard (James Russo).  Mike’s friend Scott (Keanu Reeves) doesn’t need to turn tricks to make a living.  His father (Tom Troupe), who holds political office, deplores what his son is currently doing with his life but Scott remains heir to the family fortune.  The Falstaff to his Prince Hal is a middle-aged man called Bob (William Richert), a mentor and father figure to a group of hustlers and other street people, who hang out in a derelict building.

    The action takes place in three different American states – Washington and Oregon, as well as Idaho – and also includes, when Mike learns his mother went to work there, an impulsive and fateful journey to Italy.  Much of the story is set in Portland, Oregon, where Scott’s father is mayor, but the film begins and ends with Mike alone, on the same stretch of deserted highway in Idaho, which he describes as ‘like someone’s face, like a fucked-up face’.  On both occasions, he has a narcoleptic fit and falls to the ground.  There are other such collapses in the course of the movie:  his narcolepsy enables Mike not only to shut out the present but also to play home movies of his childhood and his mother in his mind.  The metaphorical aspects of his condition are one of several elements in My Own Private Idaho that are individually striking but which play out without much traction between them.  Others include encounters with a succession of variously kinky clients, an amusing bit when the characters are animated-figure cover boys on gay magazines, and the Bob-Falstaff routines.

    These showy diversions tend to get in the way of River Phoenix’s strongly interior portrait of Mike, though not enough to obscure its quality.  Phoenix is particularly affecting in the scene, during a trip that Mike and Scott make to Idaho, in which the two boys sit in the dark by a camp fire and Mike tells Scott that he’s in love with him.  (The love is unrequited.)  Keanu Reeves is adequate as Scott.  His shallowness works to the extent that Scott will eventually forsake his street confreres and cross over to ‘normal’ and materially comfortable life – this appears to be Scott’s primary function in the story.   There’s little reality to the character’s situation:  it’s surprising that the son of an elected city official could work as a hustler without miring his father in public controversy.  The Italian episode is one of the weakest parts of My Own Private Idaho – a designed dual heartbreak for Mike.  Further away from home than ever before, he learns that his mother returned to the US and he watches Scott fall in love with a beautiful Italian girl (Chiara Caselli).  Her command of English is highly variable, according to Gus Van Sant’s immediate requirements.

    With the cinematographers John J Campbell and Eric Alan Edwards, Van Sant creates some resonant images of large, mostly empty landscapes.   But in the closing episode on the highway, the distance between the camera and what’s happening on the ground is doubly frustrating.  In the final shots a truck stops and a figure gets out of it.  He lifts Mike’s unconscious body into the truck.  We don’t see the driver close enough to get a sense of whether he’s a good Samaritan or something less benign.  This pick-up occurs immediately after another truck has stopped on the highway.  Two men get out, steal Mike’s backpack and shoes, and drive away.  One of these nasty pieces of work is overplayed even in the few seconds he’s on screen.  Gus Van Sant should have recorded this actor’s contribution from further away.

    21 May 2016

  • Seduced and Abandoned

    Old YorkerFilm review

    James Toback (2013)

    Although it claims at one point to be sui generis, Seduced and Abandoned is a documentary – one that includes a large element of larky put-on but still a documentary.  It begins with quotes from Orson Welles and Woody Allen and ends with one from Norman Mailer, whose eldest son Michael produced the film.   The Welles quote is:  ‘95% of the time I was looking for financing for my movies and 5% of my time I was actually making movies – that’s no way to live!’  The Woody Allen one-liner, familiar but cherishable, is, ‘I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens’.  Mailer opines that ‘film is a phenomenon whose resemblance to death has been ignored for too long’.  The main narrative of Seduced and Abandoned describes the attempts made by James Toback and Alec Baldwin to raise $25m for a movie they want to make together:  they visit numerous prospects at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival but none will stump up more than $5m for a political/erotic thriller set in Iraq, with Baldwin in the lead and Neve Campbell his co-star.   Welles’s words are obviously pertinent and Toback repeats them more than once – or, at least, puts up more than once on the screen the relevant percentages.  The mortal aspect, beyond the Allen quote, isn’t, for the most part, so salient in Seduced and Abandoned:  the Mailer insight comes in handy, however, because it links the two opening quotes and announces the nearly final section of the film, in which Toback asks many of the people he and Baldwin have interviewed – famous actors and directors, as well as potential backers of ‘Last Tango in Tikrit’ (the working title for their project) – whether they fear death.

    One of the interviewees is Ryan Gosling.  The conversation with him is one of the best for several reasons, including the fact that Gosling, at the outset, affably clarifies what he thinks Toback and Baldwin are up to.  This is welcome because Seduced and Abandoned is an odd concoction.  It explores the perennial tension in film-making between artistic ambition and commercial imperative.  It’s a potted biography of the Cannes Festival (Toback’s film is evidently named for Sedotta e abbandonata, a Pietro Germi movie that was shown at Cannes in 1964).  It’s also a celebration of cinema – so Toback tells Gosling, while Alec Baldwin compares repeatedly returning to work in movies (not that he’s really been away) with going back to a former mistress, always in the hope of rekindling the old magic.   Split-screen images – often combining one of the talking heads with illustrative clips from famous movies or photographs of famous film people, and legends identifying both – come thick and fast and are hard to keep up with.   They may be meant to convey the richness of James Toback’s moviegoing frame of reference and the discursive style of Seduced and Abandoned may be what he was after creating but the film is variously and increasingly irritating.   The history and character of Cannes are dealt with perfunctorily – the lfe story of the festival is nothing more than a set-up and the place becomes merely a glamorous backdrop to the conversations between Toback and Baldwin and their big-name or deep-pockets interlocutors.   ‘Last Tango in Tikrit’ is supposedly ‘inspired’ by Last Tango in Paris:  Toback uses clips from the film and interviews Bertolucci, who’s now in a wheelchair.  But surely, in the world of film financing, no one could pitch a movie with the title Toback gives his without the prospects, be they ever so crass, assuming that it’s a spoof.  This makes you wonder if the contributors to Seduced and Abandoned are in on the artifice.

    The money men’s responses to Toback and Baldwin aren’t, for the most part, enraging or ridiculous enough to keep you entertained.   It’s one of the few women prospects who comes up with the funniest way of saying no:  ‘I don’t usually get involved in [pause] … things that I’m not involved in’.   In contrast, Toback’s interviews with Bertolucci, Coppola, Scorsese and (to a lesser extent) Polanksi about their film-making are frustrating because you want to hear more.  Coppola’s financial struggles are notorious:  he needs only to appear to remind you of them and watching and listening to him is affecting – especially when the man who made several of the greatest films of the greatest decade of American cinema says that, while he’s proud of some of his work, he feels he’s never succeeded in expressing on screen the things he most wanted to express.   (I didn’t understand the references to his recent movie Twixt and what I took to be self-recrimination over the death of his son, some twenty-five years earlier.)     What the other major directors have to say about getting money to make films, although Scorsese is interesting enough, is less involving:  you get the sense that Toback, reasonably enough, wanted to hear more about their art but then remembered why they were meant to be having a conversation.

    Among the actors, Bérénice Bejo, Jessica Chastain and Diane Kruger are all charming but their interviews are unremarkable.  James Caan seems to be in mourning for a career that didn’t last as long beyond The Godfather as might have been expected.   He’s so automatically nostalgic that he laments the lack of financial success of Johnny Depp movies unsupported by the commercial heft of the Pirates of the Caribbean series – and compares this with the days when, Caan suggests, there was a guaranteed audience for any film starring Marlon Brando.  The comparison is bizarre: Brando had one of the longest (and best-known) box-office slumps of any major star in Hollywood history.  Ryan Gosling is enjoyable – funny and incisive – from start to finish:  on multiple takes and the loss of freshness that results from using close-ups that always get shot last;  on auditions as a young hopeful, aware that believing he had a career in movies was ‘either a premonition or a delusion’; on preparing for death – which Gosling thought he was doing when a plane he was on briefly seemed bound to crash.  Rather than trying to bond with the person in the next seat, Gosling says he concentrated on trying to finish his steak in the few minutes of life he had left.  (It’s a well-told story whether it’s true or not; and it fits with the line Gosling has been taking throughout the interview:  that the business of making movies is doomed to failure but worth keeping on with because it has satisfactions too.)

    Along with Ryan Gosling, Alec Baldwin himself is the most interesting actor in evidence in Seduced and Abandoned – not least when a menacing glint in his eyes, familiar from some of his dramatic performances, appears as he listens enviously to what Gosling has to say.  Baldwin seems to be sometimes part of the hoax element of the film and to be lampooning the pretentious things that movie stars can say, sometimes genuinely rancorous about the budgetary limits of what he can command as part of a film package.   The Shostakovich music that accompanies Seduced and Abandoned, although it gives proceedings an amusing flavour of self-importance, is a bit overused but, in the closing mortality sequence, Baldwin is right to compliment Toback for his superb reading of one of John Updike’s last poems, in which Updike anticipates his own death.

    14 November 2013

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