Daily Archives: Monday, July 4, 2016

  • The Wind Rises

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Kaze tachinu

    Hayao Miyazaki (2013)

    A Japanese animated film about aeroplanes sounds like a triple dose of masochism and there’s no denying that I was glad when The Wind Rises was over.  But I’m also glad that I saw it.  Hayao Miyazaki has said this will be his last film.  I’ve not yet seen any of his others – nor do I remember watching before what could be termed an animated biopic.  The subject is Jiro Horikoshi, an aeronautical engineer best known for designing fighter aircraft used by the Empire of Japan in World War II.  The film begins in 1918, when Jiro looks to be a young boy (although he was actually born in 1903).  From childhood, Jiro dreams about aircraft and his dreams comprise elements of both wondrous liberation and terrible destruction.  At his school, a teacher, knowing of the boy’s passion for aeronautics, gives him an aviation magazine that includes a feature on the Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni.  Jiro’s reading of the feature generates more dreams, which involve Caproni.  These are lucid dreams of an extraordinary kind:  their lucidness is recognised both by Jiro and by Caproni.  At first, the latter insists, rather amusingly, on ownership of the dream and is unwilling to share it.  But Caproni is ready to share with the boy in other ways.  He imprints on the mind of the near-sighted Jiro – seldom seen without his big, round spectacles and who can’t hope to be a pilot – what Miyazaki appears to suggest are essential truths about aircraft and their designers.  Creating a plane, Caproni tells Jiro, is a rarer and greater gift than flying one.  The Italian, who reappears in Jiro’s dreams throughout the film, also introduces him to the inevitable tension between the imaginative purity of aeronautical design and the nefarious purposes that aircraft are made to serve by nations at war.  Caproni, who has designed planes used in the latter stages of World War I, is initially optimistic that, once that conflict is over, airplanes will be all about passenger flight.  Most of the narrative that follows concerns the 1930s and focuses on military preparations, in Germany as well as Japan, which betray these hopes.  The Wind Rises ends in the early 1940s, when the corruption of Jiro’s beautiful ambitions and ingenious designs is fully realised.

    The film takes its title from a line in Paul Valéry’s poem Le cimetière marin:

    ‘Le vent se lève! … il faut tenter de vivre!’

    The wind that influences air flight does other things too in the story.  It blows off Jiro’s hat as he travels on a train bound for Tokyo, where he’s about to resume his engineering studies.  The hat is caught by another passenger on the train, a young girl called Naoko, who’s accompanied by her maid.  This gust of wind is the harbinger of much more alarming turbulence – an earthquake (the Great Kanto Earthquake of September 1923), which Miyazaki and his team realise brilliantly and frighteningly.  The maid breaks her leg in the train crash caused by the quake and Jiro carries her back to Naoko’s home, several miles away.  According to the traditions of fairytale rather than reality, he then departs the scene without giving his name or address but, some years later, another wind blows away Naoko’s parasol, as she paints on a hillside near the hotel where she and her widowed, doting father are staying, and where Jiro happens to be another guest.  He, of course, catches the parasol.  This reintroduction to Naoko is the beginning of a relationship which ends in a poignantly brief marriage.

    As Valéry’s words imply, the wind of mortality is always rising:  Jiro’s sweetheart has inherited the tuberculosis from which her mother died and to which Naoko too eventually succumbs.  Loss was an important element of Up (2009) but death, moral conflict and the other weighty matters touched upon in The Wind Rises are still (to me) unexpected themes in an animated film.  At the same time, the form of the movie allows Miyazaki to present these themes and the characters very simply, not to say sentimentally – in a way it would be harder for the audience to accept in a live action picture.  The form also allows him to be (from what I gather from Wikipedia and a couple of the reviews I’ve read) very free with the biographical facts of Jiro Horikoshi’s life.

    I found the relationship between Jiro and Naoko engaging but I wasn’t, in spite of an appealingly plangent score by Joe Hisaishi, moved by their story.  The aerial sequences mostly bored me, even though it’s not hard to admire the artistry of the images and the movement within them that Miyazaki achieves.  I’m no judge but the lighting struck me as extraordinarily sophisticated for an animated film.  It’s striking too that some of the Japanese characters don’t look, to these Western eyes, particularly Oriental – especially the big-eyed Naoko (it’s the shape of his spectacle lenses rather than his own features that create a similar effect with Jiro).  I assume this is typical of the stylised manga illustration which is another important strand of Miyazaki’s work:  The Wind Rises is adapted from his own manga, which was based in turn on a 1937 novella by Hori Tatsuo.  (According to Wikipedia, this ‘is set in a tuberculosis sanitarium in Nagano [and] follows the condition of the female character’s illness’.)  I saw a subtitled version with the voices of Jori, Naoko and Caproni provided by Hideaki Anno, Miori Takimoto and Nomura Mansai respectively.  The film has also been released in a dubbed English version with the voices of Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jiro), Emily Blunt (Naoko) and Stanley Tucci (Caproni).

    21 May 2014

  • The Way Way Back

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (2013)

    Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, with Alexander Payne, won an undeserved Oscar for writing The Descendants.  Now Faxon and Rash, independently of Payne, have written and made together The Way Way Back, their first feature as co-directors.  The title may refer, as Jonathan Kiefer suggests, to the protagonist Duncan’s place at the rear of a vast Buick en route to a small seaside town in Cape Cod.  The Buick is being driven by Trent, the new boyfriend of fourteen-year-old Duncan’s mother Pam.  (Trent is a car salesman and therefore unlikely to be a good guy.)  Taciturn, awkward, miserable Duncan, who would rather be spending the summer with his father, sits as far away as possible from the other three people in the car – the third of them is Trent’s daughter Steph – but he’s not out of range of Trent’s needling questions.  (‘How do you rate yourself – on a scale of 1 to 10?’  Duncan eventually comes up with a six.  ‘I think you’re a three’, decides Trent.)

    I wonder if the title also acknowledges the movie’s mixed-up nostalgic aspects.   I read online that Faxon and Rash originally intended their story to be set in the 1980s and they’ve not entirely abandoned that idea.  Duncan finds refuge from the brew of discomfort and tension in and around Trent’s beach house at a local water park, Water Wizz.  He’s told by the manager Owen, who takes a liking to Duncan, that Water Wizz is three decades old and deliberately unchanged from the way it was designed by the man who started it.   One of Owen’s staff is the droll, fey Lewis – the joke about him is that he’s always threatening to leave Water Wizz but never does.  Jim Rash, who was just about Duncan’s age thirty years ago, plays Lewis.   Nat Faxon, who’s five years younger, plays another assistant, Roddy, an unashamed big kid.   The surprising rarity of iPhones, especially among the adolescents, also suggests that Faxon and Rash haven’t thoroughly updated their screenplay.  The Way Way Back is old-fashioned in another sense too:  the kids’ miseries are all the fault of the grown-ups, who seem to have only themselves to blame for their own failures and unhappiness.

    The story is summer-I-grew-up formulaic and it’s inevitable that Duncan will learn how to live life not from Trent – a treacherous lech as well as a pompous bully and control freak – but from his polar opposite Owen, an essentially honourable scamp with dry wit to burn.    Faxon and Rash have some very talented people on board – Steve Carell as the vile Trent, Toni Collette as the confused, borderline feckless Pam, Allison Janney as Betty, a hysterically jolly dipso from the beach house next door.  All three give their characters more depth and variety than the smartly written dialogue and the facile plotting deserve.  I can’t get enthusiastic about Sam Rockwell but, as Owen, he certainly delivers what the directors want.  The underused Maya Rudolph is excellent as Owen’s girlfriend Caitlyn – warm, exasperated and the only Water Wizz employee with an emotional age in advance of the place’s teenage clientele.   Liam James as Duncan is sympathetic not least because he’s been asked to shoulder rather too much.  James’ physical tension, and moments of release from it, are good.   Zoe Levin is Steph;  the other youngsters are Betty’s kids Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), with whom Duncan teeters on the brink of a relationship, and Peter (River Alexander), whose lazy eye is the subject of at least two jokes too many.   The cast also includes Amanda Peet and Rob Cordrry.    The Way Way Back is termed a comedy-drama.  Nnot unusually, it simply alternates the two elements most of the time.  I thought perhaps its best sequence was when they were combined, in an excruciating board game, which Trent, Pam, Duncan and Steph play while confined to barracks by heavy rain.   The film didn’t make me laugh often but it’s no doubt doing well commercially because it has a more positive effect on many other people.   It also seems to be getting reviews rather better than it deserves but The Way Way Back is unlikely to be overrated in the same award-winning way as The Descendants.  Partly because of this, I preferred it to Alexander Payne’s movie.

    30 August 2013

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