Monthly Archives: September 2016

  • Little Men

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ira Sachs (2016)

    Real-estate costs in New York City, moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn, skating along the sidewalks there, friendship between teenage boys:  these themes or details in Ira Sachs’ previous film, Love is Strange (2014), all feature again in his latest, Little Men.  Brian Jardine (Greg Kinnear) is a not very successful actor.  His wife Kathy (Jennifer Ehle) is a psychotherapist, who earns a lot more than her husband.  They have a thirteen-year-old son, Jake (Theo Taplitz).  The Jardines live in Manhattan.  When his father Max dies, Brian inherits a two-storey house in Brooklyn and the family moves into the upper floor.   On the lower floor is a dress shop, run by Leonor Calvelli (Paulina García), a Chilean immigrant.  Single-mother Leonor got on so well with Max that he’d not upped the rent for years.  She too has a thirteen-year-old son, Tony (Michael Barbieri), who is often around the shop.  Tony and Jake become good friends but tensions between the adults arise when Brian and his sister Audrey (Talia Balsam) propose to triple the rent on the downstairs apartment.  Jake and Tony know only that they’re no longer welcome in each other’s homes; they join forces in stopping speaking to their parents.  Eventually, the boys find out about the grown-ups’ dispute.  Jake pleads tearfully but unavailingly with his father to let Leonor stay without increasing her rent.  The boys’ friendship ends.

    If you’re going to do a drama driven largely by the local property market and rental costs, you need a credible economic-domestic scenario in which to base the action.  Ira Sachs and Mauricio Zacharias, who shares the screenplay credit (as he did on Love is Strange), don’t provide this:  the Jardines’ financial situation is far from clear.  When they first come over to the Brooklyn property for Max’s funeral reception there, they’re undecided as to whether to move permanently.  If they didn’t, there’d be no film at all (there’s not much of one, as it is) but Sachs and Zacharias don’t supply reasons for the move.  It isn’t mentioned whether Brian and Kathy rent or own their home in Manhattan; there’s no suggestion that or how Brooklyn is better for Kathy’s work or Brian’s auditions or Jake’s schooling.  (In fact, he doesn’t change school, unless a teacher at his old one changes with him – see below.)  The terms of Max’s will are no less puzzling.  Audrey, pressing Brian to evict his tenant, reminds her brother that, whereas he’s inherited the Brooklyn house, she (Audrey) has nothing.  Later on, Brian explains to Jake that his grandfather left the property to both his children.  How was it that Audrey, evidently a tougher cookie than her painfully nice brother, didn’t insist on the matter of Leonor’s rent being resolved before Brian took possession of the rest of the place?  Jake’s and Tony’s refusal to speak to their parents is similarly necessary and incredible.  It’s the only way that Ira Sachs can delay the boys’ discovery of what’s going and the consequences of that discovery – which provide the movie’s climax and conclusion.  In a particularly feeble episode in Little Men, Jake and Tony accompany Kathy to Brian’s first night:  he’s playing Trigorin in a not-for-profit production of The Seagull.  The kids must have nodded rather than shaken their heads to indicate willingness to go to the theatre:  we seem meant to think their attendance makes sense because Tony’s ambition is to be an actor but it doesn’t make sense set against the continuing feud with the parents.  The boys’ turning out for the play is required simply in order that, when they keep their mouths firmly shut in the car journey back, Brian can launch a furious it’s-tough-for-grown-ups-too outburst from the driver’s seat.

    It comes as no surprise that Sachs and Zacharias often don’t bother to follow up on individual scenes.  Once these have made an instant impact, they’ve served their purpose and can be forgotten about.  The opening sequence is in a schoolroom, in which Jake and a couple of other kids sit quietly but most of the class are tearing round yelling, until the teacher arrives and angrily shuts them up.  Jake gets picked up from school by a woman who appears to be the Jardines’ home help; she tells him both his parents will be back late.  When he gets home, Jake answers the phone.  A male voice explains that he’s an old friend of Jake’s grandfather, is sorry for the family’s loss, wonders when Max’s funeral will be taking place.  It’s news to Jake that his grandfather has died; stunned, he hands the phone to the home help.  Are we meant to think that his parents already knew about Max’s death but neither a psychotherapist nor an often resting actor could get home to put their son in the picture?  Or don’t Brian or Kathy know either?  In which case, how come the man on the phone already does?   There’s a later sequence involving the schoolteacher and the class of what had seemed to be delinquents at the start:  they now listen attentively to what the teacher has to say about Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’.  He asks them to write, for homework, a poem about someone they love.  Why don’t we get an idea of what Jakes writes for this assignment?

    If Ira Sachs doesn’t think any of the above questions matters, here’s another one.  Why does he bother even including these scenes, except to pad out his meagre movie?  (Its best feature is that it lasts only eighty-five minutes.)  The title presumably refers not only to the two teenagers but also to Brian.  Whether the epithet in his case is an expression of contempt or protectiveness on Sachs’ part is debatable:  the effect of the ‘little’ is condescending in either case. The last time he starred in a ‘Little …’ film, Greg Kinnear was excellent.  In Little Miss Sunshine, he played an apparently confident motivational speaker who was revealed to be a loser and then as not so much a loser after all.  In Little Men, Kinnear is unimaginative casting.  This actor radiates conscientious decency; the man he’s playing is oppressed by a sense of failure from the start and stays that way.  Kinnear works hard but he’s expected – especially with two kids in leading roles – to shoulder too much.   His best moments come in the early funeral scenes – shaking hands with Leonor, thanking a row of guests for coming, weeping privately.   Jennifer Ehle, as usual, looks to be acting for the sake of it:  to be fair to her (for a change), it’s not her fault this time – the role of Kathy is feebly underwritten.  We get no sense of the relationship between her and Brian.  Paulina García holds the camera.  In fact, she’s rather too strong a presence:  Leonor becomes almost sinister.  García, without the glasses she wore in most of Gloria, has tired eyes but they still look as if they might turn Greg Kinnear to stone.  Alfred Molina makes a brief appearance as a character called Hernán.  I’d no idea who he was meant to be, other than someone Leonor knew and whom she could speak Spanish with.

    Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri have been cast for looks that emphasise the chalk and cheese that Jake and Tony are written as.  One’s a WASP; the other’s Hispanic.  Tony is extrovert – talkative, physically confident, easy in a group.  Jake is introverted – a reticent, shy loner until he pals up with Tony.  Both friends want to go to LaGuardia high school – Tony to study acting, Jake to do art.  Jake is considered effeminate by other kids; Tony gets into a (crudely staged) fight with a boy who casts aspersions on Jake’s – and, by implication, Tony’s – masculinity.  The differences between the young actors are a bit less neat.  Theo Taplitz is, for the most part, obviously acting and not particularly expressive.  Michael Barbieri certainly livens things up:  he really enjoys himself in an acting-class exercise – a shouting confrontation between Tony and his drama teacher (Mauricio Bustamente).  I wasn’t sure if Barbieri meant to come across throughout as doing an impression of a junior Brooklyn-Latino method actor but at least this is consistent with Tony’s character (he reminds Jake that Al Pacino went to LaGuardia).  In the film’s epilogue, Jake is in a party of youngsters sketching at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He sees Tony, also in a school party, on the other side of the gallery.  Tony, who doesn’t see Jake, appears unchanged from before, both in age and in school uniform.  Jake, by contrast, no longer wears uniform and has his hair in a pony tail; his face looks older too.  I assume we’re meant to think that Jake is now at LaGuardia whereas poor (in both senses of the word) Tony hasn’t moved on.   But this is a confusing sequence.  The camera movement is so deliberate that it’s not a matter of Jake’s catching sight of Tony.  It’s more as if he’s imagining Tony might be there – an impression reinforced by the fact that Tony looks the way he always did.

    Little Men is just as weak as Love is Strange.  Like that film, it’s getting mostly positive reviews.  I can only think this is because plenty of critics feel they’re on Ira Sachs’ metropolitan, liberal wavelength and share his warm feelings towards artists (of various kinds), educators and so on.  I do too; in principle, I’m all for film-makers who resist thoroughly and easily condemning  characters; and I’m naturally drawn to apparently small-scale drama that’s penetrating.  But feeling this kind of sympathy obviously doesn’t validate the actual film, and the humanity in Sachs’ movies is as automatic as – and much less witty than – the misanthropy of writer-directors like the Coen brothers and Todd Solondz.  It’s typical of the praise lavished on Little Men that Philip Kemp in Sight & Sound (October 2016) sees ‘The nod to Chekhov … [as making] perfect sense:  nuance and understatement rule, and what’s not said most of the time is as significant as what is’.  For Kemp, making use of Chekhov is enough to merit comparison with Chekhov; in fact, it merely emphasises the gulf between him and Ira Sachs.  Sam Adams’ review for The Wrap probably isn’t the only one to describe Little Men as ‘deceptively slight’. The film is slight, and that’s putting it kindly.  The deceptive quality comes in fooling people – perhaps including Sachs himself – into thinking it’s more than that.

    18 September 2016

  • Café Society

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Woody Allen (2016)

    Let’s suppose there’s at least one person in the world who has heard about Woody Allen but never seen any of his films and who decides to break the habit of a lifetime with Café Society.  This hypothetical viewer will probably reckon the picture is feeble and wonder what all the Woody Allen fuss was about.  Inveterate followers of Allen’s work  may find Café Society feeble but sadly touching too, because of who made it.  This one did anyway.  As the movie dribbled on, it occurred to me that, assuming I outlive Woody Allen, I’ll probably find it more touching still when he’s gone.

    Café Society, set in the 1930s, divides its time between New York and Los Angeles.  New York is where the protagonist, Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), was born and raised.  Tired of working in his father Marty (Ken Stott)’s jeweller’s shop, Bobby goes west to Hollywood, where his uncle Phil (Steve Carell) is an agent.  Bobby begins by running errands for Phil, whose secretary Veronica (Kristen Stewart) – known as Vonnie – introduces Bobby to LA.  He falls in love with her.  Vonnie is fond of Bobby too but she tells him she already has a boyfriend:  what she doesn’t tell him is that the boyfriend is Phil.   It’s an on-off affair because Phil dithers about whether to leave his wife of many years.  When he discovers that Vonnie is seeing Bobby, Phil’s mind is made up; when Bobby discovers that she’s seeing Phil and is going to marry him, the younger man returns heartbroken to New York.   He goes into business there, running a nightclub with his elder brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a gangster.  The club becomes increasingly successful.  Its clientele includes not only fashionable locals but swanky out-of-towners too:  one evening, Phil and Vonnie, on a visit from Hollywood, call in.  By now, Bobby is married and a father.  His beautiful wife (Blake Lively) is also called Veronica but meeting her namesake again rekindles Bobby’s feelings for Vonnie.  Bobby and Ben have a sister, Evelyn (Sari Lennick), a schoolteacher with a conscientious, super-mensch husband (Stephen Kunken).  The polarised lives of Ben and Evelyn suddenly collide when she gets fed up with an anti-social neighbour,  his associates take the neighbour out and Ben goes to the electric chair for the murder.  This leaves Bobby in sole charge of the nightclub – its reputation given added notorious lustre by Ben’s execution.  Bobby returns to Los Angeles with the idea of opening a club there too.  He decides against doing so but not before he’s seen Vonnie one more time.  The story ends at New Year parties, with Bobby back in New York and Vonnie in LA.  As midnight strikes, both are quietly regretful – closer to each other in spirit than to the spouses they’re actually with.

    Three years ago, Stephanie Zacharek began her Village Voice review of Blue Jasmine with this paragraph:

    ‘For anyone who’s been going to the movies at all regularly over the past 45 years, Woody Allen is practically family.  His movies may draw fewer passionate responses than they did in the ’70s and ’80s, but we still feel compelled to reckon with him.  Whenever Allen comes out with a new one—which he continues to do with alarming frequency—those of us who still care even moderately may ask, “How is he this time?” as if he were an infirm relation who’s reached the stage where he’s blessed with more bad days than good ones.’

    Café Society is the first Allen movie to appear since his eightieth birthday.  How is he this time?  Slightly gaga, mostly bloody-minded.  His indifference nowadays to what he creates amounts to something deeper than negligence.  This film features Central Park and views of Manhattan, movie chat and references, jazzy arrangements of standards on the soundtrack, Jewish family combat – more than a few of Woody Allen’s favourite things.  Café Society is beautiful to look at:  the production designer is Santo Loquasto, who has worked on over twenty Allen films; the cinematographer, for the first time on an Allen picture, is the celebrated Vittorio Storaro.  His lighting gives a paradisal glow to New York and Hollywood.  This conveys the fond nostalgia felt for both places by Allen – who no longer seems interested in doing much more than expressing such feelings.  He doesn’t even try to animate thirties Hollywood beyond tossing in the names of actors and directors.  He goes through the motions of writing a love story without seeming to care if what results on the screen has any romantic, comic or dramatic life.

    Allen has responded to questions about the mob violence and bloodshed in the film by saying that ‘murder and criminality’ have been a persistent feature of his work.   True enough but these elements haven’t previously been weightless, as they are here – as nearly everything in Café Society is.  It’s the weightlessness that makes the violence somewhat troubling.  It isn’t comically stylised – it simply doesn’t matter.  The links between organised crime and show business in inter-war America are familiar enough, from Chicago and Allen’s own Bullets over Broadway, but, in those cases, the links were a controlling theme.  In Café Society, they’re perfunctory – they have the quality of something the writer-director vaguely remembers having seen in movies before.

    Café Society is Woody Allen doing what he feels like doing and, in effect, talking to himself.  Ben Dorfman undergoes a death-row conversion to Christianity.  His mother Rose (Jeannie Berlin)’s horror at this development – a fate just about worse than death – is funny enough but the exchange between Rose and her husband about Jews not believing in an afterlife is curious.  It’s true that Judaism has traditionally put a stronger emphasis on this world than on the next and there have been particular Jewish schools of thought that ruled out life after death.  But the implication that Jewish eschatology generally rejects this is wide of the mark.  The dialogue between the Dorfman parents seems rather to be confirming that Woody Allen is still niggled by the impossibility of surviving death – and, after all, who’s more Jewish than he is?   The one feature of Café Society that isn’t weightless is Allen’s own (uncredited) voiceover narrative.   As a piece of writing, this is dull and otiose:  the narrator is often doing no more than describe what the image on the screen is already showing.  But the voice itself is something else – an old man’s voice.  It sounds thick and sluggish and speaks more loudly than necessary – as if it might not be able to hear itself otherwise.  The New Year’s Eve finale has a rather similar quality – in the singing of Auld Lang Syne, in the chimes of midnight that bring to mind the preoccupation with manifestations of time passing of Woody Allen’s mentor, Ingmar Bergman.  (The opening chorus of ticking and chiming clocks was the highlight of Bergman’s final film, Saraband.)

    Woody Allen’s self-absorption makes it tough on his cast (which includes, as well as those already mentioned, Parker Posey and Paul Schneider).  The actors feel privileged to be working with Allen and they really want to please – but the director doesn’t seem bothered with what they’re doing.  As a result, they tend to do too much.   In his early scenes as an innocent in Hollywood, Jesse Eisenberg is tensely focused – it’s more effortful characterisation than we’re used to seeing from him.   Eisenberg improves once Bobby’s back in New York:  with his hunched shoulders and affably suppressed world-weariness, he gets across the idea of Bobby as ever-unfulfilled in love.  Kristen Stewart is a good actress but she seems too modern throughout.  When Vonnie and Bobby first meet again, he’s appalled by her initial gush of celebrity name-dropping but this outburst doesn’t connect with anything else about the older Vonnie.  She doesn’t appear to have changed into a Hollywood wife, let alone developed the personality of one.  Steve Carell is uncomfortable in the insecurely written role of Phil.  I saw a trailer for Café Society several times.  Each time I did, there was an odd tension in the audience laughter that followed a clip where Jesse Eisenberg says, ‘Life is a comedy – written by a sadistic comedy writer …’   It was as if people were laughing on cue, thinking, ‘Oh yes, that’s a typical Woody Allen line!’ – and were then realising the line wasn’t really up to much.  This goes for Café Society as a whole.  Woody Allen evidently takes the view that he no longer has the time to come up with anything better.

    12 September 2016

Posts navigation