Friday, January 30, 2009
Monday, January 26, 2009
Right Movie, Wrong Nominee
It's that time of year again. Nominations for the 2008 Oscars were announced last week, and as usual a lot has been written and said about performers who were unexpectedly nominated or who were overlooked. The Academy Awards seem to be full of anomalies, especially in the acting awards: great performers who never won (Cary Grant, Peter O'Toole, Greta Garbo, Deborah Kerr) or were never even nominated (Joel McCrea, Marilyn Monroe), seemingly sure-fire winners who lost to long shots (Bette Davis for All About Eve to Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday, Rod Steiger for The Pawnbroker to Lee Marvin for The Ballad of Cat Ballou), lead performances nominated in the supporting category (Al Pacino for The Godfather, Jake Gyllenhall for Brokeback Mountain, Cate Blanchett for Notes on a Scandal) and supporting performances nominated in the lead category (Patricia Neal for Hud, Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada), performers overlooked for a signature performance who then later won for a lesser performance (Bette Davis for Dangerous, not Of Human Bondage; James Stewart for The Philadelphia Story, not Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Elizabeth Taylor for Butterfield 8, not Cat on a Hot Tin Roof), performers who won not for one of their greatest performances but as a sort of career achievement award (John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, Al Pacino). Tom Dirks's Filmsite.org contains a whole section of "mistakes and omissions" in the acting awards.In looking over the nominations over the years, I was struck by a particular pattern in the supporting actor and actress categories: one person nominated when another performance in the same movie should have been. Indeed, this pattern began in 1936, the very first year that the Best Supporting Actor and Actress awards were given. My Man Godfrey received nominations in all four acting categories, but one nomination struck me as clearly misguided. William Powell was nominated for Best Actor, Carole Lombard for Best Actress, Alice Brady for Best Supporting Actress; all of these nominations were well-deserved.
But who in this movie was nominated as Best Supporting Actor? To me the obvious choice was the great character actor Eugene Pallette as the irascible head of the eccentric Bullock family. Instead it was Mischa Auer in an admittedly entertaining but much smaller and more one-note performance. That same year Maria Ouspeskaya was nominated for a tiny role in William Wylers's great Dodsworth that frankly didn't make much of an impression on me, whereas Mary Astor, whose role was much more significant and who gave one of the best and most sympathetic performances of her long career, was not. Over the years, this same thing has happened numerous times:
MISGUIDED NOMINATIONS FOR BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
•1936, My Man Godfrey
Was nominated: Mischa Auer
Should have been nominated: Eugene Pallette
• 1940, Foreign Correspondent
Was nominated: Albert Basserman
Should have been nominated: Herbert Marshall
• 1952, The Quiet Man
Was nominated: Victor McLaglen
Should have been nominated: Barry Fitzgerald
• 1958, Some Came Running
Was nominated: Arthur Kennedy (one of his rare bad performances)
Should have been nominated: Dean Martin
• 1960, The Apartment
Was nominated: Jack Kruschen
Should have been nominated: Fred MacMurray
• 1964, Becket
Was nominated: John Gielgud
Should have been nominated: Donald Wolfit
• 1965, Flight of the Phoenix
Was nominated: Ian Bannen
Should have been nominated: Richard Attenborough
• 1976, Network
Was nominated: Ned Beatty
Should have been nominated: Robert Duvall
• 1986, A Room with a View
Was nominated: Denholm Elliott
Should have been nominated: Daniel Day-Lewis
• 1991, Barton Fink
Was nominated: Michael Lerner
Should have been nominated: John Goodman
• 1994, Quiz Show
Was Nominated: Paul Scofield
Should have been nominated: John Turturro
• 1996, Fargo
Was nominated: William H. Macy
Should have been nominated: Steve Buscemi
• 2006, The Departed
Was nominated: Mark Wahlberg
Should have been nominated: Jack Nicholson
MISGUIDED NOMINATIONS FOR BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
• 1936, Dodsworth
Was nominated: Maria Ouspenskaya
Should have been nominated: Mary Astor
• 1958, Some Came Running
Was nominated: Martha Hyer
Should have been nominated: Connie Gilchrist
• 1960, Sons and Lovers
Was nominated: Mary Ure
Should have been nominated: Wendy Hiller
• 1969, Midnight Cowboy
Was nominated: Sylvia Miles
Should have been nominated: Brenda Vaccaro
• 1978, Interiors
Was nominated: Maureen Stapleton
Should have been nominated: Mary Beth Hurt
• 1979, Starting Over
Was nominated: Candace Bergen
Should have been nominated: Mary Kay Place
• 1993, The Age of Innocence
Was nominated: Winona Ryder
Should have been nominated: Miriam Margolyes
The truth is that most of these nominations were not inappropriate. In reality both the nominee and the non-nominee could justifiably have been cited, and in many years more than one supporting performer from the same film has received a nomination. Several times three supporting performers from the same movie have been nominated: in 1954 for On the Waterfront, in 1963 for Tom Jones, in 1972 for The Godfather, and in 1974 for The Godfather, Part II. My point is that if only one person was to be nominated, to me it should have been the one overlooked.
It is possible that in some years the person nominated diverted enough votes from the other performer in the same movie to knock that person out of the running. This seems especially true when one performer was much better known or of greater repute than the other. Maureen Stapleton, John Gielgud, and Paul Scofield were stage actors who were more highly regarded professionally than the less well-known alternatives I suggested. Yet those alternatives were the ones who made the greater impression on me.
I'm sure that in some cases publicity campaigns by the actors and their agents were largely responsible for the nomination. After all, in Hollywood a lot has to do with publicity. In some cases it's likely that the overlooked person I suggested had a role that was considered either too major (Fred MacMurray, Wendy Hiller, or Jack Nicholson) or too minor (Mary Kay Place or Miriam Margolyes). In other cases the overlooked performer was just too obscure (Donald Wolfit or Connie Gilchrist) or not taken seriously enough in the profession (Dean Martin). In still other cases, the curse of the unsympathetic role was almost certainly responsible for the failure to get a nomination (Herbert Marshall, John Turturro, Steve Buscemi).
Whatever the reason, the wrong supporting performance from the right picture being nominated has happened often enough, and recently enough, that I am prepared to call it a regular occurrence.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Mulholland Drive: California Dreaming with David Lynch
The prestigious French publication Cahiers du Cinéma recently named David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. (2001) one of the 100 greatest films of all time. When released, it was almost universally praised as Lynch's best work since Blue Velvet (1986) and went on to win the Best Picture award from the New York, Chicago, Boston, and Phoenix film critics organizations as well as from the National Society of Film Critics. Lynch won the Best Director Award from the Los Angeles film critics and at the Cannes Film Festival and received an Oscar nomination as Best Director. The film, actually her 25th acting credit, also made a star of the British-born and Australian-raised actress Naomi Watts.Although the movie bears many similarities to Blue Velvet—a hallucinatory visual style, its plot of the two main characters trying to solve a mystery, the striking integration of pop music with visuals, a mood of escalating danger and dread—it abandons the straightforward linear narrative of that earlier film for something closer to the logic- and time-contorting narrative style of Lynch's more surreal works like Eraserhead (1977). The origin of the movie's unusual narrative structure is explained in part by its production history. It was originally sold as a story idea for a television series to ABC and shot as a pilot introducing the characters and setting up the mystery elements of the plot. The intention presumably was to pursue the mystery throughout the season and work up to a solution at the end of the show's run, as Lynch had done in Twin Peaks. When ABC rejected the pilot, Lynch got new financing, expanded what he had already shot, and devised a final section to provide the film a conclusion.
Many viewers found the result fascinating but mystifying, and it is possible to see the movie as a superbly executed reality-and-illusion puzzle, the kind of intentionally artistic examination of reality and the nature of film narrative that was popular in the 1960's. In the wrong hands, this necessarily fragmented, non-linear storytelling strategy can be disastrous. But with Lynch, this approach produces astounding results. The movie's slightly raveled combination of calculation and spontaneity, of order and anarchy, makes us reconsider the ways in which movies present time and events, not unlike the most challenging films of Luis Buñuel. And like Buñuel, Lynch, with his artist's eye and unique narrative style, shows us unexpected ways of combining images with events. Long after the movie has ended, haunting images—of faces and expressions, of scenes and entire sequences—linger like remembered fragments of a dream.
Although I don't find everything in the movie neatly explicable (is that really so strange in a film directed by David Lynch?), I do find the overall sense of the plot comprehensible, and in this post I would like to offer my own interpretation of the events in Mulholland Dr. This necessarily requires a detailed recounting of the movie's plot—something I normally try to avoid—so readers be forewarned. This is really two movies, each of which, as in Rashomon, presents an alternative interpretation of the same events. The difference is that in Mulholland Dr. there is for me little ambiguity. The first version of events is the imagined one; the second version is the true one.
When the movie begins, even before the credits, we see an enigmatic sequence, shot music-video style, of several young couples dressed in outfits from the 1940's jitterbugging to music of the period. The couples appear against a solid purple background and are computer-duplicated so that we see each couple from more than one angle. Behind some of them are projected their shadows, like Fred Astaire's in the "Bojangles of Harlem" number in Swing Time. At one point we see in the foreground the white silhouette of a group of older people enthusiastically enjoying the display, and later the white silhouette of a young woman walking toward the camera smiling while we hear applause.
The movie proper begins with a beautiful young woman (Laura Elena Harring) riding in the back a limousine. In an isolated area of Mulholland Dr. in Los Angeles, the limousine suddenly stops, and the driver turns around and points a gun at the frightened woman. At the same time, two carloads of teenagers in convertibles are racing each other down Mulholland Dr. in the opposite direction, the teenagers behaving like manic refugees from Rebel Without a Cause. Suddenly the racing cars crash into the stopped limousine. The woman, apparently the only survivor, staggers into the brush and downhill before passing out in the shrubbery of a Hollywood apartment building. The next morning she wakes up and takes refuge in an apartment whose tenant she has seen driving away in a cab with a large amount of luggage.
At the same time, another young woman named Bettie Elms (Naomi Watts) is arriving at LAX to pursue her dream of an acting career. While in Los Angeles, she will be staying in the apartment of her aunt, who is on an extended trip out of town. When Bettie goes into the bathroom of the apartment, she finds the victim of the car crash in the shower. The mysterious young woman at first introduces herself as Rita (she had just seen a framed poster for Gilda in the bathroom) but then confesses that she is an amnesiac and actually has no idea who she really is. Like Jeffrey in Blue Velvet, Bettie is intrigued by the mystery and resolves to help Rita solve it and find out her true identity. The only clues are the contents of Rita's purse—a large amount of money, a piece of paper with the name Diane Selwyn written on it, and a blue key—and Rita's vague memory that she has been in a car accident.
The rest of the movie largely concerns the two women's attempts to investigate the mystery. Several subplots are introduced. One concerns a young man who has a recurring nightmare that he goes to a diner called Winkie's with a man who is apparently his therapist and in the alley behind the diner encounters a monster. Another concerns a professional hitman. Yet another concerns a movie director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), who is attempting to get financing for a movie but is being coerced into casting an actress named Camilla Rhodes in a part. Part of this coercion involves a nighttime meeting with an odd-looking, menacing middle-aged man dressed like a cowboy.
Only this last subplot has any apparent connection to the main Bettie/Rita plot. After auditioning for a part (Watts is particularly outstanding in this sequence), Bettie is taken down the hall to a studio to be introduced to Adam, who is conducting auditions for his movie. This section of the movie contains one of its most stunning sequences. At first we see a pop group dressed and coiffed circa 1960 performing a song called "Sixteen Reasons Why I Love You." The combined effect of the visuals and music is spellbinding. Suddenly the camera pulls back to reveal that we are looking at the performance through the window of a recording studio, the recording console and equipment visible in the foreground. A few moments later, the camera pulls back even further to reveal that that we are actually on a sound stage and that the recording studio itself is a set. If any one scene encapsulates the Chinese box nature of Mulholland Dr., it is this one. And even that is only one layer of the action, for there are also haunting close-ups of Watts and Theroux gazing enigmatically at each other on their first meeting. This sequence is followed immediately by one of the next audition, of Camilla Rhodes performing another period pop song called "Why Haven't I Told That I Love You?"
At this point Bettie leaves to meet Rita to visit the address they have found for Diane Selwyn. When they find nobody home, Bettie persuades Rita to break in. In Diane Selwyn's bungalow they discover a dead woman in the bedroom and flee.
Later that night, Bettie invites Rita into her bed, and the two make love. In the middle of the night, Rita wakes from a dream muttering, "Silencio . . . silencio . . ." and insists that Bettie accompany her to a seedy part of town where a bizarre theater is presenting a late-night magic show. Here the two women huddle together while a heavily made-up woman lip-syncs to a recorded a capella version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" sung in Spanish. At the height of the performance, Bettie opens her purse and finds in it a small blue box. The performer's emoting is so strong that both women are in tears before the performer collapses on the stage while the recording continues.
When Bettie and Rita return to the apartment, Rita turns around from putting away her coat to find that Bettie has disappeared. Rita takes the blue box from Bettie's purse and opens it with the mysterious blue key. It is empty, its interior black. She drops the box to the floor, where it falls open. The camera moves slowly into the interior of the box until the screen goes black, and the first section of the movie is over.
The second, shorter section of Mulholland Dr. opens with the menacing cowboy from the first part walking into Diane Selwyn's apartment. Through the bedroom door we see a woman with dark hair like Rita's lying on the bed with her back to the camera. in the same position as the dead body that Bettie and Rita discovered in the first section. "Time to wake up, pretty girl," he says and leaves. When the camera returns to the bedroom, it is the blonde Bettie lying on the bed. When she gets off the bed and walks into the living room, she looks disheveled and distraught. At this point the movie shifts into a flashback. Bettie is lying on top of Rita on the sofa, making love to her, and Rita stops her, saying "We can't do this anymore." Later Bettie receives a telephone call from Rita reminding her that the limousine will be there for her shortly.
This time it is Bettie who takes the ride up Mulholland Dr., where she is delivered to a party at the home of Adam Kesher, the movie director. She is introduced to Adam's mother, Coco (Ann Miller), who is the same person that in the earlier section was the manager of the apartment building where Bettie's aunt lived. As Bettie sits across the table from Adam, Rita, and Coco, she tells Coco about herself. Her name is not Bettie at all, but Diane Selwyn. After winning a jitterbug contest in Canada, she came to Hollywood to pursue her dream of being a movie actress. There she met Rita, whose name is not Rita but Camilla Rhodes, and became her protégée (and presumably her lover). It was Camilla who got Diane small parts in her movies. As the party progresses, we learn that it is being held to announce the engagement of Camilla and Adam. After the announcement is made, an attractive young blonde woman comes up to Camilla (the same woman who was Camilla in the first section) and gives her a long congratulatory, and clearly sexual, kiss on the lips. At this point Diane loses her composure, and tears begin to stream down her face.
Later at Winkie's Diane meets the hitman. Here she also encounters two other people from the first section of the movie. One is the man with the recurrent nightmare, who now stands by the cash register where his therapist stood before. The other is their waitress, a young blonde woman whose name tag reads "Bettie." When Bettie and Rita came to the diner in the first section, this same person was their waitress, and that time her name tag read "Diane." (I believe that this is the same actress who also plays the first Camilla as well as the new lover who kisses the real Camilla at her engagement party.) From her purse, the same purse Rita carried when Bettie first met her, Diane removes a large amount of money and passes it to the hit man along with a photograph of Camilla. The hitman shows Diane a blue key and tells her that she will receive it when the job is done.
We now come back to the present, where Diane, dejected and mournful, sits on the sofa staring at the blue key. The last scene in the movie returns us to the mysterious theater, where the woman who earlier sang "Crying" sits alone in the audience muttering, "Silencio . . . silencio . . ."
It is now clear that the first part of the movie was an elaborate dream/hallucination/imaginary movie in which Camilla escaped the attempted hit unharmed and Diane was able to meet her all over again and become her lover. All the characters and elements of this complicated wish-fulfillment fantasy came from Diane's life; all the raw material of the long first section of the movie can be found in the shorter second section. The people, names, and situations have been deconstructed and reassembled to create an alternate and, to Diane, more acceptable version of reality that changes the past and erases both her loss of Camilla and her responsibility for Camilla's death. In the end, though, she must return to reality and remain there. Camilla is dead, Diane is responsible for her death, and the rest is silence.
There is no way I can do justice to Mulholland Dr. using words. I can attempt to sort out the order and nature of its events, to clarify what happens in the movie and why. But I cannot adequately describe the subliminal effect of experiencing this movie. I can only say that seeing Mulholland Dr. is a unique, powerful, and profoundly affecting cinema experience unlike any other I have ever had. It is a movie about the stories we tell each other and the stories we tell ourselves, about making movies, watching movies, and the movies we make up in our minds.
Mulholland Dr. may be a patchwork of disjointed events and images, but somehow it all holds together, and I can only assume that the element that unifies everything is the vision of its director. I cannot think of anyone else except possibly Luis Buñuel who could have done so successfully what David Lynch does in Mulholland Dr.—create an entire movie that reproduces the look, the atmosphere, and the ineffable narrative structure of a dream, with its logic- and time-defying sequence of events, its internal reality that echoes and distorts external reality, and its almost mystical transformation of real people and events into imaginary ones. Mulholland Dr. takes the concept of mimesis—of art imitating real life—one step further, into the realm of art imitating dream life.
In the documentary In Dreams: The Roy Orbison Story (1999), David Lynch says that he originally planned to use "Crying" in Blue Velvet, but after listening to a tape of Orbison's greatest hits and hearing "In Dreams," he decided to use that song instead. He finally did get to use "Crying" fifteen years later in Mulholland Dr.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Monday, January 5, 2009
The Cinematic New World of Terrence Malick
The career of the screenwriter and director Terrence Malick is a curious one. Since directing his first movie, Badlands, in 1973, he has directed only three other movies—Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The New World (2005). Malick is a reclusive man who doesn't give interviews, allow photos of himself to be taken, or promote his work. Yet he is a consistent favorite of movie critics, film scholars, and organizers of film festivals. Each of his movies is in a completely different genre. Badlands is a crime-spree movie based on the case of Charles Starkweather and his 14 year-old girl friend Caril Ann Fugate, who went on a similar crime spree in 1958. Days of Heaven is a love-and-betrayal story set in early-20th century rural Texas that bears clear resemblances to Henry James's The Wings of the Dove. The Thin Red Line is a World War II combat movie set during the battle of Guadalcanal in the Pacific.The script of Malick's fourth movie, The New World, which is about the well-known story of Pocahontas and Capt. John Smith, was completed in the late 1970s. Yet it was nearly twenty years before the movie was filmed and released, in 2005. At the time I had seen only Days of Heaven, and I was most impressed by its look (it was photographed by the great Nestor Almendros) and its distinctive style. Reviews of The New World piqued my curiosity, especially the one by Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle—one of the best-written movie reviews I've ever read—who chose it as the best movie of 2005. But not being a particular fan of movies about American history, I was not enthusiastic about the movie's subject. I recently got a chance to watch The New World, and I'm only sorry that I waited so long.
From its opening images, The New World is a visual marvel. It begins with the arrival of the English colonists in Virginia as seen by the Native Americans on the shore. Malick captures the arrival in images that emphasize its strangeness to the natives. The boats appearing suddenly in the clear, unbroken blue of the sea might as well be alien spaceships in a science fiction movie arriving unannounced from a clear blue sky, so bizarre does the event, as shown from the point of view of the natives, seem. When the colonists disembark, their unvarying dress, with its black fabric and tall hats, might be the military uniforms of alien beings from a distant galaxy. And the metal armor and Cavalier hats of the soldiers resemble the carapaces of insect- or robot-like creatures from outer space. The natives, who moments before had been frolicking in the tall grass, creep up gingerly to these people and touch them and knock on their armor before accepting that they are indeed human beings.The Native Americans in The New World are depicted with what appears to be painstaking authenticity. Their dress, their dwellings, their customs, their social system—all the accouterments of their culture are presented with almost documentary precision. The uncorrupted nature of their "noble savage" existence may be somewhat exaggerated, but the detail with which the Native Americans are drawn always makes them seem living people and not just idealized constructs.
Relations between the two groups are at first friendly. With the help of the natives, the British establish a rudimentary community before their leader (Christopher Plummer) sails back to England for more supplies, leaving Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell) in charge. When the expedition fails to return before autumn and their supplies are nearly exhausted, Smith sails upriver to the winter home of the natives to seek help from them. What follows is an extended idyll with the love affair between Smith and the chief's favorite daughter, Pocahontas (Q'orianka Kilcher), at its center.
When Smith does return to the fort, he finds that order has broken down, that in his absence he has been deposed as leader of the colonists and replaced with a kind of oppressive totalitarianism. Relations between the Native Americans and the settlers have also deteriorated. The natives have at last comprehended the expansionist aims of the English, and the English, who once referred to the Native Americans as "the naturals," now disparagingly call them "the savages." Each side now considers the other the enemy, and the colonists' dwellings have become a stockade fortified against attack.
Pocahontas, exiled by her father for what he sees as her betrayal of her people, takes refuge at the fort, where she is sheltered but treated coldly by the colonists. When the ships from England finally return, Smith has been recalled by the king to lead another sea expedition, this time in search of the fabled Northwest Passage. Before he departs, he leaves instructions that Pocahontas be told that he has been lost at sea and is dead. The devastated girl is befriended by another colonist, John Rolfe (Christian Bale), whom she eventually marries although she still pines for Smith. Adopting the dress and manners of an Englishwoman, she returns with Rolfe and their child to England, where she is regarded as an exotic celebrity, living on his family estate. She does finally encounter John Smith and learn the truth, and she at last is able to let go of her passionate emotional attachment to him.
What is most exceptional about The New World is less the story it tells, although it is a remarkable one, than the way Malick tells that story. Eschewing conventional methods of film narrative, Malick tells his story largely through a succession of almost silent images combined with voice-over narration by the three principal characters—Smith, Rolfe, and especially Pocahontas. There is very little real dialogue, particularly in the first part of the movie, and few scenes are fully dramatized in the conventional manner. Most shots are quite brief, lasting only 3-10 seconds, and most camera set-ups are static. When longer takes do occur, or when the camera does move, the effect is all the more striking. A good example is the long unbroken take that happens when Smith returns to the fort and walks inside. The shot lasts for a couple of minutes as the camera roams all around the interior of the fort, following Smith's gaze, to show how desperate conditions are and how suspicious and hostile the inhabitants have become.
Each individual shot is almost like a beautifully composed and rendered painting. As one shot follows another, there is often little obvious spatial connection, yet there is always a subtle continuity and progression in the sequence of images as they propel the narrative onward, continuously moving it in a forward direction. The brevity of each shot and the fact that the same camera set-up is rarely, if ever, repeated indicate that each shot, and its precise placement in the orderly series of images that make up the movie, must have been either meticulously planned in advance or meticulously devised at the editing stage. Either way, the complexity of this method of constructing a movie that runs 2 hours 15 minutes in its shortest version is mind-boggling.
Frequent images and sounds of the natural world act as a unifying element. We constantly see images of water—rivers, swamps and marshes, the sea—of the sky, of plants and trees. The first sound we hear, over the credits, is the song of a wild thrush. (Later, a Native American is shown with two Carolina parakeets, now extinct, perched on his arm.) When Smith begins to teach Pocahontas English, the first words she learns are the names of the things in the natural world—water, tree, earth, sky. These scenes of the natural world contrast markedly with the scenes that take place in England during the last section of the movie. Malick makes 17th-century England, with its oppressive gray skies, seem austerely monochromatic—a cold, damp, and forbidding place. The drab brick buildings and cobbled streets seem hard and colorless compared to the landscapes of Virginia. And the gardens of Rolfe's estate—with their rigidly formal, highly manicured, geometric design typical of the French-style gardens of the time—seem equally unnatural, uninviting, inhuman, and drained of color.
The mesmeric effect of Malick's highly visual way of telling the story is nearly impossible to articulate. I've experienced something like it before with certain films of Eisenstein, Antonioni, and Orson Welles, an effect so subliminal that it is akin almost to cinematic hypnosis. This description might make the movie sound like a sterile formal experiment in the methodology of film narrative and what Andrew Sarris calls "academic montage." But that would be far from the truth, for this is a movie with a strong human element and an emotionally compelling story at its heart.
The main character of th
e movie and its most fully defined one is Pocahontas, and the heart of the movie is her story. It is first of all a love story, between Pocahontas and John Smith, and that part of the film is both tenderly moving and intensely emotional. It is the story of Pocahontas finding and losing love, of her losing innocence as she gains experience, of her cultural displacement as she moves through three distinct cultures (Native American, early Colonial American, and 17th-century English), of her journey from girlhood to womanhood and finally death when she was only in her early twenties. Kilcher's Pocahontas is a gentle, sensitive, and intelligent woman who moves through the incredible phases of her life with quiet strength and dignity. It's hard to believe that Q'orianka Kilcher was only fifteen years old when she made this movie, so insightful is her performance, and so utterly authentic her portrayal of the evolution and transformation of Pocahontas.The New World is an amazing movie because it works on so many levels. It is simultaneously a visual and a narrative work of art, taking the viewer on a journey through history, culture, and the life of one individual woman. It uses cinematic means that are almost beyond analysis or even description to bring to life a story that seems at once particular and universal. It expresses the uniquely personal vision of a film artist who is himself an explorer, a creative adventurer guiding viewers through his own cinematic new world.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
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