Shallows
and Depths
by Les PhillipsMona Lisa Smile is a cartoon starring Julia Roberts, and directed by Mike Newell, who, once upon a time, directed an exquisite, nuanced dark picture called Dance With a Stranger. Most of the other films Newell has directed are better than Mona Lisa Smile, but this latest one is at least good looking. It's well photographed, the teachers and students and boyfriends sure enough dress like 1959, and Wellesley looks like Wellesley .
The screenplay is stupid. The voice-over at the beginning says that Katherine Watson (Roberts) is traveling to take a position at "the most conservative school in America," an absurd claim for Wellesley in the '50s or in any other time. (The film was prescreened for a group of '50s Wellesley alumnae. They thought it sucked, mainly because the social and intellectual culture of the film didn't resemble their
Wellesley in the slightest.) Most of the stereotypes in the film are introduced in the first seven minutes: the lesbian nurse who gets fired; the hysterical alcoholic quasi-lesbian instructor in elocution and poise. The womanizing faculty dude. When you get tired of being correct and elitist and proper at Wellesley , you go into town to the disreputable bar. Usually the womanizing faculty dude is at his station. All of the students are prigs and prudes and snotty rich girls, until Julia Roberts teaches them how to Think, how to Value themselves as women. Dead Poets' Society for girls, with art history.
I have absolutely nothing against Julia Roberts, and her performance in this silly film is undeniably adequate, even when she herself has to learn valuable moral lessons. Most of the actresses who play students and boyfriends (Julia
Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Topher Grace, etc.) acquit themselves well. Despite Ms. Roberts, many of them seem cheerfully resigned to appearances in Far From Heaven II, next season. Juliet Stevenson is wasted as Ye Olde Lesbian Nurse. Marcia Gay Harden has an impossible, horrible role, and took it over the top, making it far worse.
The great Marian Seldes gives the best cartoon performance in the film, by far. She plays an evil, wretched old battleaxe who fires people. Some fun!
Monster is hard to watch, and not just because of the violence. Charlize Theron, as the serial murderer Aileen Wuornos, projects rage and need of such intensity that I winced in my seat. The cliche "living on the edge" was never more apt: this is an angry, ugly, homeless, alcoholic prostitute, and the sense that she's never more than a half-step away from oblivion is palpable. And the film gives you no sense that there's any other kind of life possible for her.
Christina Ricci plays Wuornos's lover Selby. She's completely fresh, girlish, and accomplishes neatly the transition from kittenish innocence to energy and greed. I think it's one of the better performances of the year, but it's overshadowed by Theron's. I'm one of the people who
have written all kinds of sarcastic things about Charlize Theron's career up to now, and I meant every word that I wrote, but this performance is an absolute revelation. It would be a phenomenal performance even if it weren't given by a beautiful young woman who deliberately uglied herself up.
Writer-director Patty Jenkins's style is naturalistic. She could have imposed many different lines of ideology or political rectitude. Instead, we just see Aileen, and her lover, and her victims. This is a superior film, and Theron is every bit as good as her reviews
The Fog of War is a beautiful film. Bombs sail and float like birds through misty, Impressionist skies. Errol Morris photographs 1950s cars so that they're objects of approval, of aesthetic regard. Morris loves the way things work, loves to bring out the novelty in inanimate objects; here the camera will linger on automobiles, weapons, airplanes being made, while Robert McNamara talks about war in voiceover. Much of the film is the 85-year-old McNamara talking directly to the camera; Morris has chosen a background of white and shades of gray that compliments McNamara's own grayness perfectly.
The Fog of War is nothing like Mr. Death or Gates of Heaven, where the director seemed mostly interested in exhibiting the crazy, the ruthless, and the morally bankrupt. Morris allows McNamara to talk. Nobody talks back to him, and only occasionally do the images mock rather than illustrate. He seems to speak honestly, and his regrets are clearly very large. He calls himself a war criminal. Yet the arrogance that created those crimes is still very much in evidence, forty years later. McNamara can't confess except from a position of control: he must tell you How It Happened; he is still playing the man with all the answers. You could conclude that he can't stop being Mr. Military-Industrial-Death, no matter how hard he tries. You could also be lost in wonder at McNamara's humanity, discretion, fair-mindedness, and sorrow.
When McNamara's book on Vietnam came out, many critics lined up with lists of distortions, catalogues of sins of omission and commission. My sense is that, tragically, McNamara has tried to atone for misdeeds that perhaps no one can wholly atone for. On the basis of The Fog of War, I'm ready to say that the contemporary McNamara is doing his best. I admire him for that. And whether or not Errol Morris intended that, he's produced a superb film.
©2004 Les Phillips
CineScene