Idle Hands
by Chris Dashiell

The title sequence of Fernando Léon de Aranoa's Mondays in the Sun shows a violent confrontation between workers and police. We don't hear the shouting, or the beatings with billyclubs - on the soundtrack is romantic, soothing music. The effect is both amusing and elegiac. As it turns out, so is the film.

The picture takes place in a coastal town in northern Spain. The dock workers lost their fight two years before; the shipping company is moving to Korea. A group of laid-off workers hang out at the local bar, commiserate, and try to stave off their frustrations and feelings of powerlessness with humor. Santa (Javier Bardem) is a gruff bear of a man, charismatic and irresponsible, who refuses to pay for a streetlight that he broke during the demonstrations (and this forces him through a series of humiliating court appearances). José (Luis Tosar) struggles with the shame he feels over his wife Ana (Nieve de Medina) being the breadwinner (she works at a fish canning plant, which necessitates an elaborate deodorizing ritual when she comes home). Middle-aged Lino (José Ángel Egido) is at least making an effort to find work, but the companies only seem to want young people, and he becomes more and more depressed at each rejection. Then there's the old man Amador (Celso Bugallo) who claims that his wife is in the hospital, but there's been no sign of her for weeks, and he spends his life at the end of the bar, sinking deeper into alcoholism.

The summary sounds as gloomy as can be, but the screenplay (Ignacio del Moral, with help from Anaro) is passionate about the way these men feel, think, and behave, rather than as icons of class warfare. Scraping by on unemployment checks, hitting up their bar owner friend for free drinks, they have great difficulty even acknowledging the reality of their situation, which brings out their playfulness and humor, but also their petty animosity and jealousy. Hidden beneath the stoicism is guilt and fear - without their work they're not sure who exactly they are. José blows up at a bank's loan officer, his sense of pride spoiling his wife's attempts to get a loan. Lino dies his hair black in a futile attempt to appear younger. In one of the most wryly amusing sequences, Santa makes money on the side by baby-sitting in place of the bar owner's teenage daughter, who gives him a cut of her fee, while she skips off to see her boyfriend.

The center of the film, the anchor, is Javier Bardem as the wise-cracking scoundrel Santa. A handsome American star would try to look as attractive as possible to the audience. But Bardem appears here with a beard, a receding hairline, and a paunch. If I hadn't known he was in the film, I wouldn't have recognized him. And he's magnificent. The performance has richness, unpredictability, darkness, wit, and a kind of inchoate nobility. You start out thinking he's a jerk, and by the end you love him, even though he's still a jerk.

Aranoa's style is matter-of-fact. The story is anecdotal, drifting along like the lives of its inactive protagonists. The open-ended mood fits the subject like a glove. Whatever protest there is in the film against the globalization that puts men out of work is expressed through the effects on their lives, and an occasional rant from the articulate Santa. When the movie ends, as ambiguously as it began, the dominant note is not anger or even sadness, but a quiet feeling of brotherhood, a clearer sense of the ties that bind us together.

Loose ends:

Outside of the deafening roar from the mutliplexes, where the escapist fare seems emptier and more desperate than ever, 2003 has seen an excellent series of documentaries and subtle fictional portraits of character and community.

There's not much to say about Spellbound (Jeffrey Blitz) that hasn't already been said elsewhere. Simplicity and sincerity - rare virtues these days - make this film work exceedingly well. It profiles eight young contestants in the National Spelling Bee, wisely letting them and their parents do most of the talking. I feel like I really got to know these kids - and liked all of them. It's intelligent, warm, witty, and suspenseful. See it.

The incredible story of Capturing the Friedmans seems to have fallen into the lap of director Andrew Jarecki. I think he chickens out by trying to be noncommittal about what really happened in the notorious 1987 child sexual abuse case of Arnold and Jesse Friedman. But the home movies and interviews are so fascinating that the film is worth a look anyway. Strong stuff, but worth your time if you can take it.

Thomas Riedelsheimer's Rivers and Tides is the most beautiful movie I've seen so far this year. It's about the boldly innovative Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy, who uses the materials of nature itself to create works that reveal the patterns and relationships in the natural world. His gorgeous sculptures and installations are meticulously fashioned from stones, leaves, dirt, twigs, or icicles, resulting in forms that seem archetypal or primeval - spirals, wavy lines, cones - and reveal aspects of the natural landscape that our eyes normally don't see even though they're in front of us all the time. Some of his work only lasts for a brief period - he'll photograph it before it melts or is carried away by the tide - expressing the precise relationship between our sense of beauty and the passing of time, the very evanescence of life making it precious.

Reidelsheimer takes the time to let us see Goldsworthy's process as he creates his art, as well as lingering on the beautiful images of the works themselves. The 47-year old artist speaks eloquently throughout the film about his work, and his intense commitment to learning about the deep processes of the natural world, the water, the earth, the stones, and our own spirit. It's a rare film about art that manages to be completely absorbing, opening one's vision in breathtaking, unexpected ways. Don't be put off by the idea of some run-of-the-mill documentary that puts you to sleep talking about works of art. This is not one of those. It's a brilliant, enchanting glimpse into the mind of a true artist.

I had similar misconceptions about Winged Migration (Jacques Perrin). I wasn't sure if I could take an hour and a half of watching birds flying, and I expected something like one of those National Geographic specials - informative, mostly pleasant, but a little dull. I was wrong. This is an astounding film. The photography, done with super-light aircraft and remote control gliders, takes you so close to the life of migrating birds (not just their flying, but their nesting, feeding, and raising of young) that it feels almost as if you experience what it's like to be a bird.

In the fiction category, Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne gave us another of their unromantic pictures of working class life, called The Son. It's about a carpenter (Olivier Gourmet) who trains apprentices at a rehab center. He begins to take an unusual interest in one of the boys (Morgan Marinne), following him around and behaving inexplicably, until a revelation half way through allows us to wonder even more about his motives. The Dardennes push their minimalist aesthetic to the limits here - the extreme close-ups, handheld camera, and deliberate avoidance of dramatic distance produce a kind of ultra-realism that's about as rigorous as you can get. I liked their 1999 film Rosetta better, because it let us see further inside the characters, but there's no denying the power of the Dardennes' approach here, or the importance of their themes of guilt, forgiveness, and the task of becoming human.

Underrated and little seen, Tom Hunsinger and Neil Hunter's Lawless Heart takes the by-now familiar device of interlocking stories to create a film of uncommon subtlety and lyricism. Centered around the funeral of a gay restaurant owner on the Isle of Man, the tale follows three characters in succession, each time coming back to the funeral to start over again. The dryly acerbic brother-in-law (Bill Nighy) is tempted to stray from his marriage when he meets an intellectually stimulating French woman at the funeral. The lover (Tom Hollander) struggles against his own grief, striking up an ambiguous friendship/fling with a wild-spirited young woman (Sukie Smith). The best friend (Douglas Henshall), a good- hearted, reckless fuck-up, comes back to the Isle for the funeral after a long absence, promptly creates a mess wherever he goes, while falling in love with a local woman (Josephine Butler) whose past intersects with his in a way he doesn't suspect.

The stories all relate to one another in various ways, but it's the characters and their passions and foibles that make the film enjoyable. We are drawn to make judgments about the people in the film (just as they do about one another), based on their often strange behavior, only to be pulled up short by our later insights when we get to see things from their point of view. The result is a softening of perspective, a compassion that dovetails with the theme of loss and remembrance.

Finally, I was pleasantly surprised by Peter Sollett's Raising Victor Vargas, a coming of age story about a young man (Victor Rasuk) on the Lower East Side, who tries to be macho in the midst of a turbulent home life and a deepening crush on a neighborhood girl (Judy Marte). At first I was annoyed by the title character's immaturity and the whole "home boy" culture that was being depicted. Then I realized that that was the point - the film gradually, and convincingly, reveals the basic goodness beneath his contrived behavior, and how he comes into his own as a man under less than ideal circumstances. Particularly moving is the performance by Altagracia Guzman as Victor's hard-working, conservative grandmother. Sollett shows great insight by having Victor's journey involve not only honoring her, but standing up to her. This is a slice-of-life movie that is faithful to the milieu it depicts, with some honest, understated acting by a bunch of young newcomers.

Leaving aside Spellbound and Winged Migration, which got nominated last year, I don't expect we'll hear about any of these movies come Oscar time, when the slicker and more self- important "prestige" films take center stage. But I'll remember them.

©2003 Chris Dashiell
CineScene