A FEW LEFTOVERS
by Chris Dashiell

As the end of the year approaches, Hollywood traditionally starts releasing their most prestigious offerings, in the belief that Academy voters won't be able to remember anything they saw more than two months ago. Judging by three out of the last four years, when the Best Picture winners were released in the summer or earlier, this idea doesn't seem to be valid. Nevertheless, the critic is still subjected to a few hectic months in which there isn't enough time to see everything he wants to see, followed by the usual long period of relative torpor. For those of us in the burbs, or the cinematic hinterland, this frantic time extends from December to about mid-February. In anticipation of this, I now sweep a few thoughts out of my critical attic, on films that I never got around to reviewing, or films on which others have beaten me to the punch. Just because they are leftovers doesn't mean they're no good. In fact, a couple of them are among the best of the year.

Pollock (Ed Harris).
It's very hard to make a good film about painting. Harris falls into some familiar traps here - he turns Jackson Pollock into a sort of inarticulate life force, discounting the man's intellectualism - in order, I suppose, to make his angst more palpable, and for sharper contrast with Marcia Gay Harden's Lee Krasner. That said, he turns in an impressively focused performance within this conception, and the film contains some very remarkable painting sequences that come close to conveying the urgency of creation in the moment. His directorial style is almost as inward as his acting, and the respect he shows for the raggedness of Pollock's life makes the picture vivid, for the most part avoiding the contrived, reverential quality that has always been the bane of movies about artists.

The Pledge (Sean Penn).
Jack Nicholson's performance has none of his familiar mannerisms, which is to say that he is very good here as a retired cop who is obsessed with fulfilling the promise he made to a murdered child's mother that he will find the killer. He's taciturn and rumpled and rather ordinary, and it's just that lack of flashiness that makes the role interesting. Penn, in his third outing as director, hasn't really found a style yet. His visual approach is flat, and he's too literal-minded to give the material the energy it needs, but at least he has a feel for the way lower middle class people behave. The twist at the end - more a kind of anti-twist - upends audience expectations in an interesting way.

The Gift (Sam Rami).
God knows I'll put up with almost anything for a chance to watch Cate Blanchett. Here she plays a single mother in a small Southern town, a psychic who ekes out a living doing Tarot readings, and the movie actually starts strong. Blanchett manages to create a warm, compelling character, and Giovanni Ribisi is great as a nut case who looks to her for help. But then The Plot kicks in - a murder mystery in which I knew the identity of the killer almost an hour before the movie reveals it - and Raimi settles for stale melodrama and Twilight Zone-style epiphany. Oh well....

Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff).
I laughed pretty steadily during the first half of the picture, in which Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson express the revulsion of their teenage existence with withering wit. Birch is a real character here - as opposed to the symbol she played in American Beauty - and I expect great things from her in the future. The scenes with Illeana Douglas, as one of those terribly with-it, helpful high school art teachers, just about had me rolling. The one mistake Zwigoff makes, I think, is to turn the Birch character's relationship with a geeky record collector (Steve Buscemi) into the movie's center. To have her start trying to find a girlfriend for him struck me as completely against her character, as if the movie were trying to become a romantic screwball comedy in order to widen its appeal. The Birch-Buscemi thing might have worked if it had been only a thread, rather than the main thing. Despite this, it's still one of the more intelligent American films of the year.

Mulholland Drive (David Lynch).
Forget about all the reviewers who complained that they couldn't understand it. If you are open to the premise that a movie expresses truth in ways similar to a dream, then Lynch's meaning is clear enough. Let's just say that the ending is a nightmare of cold reality following a dream of wishful thinking. Although Lynch sometimes gets away with weak scenes and overly baroque effects - simply because he's Lynch and you expect that kind of thing - I'd have to say that this is his strongest work to date. The important elements - black humor, horror, psychological crisis - all come together in what is possibly the most bitter attack on Hollywood ever filmed. Frankly, it's great to see a movie that shows some active disrespect for genre - instead of worshiping tradition, Lynch lets it blow up. Yay.

©2001 Chris Dashiell
CineScene