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Other Dashiell Writings: Actor
Auteurs Aye,
There's the Rub Way
Out There
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A Little Gem &
a Rotten Apple
The Belgian directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have taken the struggles of working class people as their subject. ROSETTA, the surprise winner at Cannes last year, is a portrait of a girl desperate to escape the squalid conditions of her existence. She lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother who has given up on life. The roles are reversed and Rosetta plays the stern, controlling parent to her own mother. Her overriding feeling, the mood that accompanies most of her waking moments, is seething and inarticulate anger. Her one desire is to get a job. The film follows her as she does whatever she can, regardless of who might get in the way, to find full-time work. Rosetta is not an archetype of the meek and virtuous poor. Her attitudes and decisions are disturbing. The Dardennes want us to look at what the iron grip of material necessity can do to a soul - the callousness, the suppression of feeling, the subordination of everything to a relentless pursuit. And they employ a style that perfectly embodies their story - the hand-held camera constantly showing us the girl in close-up, following her in her furtive daily rituals, creating a visual sense of entrapment and being hemmed in, outwardly and inwardly. Nowadays the hand-held technique has actually become overused and distracting - but this is a case where the method precisely mirrors the message. Rosetta is played by Emilie Dequenne. It is a performance
on a par with great ones from the silent era - so much communicated through
the face, the eyes, the way she always runs from one place to another
as if pursued. What I found tremendously moving about the film is that,
even though Rosetta has had her childhood stolen and has become a fierce
and hostile creature, her spirit is not completely dead. In her very desperation,
her emotional refusals to leave when she is fired from jobs, her feelings
of guilt about her mistreatment of a friend, there are glimpses of beauty,
if not hope. Some critics have complained that Rosetta is too bleak,
comparing it unfavorably with the Dardennes' previous effort, La Promesse,
where a child made brave moral choices even in the face of opposition.
I admired that film too, but I think Rosetta is greater in its
clear-eyed view of its heroine's spiritual condition. The devastating
final sequence does not close the door on Rosetta. It poises her, and
us, on the doorstep of choice, between despair and a greater human connection. John Irving has a way of taking questions of the day and making them grist for his fictional mill. Here he's adapted his own book to the screen, and even I was surprised at what an untalented hack he really is. It's about an orphanage in Maine in the 1940s, run by the run-down but devoted Dr. Larch, played by Michael Caine. Homer Wells, one of the orphans (Toby Maguire) is trained by the doctor to succeed him, but they differ on the issue of abortion. Larch performs them for women in need, Homer won't. Homer eventually leaves home to pursue a life of apple picking while having an affair with a friend's fiancee (Charlize Theron). A plot development, which I won't go into, leads to a supposed ethical dilemma which I saw coming several miles away. Then, as they say, things are wrapped up, etcetera, etcetera. First of all let me say that, on the evidence of this film, Toby Maguire must be the most boring actor on the planet. Yes, his character is one of those unbelievable saintly innocents that populate Irving's books - but even so, Maguire makes him even more of a deadly dull prig than he was on paper. His facial expressions and tone of voice barely modulate throughout the picture. More importantly, Irving's pretense of dealing with issues of sexual politics and abortion is dishonest. He stacks the deck so that the decisions his hero makes seem right, without ever really confronting or challenging an audience member's ideas or convictions. Furthermore, the women characters are ciphers, mere game boards on which the male characters enact their debates and rites of passage. I really took an active dislike to this movie when I realized how it was using the hot-button issue of abortion to merely fabricate a sense of topical relevance without taking any chances or giving the female characters a voice. I thought Hallstrom had promise as a director at one time - at least I liked parts of My Life as a Dog and What's Eating Gilbert Grape. His sojourn in Hollywood seems to have taken its toll - The Cider House Rules has the same dreary, unimaginative style as a thousand other studio products. Which isn't to say that some crowds aren't pleased. At my screening, I heard a lot of sympathetic oohing and ahhing over the cute little orphans. I'm sorry, but I don't believe in John Irving's fantasies about well-behaved, adorable children - it's condescension disguised as love and compassion. Even Michael Caine, with an American accent, can't redeem this rotten apple. Be sure to miss it. |
For
most of us, work of one sort of another takes up close to a third of our
time. It's remarkable, then, how seldom the movies focus on this. Leaving
aside our supposed need for "escapism," even most films that aspire to
the realm of art neglect this aspect of life.
With
a budget that could probably finance fifty Rosettas, Lasse Hallstrom's
THE CIDER HOUSE RULES gives us a big, prestigious package of sentiment,
social issues, colorful pictures and uplifting music, all for our Oscar-loving
consumption (seven nominations) - and there's not a spark of life in the
whole damn thing.