Other Dashiell Writings:

Flicks - November 1999
Crossfire
The Hunchback
of Notre Dame (1923)
By the Law
Le Petit Soldat
Shadows

A Guided Tour
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies

Friends and Strangers
The Talented Mr. Ripley
All About my Mother
The Straight Story

Ends and Odds
by Chris Dashiell

MY NAME IS JOE (Ken Loach). Gritty realist Loach takes us to working class Glasgow for the story of a recovering alcoholic (Peter Mullan) who falls in love with a social worker (Louise Goodall). When a young member of the soccer team he coaches gets into trouble, Joe risks his new relationship and his sobriety in order to help. Loach is adept at showing the love and basic decency of people who struggle within a world of limited options. There is warmth and humor here, and then a sense of impending disaster which increases as the film goes on to a heartbreaking intensity. Mullan is very fine - by turns jaunty and mournful and smoldering with anger. This is Loach's best work in years - there's barely a false move in the picture, and it ends with a devastating jolt that is well earned. The Scottish accents are so heavy that the film was subtitled - I have to admit that I wouldn't have understood half the dialogue without them.

THE GAMBLER (Karoly Makk).
19th century novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky found himself in a terrible bind - due to a contract made under financial duress with an unscrupulous publisher, he had to write a new novel in thirty days or lose all rights to his works. He hired a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina, and the miraculous result was his novel The Gambler , completed just in time - and, in Anna, a devoted wife for Dostoevsky's twenty remaining years. Makk's film purports to tell the story of how this novel was written, as well as the story of The Gambler itself. It boasts excellent performances by Michael Gambon as Dostoevsky - succeeding in the difficult task of bringing a literary figure to life with intelligence and passion - and Jodhi May, who is the spitting image of Anna. Perhaps I would have liked the movie better if I weren't such an avid reader of Dostoevsky, for this is a case where my knowledge of the literary source, and the author's life, soured me on the movie. First of all, there is too much time spent on the framing story of Dostoevsky and Anna and not enough on The Gambler itself. There was a lot of potential - the roulette scenes are marvelous, and Luise Rainer, looking incredibly ancient, does a great turn as the irascible Granny who shows up and spoils everybody's plans. But instead Makk flails about, injecting melodrama into the writer-stenographer story, when the real story was quite dramatic enough. It's bad enough that he puts a sex scene in The Gambler (as if Dostoevsky would ever do such a thing). But when a title announces at the beginning that "This is a true story" one would expect some adherence to the facts - Makk gets many things wrong, and invents a few things out of whole cloth. I probably would have forgiven all this if the picture had enough dramatic energy, but despite the fine efforts of the actors, it meanders about and lacks the courage to really explore the issues of the novel, or the ideas of its creator.

THE SIXTH SENSE
(M. Night Shyamlan).
This movie reminded me of a Twilight Zone episode, where everything in the story is a set-up for one gimmicky idea. I figured this one out an hour before I was supposed to. It does have two major assets - first and foremost, a child actor named Haley Joel Osment who acts rings around everybody as the traumatized boy, and secondly, some creepy moments achieved, refreshingly, without any whizbang special effects. Unfortunately Shyamlan ends up being more focused on the mechanics of plot (which nevertheless, or maybe because of this, is full of holes) than in the inherent psychological interest of the material. I didn't see anything especially distinctive in the performances of Bruce Willis or Toni Collette. Better than your average spook movie, but considering what it might have been it seems a shame that Shyamlan chose to ride a one-trick pony.


THE IRON GIANT
(Brad Bird).

A giant robot lands on Earth in 1956 and is befriended by a boy, while a paranoid government agent wants to destroy it. You could hardly ask for a better children's film than this - intelligent script, funny, exciting, with a real point. Bird has the rare virtue of respecting his young audience - he doesn't condescend, overdo or overexplain. Best of all, the animation is absolutely superb - from the storm at sea which opens the film to the crowd scenes which end it, the drawing is lovingly detailed, a world unto itself.

ELECTION (Alexander Payne).
This comedy about a teacher (Matthew Broderick) whose hostility against a shallow student (Reese Witherspoon) running for class president, causes the frail edifice of his life to topple, received a lot of critical acclaim. I laughed at some of the bits, and I liked Chris Klein as the dumb, good-natured football player, but I was surprised at how little I enjoyed the movie. It has a sour heartless quality which is not redeemed by any true instinct for character. It seems to me that a lot depends on our position as observers. I accept that adults can be vain, self-serving hypocrites who take out their frustration on kids. And I accept that adolescents can be inane, cruel, status-hungry little monsters. If a satire can show me that from the inside of the characters, so that I am implicated in the story, I think it can work and be very funny. But Payne takes his position outside of the characters, pointing at them and laughing, and I think we're supposed to feel very clever and sophisticated and superior. It didn't work for me - the effect was mechanical, like watching an ingenious little wind-up toy run around the floor for two hours.

THE GREEN MILE (Frank Darabont). Come back, American Beauty. All is forgiven.