Vagabond, The Constant Gardener, and The Messenger are some of the movies reviewed this week. There's also a little bit of a World War II theme with Resnais' Night and Fog and Truffaut's The Last Metro, both French films coincidentally. In this post you can also find some words about how people view free spirited people, how we can avoid another Holocaust, and the different ways we all grieve.
Vagabond (Agnes Varda, France, 1985): You could call this film a mockumentary, but it's clearly fictional when you watch movie. What it is, is a mockumentary in spirit. Agnes Varda tells the story of a homeless girl walking around Southern France and living life. Interspersed throughout the film are fake interviews of the people she meets throughout her journey. These people talk about her and the affect she had on them, and his angle of the movie makes the more of an observation of what people and the audience think about a free spirit who is living an aimless life. Is this person a free spirit who has succeeded in living a happy life without the constraints of modern society? Or is this person just a bum who will never have happiness in her life? The movie does not have a clear answer to these questions. It seems that Varda agrees in some way to both sides. The main character, Mona, is an aimless girl who won't get anywhere in her life. The beginning of the movie is her dead, so we know she dies at a young age. But did she live a happy life? Sometimes yes and sometimes no, which is not all that different from most peoples lives. It's a wonderful gimmick to film fake responses by the other characters to Mona, because we get to experience the many different reactions people to have to a character that lives "without roof or rules" (the films French title).
The actress who plays Mona, Sandrine Bonnaire, is mesmerizing and completely real. She's a young girl, but you can tell she's lived a lot. She displays an apathetic attitude and is phenomenal in scenes of intense emotion, like anger or happiness. Because this is a film about how people see her, we don't get much information on how Mona sees herself. She's a person who is hard to read, and we're never quite sure why she's doing what she's doing. But that's why the movie is genius. It hangs on to its main idea about how other people see people like Mona, not how Mona sees herself, and the movie sticks to that. Vagabond is a brilliantly structured film that almost feels like a travelogue of sorts sometimes, but at the end of the movie we have a great feel of a particular environment and also a particular person. Like most great films, it's personal but also very social in the way it looks at the person. Varda has created maybe the best movie I've seen on those who are homeless by choice.
Grade: A
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, France, 1955): This is one of the earliest movies made on the Holocaust, it's a documentary and it's only 30 minutes. Most importantly, it's easily the best film on the holocaust, fiction or nonfiction, I've ever seen. Resnais takes on a essay-like approach, giving us a rundown from the rise of the Nazi's to the building of the concentration camps, to what went on in the concentrations camps themselves. Despite the fact that the movie feels very objective, it's still an amazingly powerful film. It's really an amazing accomplishment that this much power can filled into a single 30 minute documentary. Certainly it's the horrific images of the torture, killings, and completely inhuman behavior that went on in the camps that are incredibly powerful. One image in particular, of a bunch of naked skinny dead bodies getting dumped into a mass grave by a bulldozer is an image that will never leave my head. It's a film that can do so much and really displays why images are so powerful.
What catapults this movie over any other movie that may show horrific images, is that it's a film that brings it all back to us, the audience. The movie cuts back and forth between black-and-white images and footage of the camps when they were occupied and color images and footage of the camps in the present day (in 1955). The whole point of the movie is not that we don't forget what happened, but to make sure that the audience knows that this is all real and what's to stop it from happening again? The movie asks us in the end, "who is responsible?" He asks us and tells us at the same time. It is us, it is humanity who is responsible. It was not the Nazi's who were killing Jews, it was people killing people. There are numerous great anti-war movies, but this one is one of the best. If people could willingly kill other innocent people in the 1940's, then why can it not happen again?
Grade: A
The Messenger (Oren Moverman, USA, 2009): Two veterans, one from the first Gulf War and the other from the second, are on duty in the states as the messengers who go to the homes of the slain military family members to inform them of the news. It's a harrowing and promising premise. Based on this premise, The Messenger totally delivers, but it still does not completely work in crafting a movie beyond the premise. There are about six scenes in which the two soldiers tell families the news of their loss, and each of those six scenes are incredible cinematic examples of grief and how we deal with it. Sometimes people are silent, sometimes they lash out against the messenger, and sometimes the family come together. Those powerful scenes are brilliantly acted and written. If this movie consisted solely of scenes of the soldiers telling family members about the deaths of their loved ones and showcasing the different ways people grieve, this film may have been a masterpiece.
When the movie is not showing us the grief of military families, it's showing us the torment and grief of the soldiers involved. For much of the first half, almost completely with Ben Foster's character, this emotional torment is realized very well. The second half the movie goes more into the personal lives of the two guys, Foster and Woody Harrelson, but their personal lives are nowhere near as interesting as the lives of the people they're seeing in their jobs. The non-messenger parts of the movie are lacking in focus and are comparatively lacking the raw emotion of the rest of the film. The movie does attempt to show that the pain of war doesn't just go away when the soldiers come home and that the cost of war is on the families and the soldiers themselves. But the soldiers who are at home seem to have it a lot easier than the families who just learn that their loved ones are dead. It's a difficult movie to grade, because I love the messenger scenes, but the rest of the movie feels very average in comparison. Regardless, those scenes with the families are filled with such intense emotion that I can't help but recommend it.
Grade: B-
The Last Metro (Francois Truffaut, France, 1980): Francois Truffaut is known for being one of the forbearers of the French New Wave, a new cinema that was personal, deconstructive, and completely refreshing. But here is a film that is almost antithetical to that notion. It was made almost 20 years after the beginning of the French New Wave, so it's definitely not French New Wave, but still there are some expectations for a director like Truffaut. You wouldn't expect Truffaut to make a movie that is so informed of classical Hollywood filmmaking, the style that Truffaut tried to get away from in the French New Wave. But if you don't know Truffaut's history, it is a nice homage to those types of classical-style period films that Hollywood loves. It's a film about a bunch of theater artists who are having difficulties putting on a play in Nazi-occupied France. This is exactly what people talk about when they talk about Oscar-bait movies. Like most Oscar-bait movies, it's very enjoyable and has fun, relatable characters. But it's also not very memorable and doesn't have as much personality as you'd expect from a Truffaut film.
Certainly the most interesting part of the movie is the environment that the film is set in. It's fascinating to see the difficulties the theater troupe has, especially the Jewish director in hiding. It's a wonderful look at how Jews, Frenchmen, and artists dealt with the occupation. It's beneficial almost only because of how it shows the lives of people living under a Nazi occupation. Another smaller reason why it's a bit more interesting is that the color cinematography is frequently beautiful looking. But it is still a lesser Truffaut, but certainly one of the most accessible Truffaut films. It's a movie that fans of Hollywood cinema will like very much, but to fans of art cinema will probably forget. As someone who likes Truffaut, I found it interesting, but ultimately not completely rewarding. My interest in World War II certainly helped and it definitely expands your knowledge of that time period, but the film is trite and conventional. It's defintely possible that I am looking down upon this movie more so because of my expectations with a great director like Truffaut, so you may want to take the grade with some caution.
Grade: B-
The Three Musketeers (Paul W.S. Anderson, USA, 2011): I reviewed this film for the newspaper. You can read that review here. I honestly have nothing more to say about it. It's a very bland movie and one I never would have watched and never would have considered watching if I didn't have to review something. I can't imagine why anyone would go to this movie and why anyone would come out loving it. It's not the worst movie made, it's just completely pointless.
Grade: D
The Constant Gardener (Fernando Meirelles, UK, 2005): At the end of this movie, you may feel like you just watched a two hour long PSA on the big pharmaceutical companies illegally and immorally testing harmful drugs on innocent Africans. But what makes this PSA more than just a message, is that it's fairly well made. Directed by City of God director Fernando Meirelles, the movie has an urgency and in its depiction of a romantic relationship, it's frequently beautiful. It's still purely a genre movie, but it's one of the better conspiracy thriller films. The plot is intricate, but there is a clear arc for the main character that is believable and a clear real life evil that is the villain. The movie is not based on a true story, it's based on a novel by John le Carre, but it was certainly inspired by true events, and that freedom gives the movie just enough room to do what it wishes and not feel overly sentimental.
Besides the message of the evil big pharmaceutical companies, the movie has a more intimate message of caring for people other than yourself, even if its just one person. That's where the title comes from. The main character played by Ralph Fiennes takes care of his garden, but never ventures beneath and outside the garden to find out what's going on. The movie can be a bit blunt in its messages, but it's a movie smart movie made for the mainstream so there had to be come compromises. That doesn't take away from the fact that the movie is well-intentioned and very noble. The end of the movie though doesn't compromise and goes perfectly with the overall message of the movie. It's a brave mainstream conspiracy thriller. It falls into some of the traps of the genre, but it frequently shies away from them. You've seen countless stories about people trying to better the world, but this is a movie that stands out just a bit from those other ones.
Grade: B
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