Review: The Wrestler (4/5)

The Wrestler
(Darren Aronofsky)
Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei, Ernest Miller, Evan Rachel Wood.
Running time: 115 minutes. (16)

The Wrestler stars Mickey Rourke as Randy the Ram, a wrestler pinned on the canvas of life. Twenty years ago, he was a superstar professional. Now his career has been power-slammed. He wrestles at town-hall championships for spare cash and lives alone in a trailer park where he can’t make the rent. His heart has taken a beating. He has an out-of-contact daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) whom he has neglected and his only hope of love is with a stripper called Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) who won’t get involved with a customer. No wonder his ticker gives out with a heart attack. His spirit has taken a pile-driver. You expect him to tap out at any moment. The commentator in your head screams ‘this is over!’. But wait. Randy the Ram is flexing his muscles! Randy is getting up! Can he ever again jump from the top rope?

The Wrestler is a moving and beautifully restrained story, in the words of Bruce Springsteen’s touching end-credit song, about a one-trick pony. Randy is set to play a 20th anniversary grudge match when his heart attack sends him into retirement. What’s he to do? This is the kind of guy who, when shopping with another wrestler, breaks frying pans over the guy’s head. He’s a wrestler through and through.
He’s never more at home than backstage before a game. We see him in a dressing room full of muscle and make-up, and the place looks like a hang-out for failed superheroes. Before each game, the wrestlers discuss a gameplan and the film is quick to dismiss wrestling as a sport. It even reminds you of how much fun it is to watch: when Randy throws his opponent into the crowd, a spectator hands him a trashcan to bash the guy with. Which makes you wonder: who in the hell brings a trashcan to a wrestling event? Then another man offers Randy his prosthetic leg which is used to give him a kicking.

Wrestling is showmanship, but the blows are real. Randy now wears a hearing aid. One gap-toothed wrestler riddles Randy’s back with a staple gun. His side is speared with barbed wire. Tomei’s Cassidy, herself struggling with a heavy load, tells Randy he looks like Christ. She’s referring to his flowing blonde highlights. (Though you can bet Christ didn't shave his armpits).

And you wonder whose sins does Randy do this for? He’s the kind of guy who can barely express his emotions. He wants to take his inner pain and make it physical in the ring.

What gives The Wrestler a bonus layer of poignancy is Mickey Rourke’s Lazarus return as a leading man. The 1980s star of Nine1/2 Weeks had the smooth, square-set features of a Corvette. Now his face is written off, as if he wrapped himself around a lamp-post. His shapeless, pudge-face is now embedded with gravel. He speaks as if he lost an exhaust pipe. For large parts of The Wrestler, the camera follows him from behind, as if it were too ashamed to look at him.

You don’t expect this from director Darren Aronofsky. His debut Pi filmed the paranoid Maximillian Cohen head-on, locked into stride, so you could do nothing but stare turmoil in the face. Aronofsky was brazen and blunt and in a hurry to announce himself. In Requiem for a Dream, he wanted to bludgeon you into his waking nightmare. Now he has found grace in maturity. When he photographs Randy in long shot, in forlorn empty spaces chilled by winter, or in the noir-inflected gloom of his trailer park – all slatted lighting and puddles of darkness – he wants not to evoke his own talent, but the loneliness and heavy heart of his character.

And what an unforgettable character. Rourke becomes the larger-than-life wrestler, but he fills up Randy’s hollowed personality with a broken dignity. There’s a beautiful shot where he walks with his back to us through a warren of corridors. It feels like he’s backstage: you can hear the crowd roar in anticipation. But it’s in his head. He’s psyching himself up for his first shift at a deli meat counter. “Do I know you from somewhere?” asks one man getting an order.

In Limelight, at the end of his career, Charlie Chaplin made a film about a neglected vaudeville star who nobody wanted to watch any more. It’s hard not to see The Wrestler too as the story of Mickey Rourke. But unlike Limelight, there’s little self-pity. Randy carries a tattoo saying ‘Job’ on his knuckle: he stoically takes the knockdowns and only blames himself. “I’m an old, broken-down piece of meat. And I’m alone. And I deserve to be alone,” he tells Cassidy at one point. But yet, he’s never pathetic.

Aronofsky’s film is a lament for men like Randy, the John Tuckers of the world, troubled men who can only do what they do. But it’s a tribute, too, to an icon who has got himself back into the ring. To watch The Wrestler is to watch Mickey Rourke back on that top rope. Here’s hoping he bodyslams that Oscar.

Review: A Christmas Tale (4/5); Beverly Hills Chihuahua (1/5)

A Christmas Tale
(Arnaud Desplechin)
Catherine Deneuve, Jean-Paul Roussillon, Anne Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Melvil Poupaud, Chiara Mastroianni.
Running time: 150 minutes.
(IFI Club)

“All happy families resemble one another,” said Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina. “But each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Arnaud Desplchin’s fascinating, minorly-flawed study of family dysfunction has, strangely, an uncanny resemblance to the emotional mechanics of Jonathan Demme’s forthcoming Rachel Getting Married. But it still manages to be unhappy in its own unique way – with a kind of free-wheeling, free-style, jazzy Frenchness that once made Gallic movies hip.

A Christmas Tale has an impeccable line-up and perfectly judged performances. The parents are played by Catherine Deneuve – who else to play a mother frozen in her own isolation? – while her ribbitting, toady husband is played as a gentle beneficent by Jean-Paul Roussilon.

Years ago they lost a child. Now their remaining three children are a handful: writer Sylvia (Anne Consigny) detests her feckless, alcoholic older brother Henri (Mathieu Amalric in generous form) and has him banished from the family. Then there’s their once fragile younger brother Ivan (Melvil Poupaud).

Imagine if Wes Anderson had grown up in France – the comedy is dark, eccentric and border-line wacky but the sentimentality is toned down. The joints of the family drama are fitted together like a thriller, including ominous cellos. It’s much too long, while a subplot involving Ivan and his wife (Chiara Mastroianni) borders on the ridiculous.

But it’s a loving portrait of an unlovely family at Christmas, carefully tuned to the invisible, emotional winds that blow through family.


Beverly Hills Chihuahua
(Raja Gosnell):
Jamie Lee Curtis, Piper Perabo, Manolo Cardona.
Voices: Drew Barrymore, Andy Garcia.
Running time: 91 minutes. (G)


Paris Hilton is a bitch. A pampered, diamonded, snow-white, fluffy bitch. Disney has reincarnated the spirit of America’s human poodle into a dog called Chloe in this live-action talking dogs movie. She’s now an obnoxious four-legged fiend owned by fashion maven Vivian (Jamie Lee Curtis).

Fluffy Chloe is left in the company of another white, fluffy poodle – Vivian’s niece Rachel (Piper Perabo) – who takes her to Mexico on holidays, only for the pooch to be dog-napped. Can imprisoned Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) escape the organised dogfight ring? Can she escape El Diablo (voice of Edward James Olmos), the vicious Doberman sent to recapture her and her helper Delgado (voice of Andy Garcia)?
Will Rachel and hunky Mexican gardener Sam (Manolo Cardona), who set out to find Chloe, fall in love?

This pedigree glum has animated talking muzzles, but it looks like reconstituted scraps of various kiddy movies from the 1980s. It should just about pass muster for young kids.

Review: Seven Pounds (1/5)

Seven Pounds
(Gabriele Muccino)
Will Smith, Woody Harrelson, Rosario Dawson, Michael Ealy, Barry Pepper.
Running time: 118 minutes. (15A)

Seven Pounds is like a school bully. It wants nothing more than to turn you into a snivelling, weepy-eyed blubber puss. I’d give it my lunch money so as not to have to watch it again. It stars Will Smith as a depressed US Treasury official called Ben Thomas. He begins the film telling a 911 operator he’s going to commit suicide.
We then see him beforehand, investigating the finances of sick people, which involves some very suspect behaviour. He plays good cop, bad cop, engages in strange acts of kindness and falls in love with Rosario Dawson’s Emily, a woman wearing lots of grey pallor make-up and in need of a heart transplant. His best pal needs a bone marrow transplant. Could Woody Harrelson’s blind man need an eye transplant too?
The director Gabriele Muccino, who teamed with Smith for The Pursuit of Happiness, has an engaging style. His movies are neatly constructed and somewhat enigmatic. But this is an insufferable, one-note, minor key, mushy, maudlin melodrama. It’s like listening to Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ only to have someone drop the piano on your head. The plot is designed to keep you guessing and to make you cry as often as possible. Once you’ve stopped guessing and observe its improbable script, cry you will.

The Dublin Film Critics Circle Awards 2008

The Dublin Film Critics Circle has named Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will be Blood as the best film of 2008. Hunger, Steve McQueen’s study of Bobby Sands’s last days, was selected as the best Irish film. The DFCC, which polls professional critics in the capital, including this one, limits its selection to those films released in Ireland during the calendar year and, as a result, many of the pictures jockeying for attention in the current American awards season are deemed ineligible. This also explains why some of last year’s Oscar winners – released early in the year in this territory – make it onto the list. The DFCC was set up three years ago to gather the thoughts of the city’s critics and to stage special events. Last year the body presented its first Maverick Award – a set of fabulous cufflinks – to the great John Waters. More activity is brewing.

BEST FILM

1 There Will Be Blood

2. Hunger

3. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

4. No Country for Old Men

5. Wall-E


BEST DIRECTOR

1. Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will be Blood)

2. Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)

3. Steve McQueen (Hunger)

4. The Coen Brothers (No Country for Old Men)

5. Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)




BEST ACTOR

1. Daniel Day Lewis (There Will be Blood)

2. Michael Fassbender (Hunger)

3. Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight)

4. Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men)

5. Josh Brolin (W.)

BEST ACTRESS

1. Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long)

2. Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky)

3. Ellen Page (Juno)

4. Angelina Jolie (Changeling)

5. Nadine Labaki (Caramel)

BREAKTHROUGH

1. Steve McQueen (Hunger)

2. Martin McDonagh (In Bruges)

3. Michael Fassbender (Hunger)

4. Nadine Labacki (Caramel)

5. Ellen Page (Juno)

BEST IRISH FILM

1. Hunger

2. Kisses

3. Saviours

Oscar in the trash can once again....

This time last year, Scott Foundas at the LA Weekly launched a salvo at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' nine-film "shortlist" for the 2007 Foreign Language Film Oscar after it excluded Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's Cannes-winning abortion drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. He was right. He's at it again this year here after Matteo Garrone's neo-neo-realist mob movie Gomorrah got the snub. You can read my review of the film (published last October but new to the blog) below.

Review: Gomorrah (4.5/5)

Gomorrah
(Matteo Garrone):

Salvatore Abruzzese, Toni Servillo, Carmine Paternoster, Marco Macor, Circo Petrone,
Salvatore Cantalupo, Carlo Del Sorbo.
Running time: 137 minutes. (16)

Things were a lot tougher back in the Old Testament. If vice got the better of you in Gomorrah, you were met with a pyroclastic surge of fire and brimstone. But in Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, a multi-narrative film set in modern-day Napoli, there is no god to arrest the fall of man. And the Italian authorities don't bother either – the police only ever enter to mop up a mess. Yet this is a place awash with sin and corruption, a Gomorrah in everything but name. It's the true-to-life world of the Camorra, the sprawling network of gangster families that control parts of Napoli and whose tentacles reach far into Italy. This is a world unto itself. Society is sinking faster than a barrel of lead. It's set around a warren apartment complex, a place where teenagers carry guns and rob African cocaine dealers; where families snuff each other out in daily feuds; where women are shot in the head because they come from the wrong family; where state contracts go to men who dump toxic waste in the countryside. The only law here is loyalty to your clan.

The opening sequence lets you know what you're in for: preening gangsters luxuriate in a tanning booth when suddenly, their own associates draw guns and shoot them down. Here violence is used as a tool to shock rather than to excite. Executions burst onto the screen like an unexpected punch to the head. It leaves you reeling.

The story evolves over five threads, taking in six characters whose lives are helplessly consumed. There's Totó (Salvatore Abruzzese), an unblinking pre-teen who watches killings and drug-dealing daily. He is going to be sucked in with the inevitability of quicksand. At one point, he lines up with other boys who await their turn to enter an old warehouse. There, a man swamps their tiny shoulders with a bullet-proof vest and shoots them in the chest. "Now you're a man," he tells each of them.

Don Ciro (Carlo Del Sorbo) is a grey, middle-aged moneyman who shuffles from apartment to apartment paying out mob cash to loyal families whose sons and daughters are in jail. But feuding ruptures his clan and he is caught in the middle. There's Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo), a quiet tailor who works in virtual poverty despite overseeing the factory production of haute couture for the European markets. In desperation, he accepts money to teach workers at a clandestine Chinese factory. He rides there in the boot of a car as he will be shot for disloyalty if he is found out. There's Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), a young man who finds work with the smooth, silver-haired Franco (Toni Servillo). He thinks it's an honest job but Franco is as toxic as the waste he buys up from Italian firms and then dumps illegally in any place he can hide it. At one point, his truck drivers quit after one of them is burned by leaking waste. Franco then hires kid drivers instead.

The film's apogee of madness resides, however, in Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), a pair of coke-addled gun-toting livewires who think life is a gangster movie. "I'm No 1, Tony Montana," says Marco, whose hero is Al Pacino's Scarface. They uncover a stash of mob weapons, which leads to a classic scene where, on a wintry beach, they stand in their underpants firing guns into the sea. Their robbing spree incurs the wrath of a local Don.

Hollywood could glamorise gangsters because it knew they had to get comeuppance. Social order was restored. But in Garrone's universe, there is no such thing as comeuppance. And the social order no longer exists. There's just a daily cycle of violence. He captures this with an almost journalistic honesty. Gomorrah is very much in the Italian neo-realist tradition, using real locations and mainly non-actors to tell a raw, truthful story. But Garrone builds on top the multi-strand perspective of American films such as Traffic and Babel, giving us a dizzy gallery of characters and ever-shifting, nosing perspectives. This comes at a price though: you cannot but feel a little detachment for its characters.

Garrone views his subject matter with a dispassionate, roaming eye. His camera is always searching out and contrasting daily life: there is a scene where you watch a drug deal right above a pair of newly-weds making their procession. It's a tough, angry, unrelenting film, a dazzling socio-economic portrait of a country devastated by mafia corruption. The point is hammered home in the final scene, in which middle-aged men stand on a beach, guns in hand, while a dump truck goes to work with the crumpled bodies of Italy's youth inside. (October 12, 2008)

And the top 10 films of 1918 are....

For those of you who are sick to the gills of end of year movie lists, Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell over at Observations on film art and Film Art have put together their top 10 movies of 1918.... Here