Saturday, January 7, 2017

Review: "20th Century Women"


Director: Mike Mills
Runtime: 118 minutes

It has taken six years for Mike Mills to make another film. When we last saw him, he delivered Beginners, a touching ode to his father, who came out after decades trapped in the closet. Yet even though that film was all about the father, one of the most intriguing peripheral characters was Georgia (Mary Page Keller), a stand in for Mills' mother. Now, over half a decade later, Mr. Mills is back to put Georgia (now named Dorothea, and sublimely portrayed by Annette Bening) in the spotlight she deserves.

Set in 1979 in Santa Barbara, 20th Century Women both exists as a maternal counterpart to Beginners while also standing firmly on its own. The film is just Mills' third full outing as a director, and his voice has only grown richer in the too-long gap between new work. Beginners charted a man's relationship with his father late in life (in which Mills got to be represented by Ewan McGregor; we should all be so lucky...). 20th Century Women, by contrast, takes the writer/director back to his childhood. Mills' new avatar is Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann), the teen son of newly-single mom Dorothea. Aptly, the film opens with the never-seen father's car catching fire, thus firmly severing the last symbolic ties with the past. 

As we're seeing a boy/young man in a highly formative stage, 20th Century Women uses Jamie's place in life to examine those around him. In some ways, it calls to mind another 2016 release - Moonlight - in that it traces a child's growth by embracing a nurture over nature (to a point) idea of how our complete adult selves form. We are largely blank canvases coming into this world, and the people present in our lives at critical moments of change affect our growth in ways both obvious and subtle. 

And so, early on, Dorothea enlists photographer tenant Abbie (a wondrous Greta Gerwig) and childhood friend Julie (Elle Fanning) to help raise her son. "Don't you need a man to raise a man?" asks Julie. To which Dorothea, nonchalantly, replies, "...no, I don't think so." "I think you're what's going to work for him," she says at another point. And even though there is an adult male presence in the form of handyman William (Billy Crudup), the three women turn out to be more than up to the task, in their own ways. The film may set itself up as Jamie's coming-of-age story, but the true subjects are the richly drawn women who lead him through that evolution.

Early on, it's tempting to dismiss the set up as scattered. But as Mills settles into his story's rhythm, the film blossoms. Both as writer and director Mills has grown considerably. His tendency to intercut archival footage and stills into his own material, at times grating in Beginners, feels purposeful and elegant throughout this new endeavor. Mills' films are not necessarily about compartmentalization, but his framing and editing choices (as executed excellently by Leslie Jones) present memories as little moments to be treasured and isolated in curio cases. The lighting accents this notion as well, often capturing moments of stillness by isolating an overhead source of light, so as to catch the subject as if they were occupying a museum display.

Where Mills' figures differ from museum oddities, however, is in their vibrancy. The voiceovers frame the characters in the past, yet while on screen they are thrillingly alive, even at their most ordinary. 20th Century Women can be brittle and caustic, but there is an underlying warmth at the core that practically floods the screen. And yet, in that tremendous warmth also lies clear-cut honesty. Mills and his characters don't sidestep the painful realities of life, whether it's those experienced by a parent or a child. But in that honesty, the film finds its transcendent moments. Those slices of life can be as significant as addressing a childhood trauma, or simply flailing your arms as you try to dance along the music around you. 


Grade: A-


Monday, January 2, 2017

Review: "Silence"


Director: Martin Scorsese
Runtime: 161 minutes

Martin Scorsese has been grappling with his Catholic faith for his entire career, even when it seemed the least obvious. The intensity of his religious convictions, as well as the intensity of his questions and severe doubts, have manifested in ways both literal (The Last Temptation of the Christ) and abstract (Taxi Driver). Catholicism (or, in a sense, any faith) is the third pillar at the foundation of his filmmaking, seated right alongside masculinity and violence (and all of the intersections among the lot). 

Though Scorsese remains an impeccable craftsman, often invigorating his material with dynamism of someone decades younger, he has recently started to run on fumes when dealing with story's beyond their basic text. The Wolf of Wall Street tackles excess, but to the point of becoming excessive itself. Even Best Picture winner The Departed, though powerfully acted and edited, comes up short when one looks for something to chew on beyond the bloody bodycount. 

The apparent exhaustion of two of Scorsese's thematic pillars (well, for now) has left a clearing for capital F Faith to grab the spotlight all for itself. After an on-and-off journey of roughly 30 years, Scorsese has taken Shusaku Endo's novel "Silence" and brought it to life on the big screen. Here, the man who almost became a priest turns his camera to meet not just his maker, but the ideals and practices of those serving in his name. And, while not without its faults (largely at the outset), Silence ultimately proves itself to be a worthy landmark moment of the latter stages of Scorsese's career. Regardless of your religious persuasion (or lack thereof), there is a tremendous amount of value in the issues raised in this exhaustive and exhausting work of Catholic cinema. Though not the director's most polished or lush work, it more than compensates with its staggering devotion to crafting a drama filled with ideas about the earthly and the transcendent. 

Yet much like the film's journey to the big screen, Silence is not without its hiccups. The earliest passages, concerning Jesuit priests Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garrpe (Adam Driver) seeking out a former mentor in 17th century Japan, come off as stilted. Despite some striking, simple visuals, Silence begins by playing things in a strangely safe manner. At times, it even seems shockingly amateurish. Even longtime Scorsese editor (and basically co-director) Thelma Schoonmaker isn't immune, and turns in some of her weakest work to date. Simple conversations change angles with a frequency at odds with such contemplative subject matter. And Mr. Driver, though an intriguing casting choice, can't quite master what is supposed to be a Portuguese accent (the Portuguese characters speak in English). Early on, a few lines escape his throat like a squawk from a goose raised in the Bronx. Garfield generally fares better, though even he is not without his stilted moments. It's not an auspicious beginning, especially for a film that is so clearly a labor of passion. 

But the further the two Jesuits step into the so-called "swamp of Japan," the more Silence finds its footing. The beauty of Endo's novel, which Scorsese has wisely left intact, is its refusal to sugarcoat or simplify the conflicts at hand. And what conflicts they are. On the surface, Silence's tale involves priests administering aid to Japanese Christians living under persecution. In less enlightened times, such a socio-political conflict would have likely been sanded down to lift the Jesuits up as Christ-like figures. Scorsese includes such a moment, though it's hardly presented as sincere. Alone and starving, Fr. Rodrigues finds himself confronted with his reflection. After a moment, the face transforms into a familiar sight: a Goya painting of Christ's face which we've been shown as how Rodrigues imagines the Lamb of God in his prayers and meditations. Garfield, with his thin features and his hair grown out into a magnificent mane, makes a fitting vessel for this sort of transfiguration. 

The moment, alas, does not come greeted with a moment of intervention or inspiration. Rodrigues bursts into unsettling, hollow laughter. In his manic, dehydrated state, he seems ecstatic with such a vision, but the tone and timing suggests the sort of madness one would find in a 70s-era Herzog drama. Yet Scorsese curtails the sequence before such madness turns hallucinatory. Rodrigo Prieto's images, even at their most painterly, have an air of reality to them. The staging thrives on ordinariness, rather than elaborately constructed tableaus.

All the better, then, to enable the film to cut to the heart of its conflicts. Somewhere towards the middle (I think) of the film, Silence shifts from acting as a drama about the faithful, and morphs into a searing interrogation of men of the cloth and their motivations. Rodrigues meets a number of foils among the Japanese, chief among them a translator (Tadanobu Asano) and the inquisitor Inoue (Issei Ogata). Though radically different in their approaches, the two men proceed to challenge not just Rodrigues' convictions and his mission, but the core of Catholicism itself, as well as its place in a country like Japan. 

And it's here, when it's most bound to simple scenes of people talking, that Silence finally grasps the intangible profundity it's been reaching for the whole time. Asano and Ogata make excellent philosophical adversaries for Garfield's Rodrigues, with Ogata in particular relishing every word (among his most notable jabs: "the price for your glory is their suffering.") So many faith-based films use Christian conviction as a crutch, including this year's Hacksaw Ridge, which also planted Mr. Garfield at the center. With that baseline established, a film like Silence becomes all the more remarkable. Here is a drama with source material from a Catholic writer (albeit a Japanese convert, and not a European), directed by a passionately Catholic director, that avoids turning its protagonists into the one-note martyrs they secretly wish to be. 

The most magnificent wrench of all, however, comes in the form of Fr. Ferreira (Liam Neeson, thankfully not even attempting the accent). In addition to administering to the persecuted faithful, Rodrigues and Garrpe have snuck into Japan to seek out their former mentor, who has been rumored to have renounced the faith and taken up life as an ordinary member of Japanese society. Ferreira's eventual return to the narrative (best left unsaid) gives Silence a final headbutt of ambiguity, heightening the specificity of the film's conflicts, while simultaneously making them all the more universal. Neeson, in his all-too-brief screen time, is nothing short of mesmerizing. In such quick moments, he conveys Ferreira's decades of work in Japan, and the toll it took on him. Ferreira's exploits could have easily been their own film, and the way Neeson takes the bones of Scorsese and Jay Cocks' script and turns it into its own meal is nothing short of astonishing. It's a masterful moment of teaching both for Rodrigues and the viewer, the complexity of which has stayed with me long after the lights went up in the theater.

In my four years at a Jesuit-led high school, one of the theological ideas that I remember most is that faith without room for doubt is not really faith, but merely blind obedience. That remarkably nuanced notion, standing in such stark contrast to the right wing extremists now posturing as 21st century moralists, has stayed with me even as whatever religion I had slipped away. And, whatever my personal beliefs now, that Catholic and Jesuit identity (hello, Catholic guilt, you old bastard) is still etched, however faintly, in my being. To see that same sort of depth is a monumental intellectual achievement, one that overrides the vagueries that somewhat plague the central role of Rodrigues (he is both an individual and a representative of the faith as a whole, though not quite to the degree where it feels possible to empathize with him enough). With such a long wait, it would be tempting to hold Silence to the standard that anything less than a masterpiece would be a letdown. To do so, I think, would be to dismiss the tremendous accomplishments on display. Rodrigues and Garrpe may find themselves starving, but their story is veritable feast of ideas, the strengths of which are made all the more powerful by their existence alongside the flaws. 


Grade: B+