|
|---|
Sunday, April 24, 2011
"Water for Elephants" and "Hanna" reviews below, followed by commentary on their Polish characters. One is quite the surprise.
Even in the poster, Christoph Waltz, and the elephant, are the most interesting characters.
"Water for Elephants" is a flat soap opera
lacking flair or heart or even coherence. It's a love story set in a
Depression-era circus; how could it be so boring? Direction and miscasting.
Director Francis Lawrence never milks the Depression or the circus setting. He
directs as if in the suburban living and bedrooms of television's Pine Valley.
You never get the sense of how a Depression-era, small-town kid would be
thrilled, terrified, and curious seeing a lion or an elephant for the first
time. There are a couple of what appear to be CGI shots of a train chugging
across moonlit landscapes; even these lack magic.
Robert
Pattinson, star of the teen-vampire sensation "Twilight," is miscast
as Jacob, the lead character, a circus vet. Pattinson displays the skills
necessary to make teenage girls swoon: he pouts, he broods, he is
self-absorbed, he makes zero intellectual or psychological demands on his
audience. He has heavy brows and lots of hair. These skills deserve respect. They
cause teen girl fans to post reviews of his work that end in multiple
exclamation points!!!!!!! But Pattinson is in so far over his head in
"Water for Elephants" all you see of him, in some scenes, are bubbles
on the surface as he sinks into invisibility.
Reese
Witherspoon is a crisp and perky professional with shiny hair and perfect teeth.
Problem is, she's playing Marlena, an orphan trick horse rider who marries an
abusive circus boss, August (Christoph Waltz.) Marlena should exude desperate
vulnerability combined with manipulative power, the kinky raw sex appeal of a
woman who, scantily clad in skin-tight, revealing costumes, performs suggestive
tricks with muscly animals in front of applauding throngs. Witherspoon doesn't
even try to bring that Marlena to life. She just plays Reese Witherspoon,
professional movie star with flawless hair and teeth, a little bit bored as
Oprah interviews her. There's nothing of the abusive orphanage, the poor
street, the skanky Big Top about her at all.
Robert
Pattinson's Jacob and Reese Witherspoon's Marlena have zero chemistry. They are
the least sexy screen couple I've ever seen. Al Gore and Bill Clinton had more
chemistry. When they do kiss, it's not that long-awaited, thrilling moment of
release. It's "Huh?"
Christoph Waltz as
August, the circus owner, is from a completely different, much better, movie.
People are going to walk out of this film wishing that they could have seen the
movie centered around Christoph Waltz's August. Waltz demands the audience's
attention in a way that no one else in the film does, except Tai as the
elephant, Rosie. Waltz's nuanced performance brings to life an August who is
very complex and worth caring about, despite his being a monster.
It's clear that Sara Gruen, the book's author, and the filmmaker
wanted to tell a story that featured lots of animals. The plot is a
cobbled-together, soulless bit of scaffolding on which to hang shots of circus
animals and shallow depictions of circus rituals. Why is Jacob a Polish
speaker? Why is the elephant a speaker of Polish? Most Polish immigrants to the
US at this time were descendents of recently liberated serfs, and did very
harsh manual labor in the US: coal mining, steel, cleaning. It's very unlikely
that a Polish speaker would be an Ivy League veterinary school graduate. In any
case, the film makes no use of Jacob's ethnicity. He could as easily be Spanish
or Italian or Greek. Why would a man who had the focus and self-discipline to
complete an Ivy League veterinary school education toss aside, literally,
everything he has worked for, and everything he owns, to jump on a passing
train? The moment utterly lacks verisimilitude and psychological depth. It's
obvious that the film just wants to get to its circus setting and animals.
Jacob is just a pawn. Why is the film told as an old man's flashback? That
approach, and the voiceover narration, add nothing to the film.
***
"Hanna": Come to think of it, she DOES look a bit Polish.
"Hanna" is a ruthless, relentless, chase
featuring a teen girl assassin. It's violent and suspenseful, fast and cruel.
The chase sprawls over travelogue settings in the Arctic Circle, North Africa,
and Berlin. It's like the Bourne movies, like Daniel Craig's Bond movies. The
difference is, of course, that the hero is not a muscle-bound adult male, but a
barely muscled teenage girl, Saorise Ronan. And the focus never waivers from
the chase. Hanna gets no love interest.
I generally
don't go to movies I know are going to be violent and I have walked out of
violent films, but I loved "Hanna" and kept my eyes open throughout
almost all of it. It's not just that Hanna, the assassin, is a girl, and I'm
female, too, although that was part of it. "Hanna" depicts Hanna as
having an admirable work ethic, and as being an underdog. The one thing that
separates her from the people she so determinedly wounds, beats, stabs, and
kills is that she is just following the pedagogical training of her admirably
dedicated, old-school patriarch, Erik (Eric Bana.) Erik raised his girl to know
how to read, write, and kill. He did this for a righteous reason. The people
Erik trained Hanna to kill are very, very bad people, and the audience wants
them dead, as well. The morality and worldview of "Hanna" is very much
that of the setting of its opening scene: the harsh north. This is Nordic
morality, where even if you do the right thing, you may end up dead, anyway.
There is no reward. If you don't end up dead, and live on, you live on only to
keep fighting in a harsh, unforgiving landscape.
Saorise
Ronan gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Hanna. She truly inhabits a character
whose sole focus is on struggle. She enters every new landscape, from a
treeless desert to a hotel room, with the focus of a wild animal: where is the
food? Where is something to drink? From what direction will danger come? How
will I meet it? Ronan never once slips up, never once behaves as a comfortable
teenage girl would behave. She has a killer's eyes throughout the entire film.
I have to wonder if this wasn't a tough film for her to make. Playing Hanna
would have given me nightmares.
The film's ruthlessness
becomes a bit of a failing. The film is so ready to wound and kill characters
the audience wants to like, so ready to turn sweet moments into deadly poison,
so ready to let any landscape become a death trap, that I did get a bit jaded
about 75% into the film. I was no longer surprised when a character showed some
humanity only to be dispatched in the most hateful of ways. But the film threw
some new plot developments in at that point, and it kept my interest.
Cate Blanchett is terrific as Hanna's foil. Eric Bana is solid
as her dedicated teacher and father. The supporting cast, including Tom
Hollander and Olivia Williams, is all very good.
The
Chemical Brothers' soundtrack is perfect. I often don't even hear soundtracks
the first time I watch a movie, and when I do notice them, it is, all too
often, because they are intrusive and trying to do the work of wrenching
emotions that poor filmmaking could not do. During one breathless scene in
"Hanna," I realized that the post-Apocalyptic soundtrack geared me up
and made me tense and brought me into the scene in a very enjoyable way.
***
Comments on the Polish characters in these new films:
"Water for Elephants"'s Jacob Jankowski is Polish in
name only. It's highly unlikely that a Polish speaker would be an Ivy League
vet school grad in the Depression. Most Polish immigrants to the US at that
time were descendants of serfs who had been liberated only in the 1860s. They
did very demanding, deadly, manual labor and Ivy League universities, at that
time, were cranking out "scholarship" proving their racial
inferiority. I'm not saying that no Polish American got an Ivy League vet degree
in the Depression; I'm saying that such a person would not be representational.
In any case, there is nothing Polish about Robert Pattinson's
Jacob. He could be the exact same character and be Greek, Eskimo, or Urdu.
The whole film struck me as random in that way. Events and
characters existed only as an excuse to produce a movie pretty animals and
exotic circus costumes and the Depression. And none of these features came to
have any verisimilitude or heart, except Rosie, the very adorable elephant, and
Christoph Waltz.
"Water for Elephants" is the
first movie that made me lose respect for a book I had not read. I came to
wonder if the book is as random and pointless as the movie, as much just an
excuse for pretty horses on the page. I read reviews
at Amazon that suggested to me that that may be true.
"Hanna," on the other hand, is fascinating. One learns -- I'm
about to type a spoiler! -- that Hanna is a genetically modified human being.
She was genetically modified to have less pity, and more of an urge to kill. Where
did the CIA go to get embryos to manipulate in this way? You got it, reader,
Poland!
0 Comments:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
LinkWithin
