Film Reviews: February 2008 Archives

Director Michel Gondry is known for his whimsical and fanciful inventions in films such as The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and, more recently, The Science of Sleep. This film follows very much in that tradition, and is undeniably entertaining, though unfortunately the comedy starts to wear a bit thin after a while. This is simply because we have not been told enough about the characters to really care about them very much: they are pegs on which to hang a zany and ingenious plot. For this reason Be Kind Rewind doesn't quite manage to be the kind of feel-good movie it sets out to be. It aspires to be a Cinema Paradiso for contemporary America, showing how love of movies can unite a community as it did the Italian town depicted in Tornatore's famous film. However, the saving of Mr Fletcher's video store - threatened by ruthless town-planners - by the exploits of two friends, seems implausible and, sadly, unnecessary. The store isn't, after all, a vibrant hub of community life, although the proprietor, Mr Fletcher, is a nice enough character who does inspire the affection of the two rather apathetic younger men, Mike and Jerry, who spend time there (Mike as assistant, Jerry as a hanger-on, a mechanic working over the road). The store is, however, failing, and we, the viewers, do not feel that its demise would be a great loss to the neighbourhood. This may seem like a rather sour and ungenerous view to take, but the fact is that I wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't felt that we were being urged to care desperately. We are expected to be swept along on a wave of bonhomie when the local patrons of the store flock to support the madcap antics of Mike and Jerry. These antics (remaking a whole catalogue of hit films in shortened form on a home-movie camera, all done in order to rent them out when a disaster wipes the stock of tapes) are funny and refreshing in their way, but they hardly add greatly to the sum of human happiness.

There were some clever ideas in this film, mostly to do with authenticity, originality and creativity, and the relation between these three. Gondry clearly knows his postmodernist theory, and this film is a gift for any students of postmodernist culture! When Jerry and Mike nearly get arrested for piracy and infringement of copyright, we the audience are left wondering what kind of production could be said to be truly original. This debate is particularly topical at the moment (we've all seen the public broadcast announcements about the evils of piracy) but is in fact an age-old debate. In the literary field, the term 'plagiarism' is usually used, but it's pretty much the same thing. Of course, jazz is an art form that particularly thrives on borrowing, and so it's not accidental that jazz is a sub-theme in this film. One of the local legends in the area is that the pianist Fats Waller was born, and grew up, in the building that houses Mr Fletcher's video rental store. This legend becomes the subject of the community film project that is the culmination of the film. Many black jazz and blues musicians never received the financial reward for the tunes and musical ideas they originated, and which went on to make money for white performers and producers, and so this is quite a controversial area from a race-relations point of view. This isn't dealt with in a heavy-handed way by Gondry, but the multi-racial cast of characters goes some way towards acknowledging these issues. Danny Glover plays the African American Mr Fletcher with a wry understatement that is very Driving Miss Daisy (though of course Morgan Freeman starred in that film). Driving Miss Daisy is one of the movies revisited during the spree of remaking that Jerry and Mike undertake in Mr Fletcher's absence, and this is significant I think. Another film the two friends remake (hilariously) is Ghostbusters, which makes Sigourney Weaver's cameo role in Be Kind Rewind all the more telling: she plays the lawyer who comes to explain to them about copyright law! These kind of allusions add an extra layer of enjoyment to the film, but I was still left wanting more.

Although I wanted to 'be kind', I felt this could have been a better film. It does provide gentle, inoffensive comedy, though, and that's rare enough these days! The acting was of a high standard: Jack Black was his usual irrepressible self as Jerry the mechanic, and Mia Farrow plays the dreamy and mildly depressive local housewife quite amusingly. Her presence seemed an allusion to another film celebrating the glory days of cinema: Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo. Gondry is a filmmaker's filmmaker, but sometimes seems to get lost in his own fantasies.

Although this film has epic qualities - offering sweeping panoramas and a glimpse into a key stage in American history - it is actually quite closely focussed on the relationship between a father and his son. This is the heart of the film. The oil prospector Daniel Plainview, played by another Daniel (Day Lewis), starts out as a sympathetic character. He seems an affectionate father to the little boy whom he takes with him everywhere. At one point, he claims that the mother died in childbirth, but this is later called into question, implying a darker side to our hero. Not that he's necessarily a wife-murderer, but that he might be capable of distorting the facts for public relations purposes. Whatever the story, his love for his son seems genuine at the outset, but that love gradually becomes twisted by Daniel's growing obsession with power and money as his empire expands. Of course, the corrupting power of money ('radix malorum est cupiditas') is a Christian theme, and religion is another important strand in this film.

Daniel early comes up against the plans and ambitions of Eli Sunday, the charismatic preacher and leader of the community where Daniel makes one of his biggest killings (in the financial sense). Unfortunately, Eli has his flaws too, and is not entirely sympathetic, which means that there is no black and white moral resolution to this film. Perhaps it is the better for that. The lack of any sympathetic characters makes it quite difficult to watch in some ways; certainly it offers a dark vision of human nature. Daniel Day Lewis plays the lead with a consummate panache that is reminiscent of his performance in Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Given that he also starred in The Last of the Mohicans, one wonders if this most British actor is on a personal mission to explore the American classics! His own family background, as the son of former Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, also raises the question of whether father-son relationships and the impact of ambition on that bond is another theme that preoccupies him personally; not that Cecil Day Lewis was anything like the monster that Daniel Plainview becomes. This is essentially a family tragedy on the pattern of a Faulkner novel (Absolon! Absolon! springs to mind), though it's actually based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, called simply Oil!

That America's 'black gold' has had the power to shape communities and redraw the moral landscape is established beyond question by this powerful film. The visual qualities it displays are impressive - scenes of burning pumping stations lit up against the sparse desert scenery are 'burned' in the memory - and this visual impact combined with the fine acting make it a film not to be missed.

Although absorbing and involving, this film by director Michel Spinosa was ultimately frustrating to watch because it seemed to hover between rose-tinted romanticism and the clinical coldness of a case-study. The central character, a bookbinder played by Isabelle Carre, is a fantasist who gradually loses touch with reality when she falls for the doctor who treats the wounds she incurred through a suicide attempt. Her moments of reverie are filmed in an impressionistic way so that we feel at times as if we are entering into her world, seeing through her eyes. The rest of the time we see her with detachment, often, oddly, at a distance as when she collapses in the library reading room without explanation and her body is shown lying below, the camera high overhead. Presumably this collapse is caused by nervous exhaustion, though this is never explained, even though a similar physical collapse occurs later on in the grounds of the mental hospital where she eventually winds up. Her progress through the months leading up to her commital makes rather painful viewing as the viewer feels like screaming out: 'someone get this woman the treatment she needs!' Even the man she falls for and persecutes by stalking him doesn't seem to think seriously of getting her to see a psychiatrist, even though he is a member of the medical profession. The one time he does mutter that he knows a man who could help her, this seems like a last-ditch attempt to get her off his back rather than a compassionate expression of sympathy. The man and his wife, even though they are the innocent victims of stalking and harrassment, do not attract much sympathy as they seem rather uncaring. Their super-chic Parisian lifestyle seems rather smug, and it is easy to see how someone living on the fringes of this world, as Anna does through her work with rare and collectable books of aesthetic value, might be driven mad through sheer irritation! It is a world where good taste and appearances seem to matter before all else. Part of Anna's trouble is that her derangement does not, at first, impair her capacity for functioning as a plausible, and even likeably eccentric, member of the literati. Her brand of dysfunction is portrayed as winsome rather than dangerous, and the people around her seem to accept her as a young woman whose dreaminess is part of her kooky charm, without asking what lies beneath the surface. Without spoiling the plot too much for others, I'd say that the erotic dimension of the film comes to seem less important, or at least less interesting, than the theme of children and innocence. The best scene in the film, to my mind, is the one where Anna is left in charge of two small children: tension mounts to the point where we realise that Anna herself is like a child. That, arguably, seems to be the film's message. The closing scene, also a meditation on childhood, is intriguing but frustrating because it seems like an escapist cop-out, leaving too many questions unanswered. Our doubts about this as a conclusion are partly silenced by the beautiful cinematography at this point. The screen is flooded with light, almost as if we are being given a glimpse into a kind of heaven. Given the religious overtones here - the visit to a chapel and the voice-over readings from a religious text that might have been a mystical tract in the tradition of Ignatius Loyola - this would be appropriate. All in all, this is an intriguing, but flawed, film.