Video Interlude: Spielberg/Aronofsky

The last few days (and until New Year's) I've been spending my meager time to write on the year end summation of 2012 (and feeling a bit guilty about it, having passed opportunities to see Django Unchained, Les Miz, and a couple other stragglers, which undoubtedly should be included).  Lots of background work, memory-challenging and linkage for that one (as well as the latest entries in the Library of Congress' collection, the review of which will come soon after).  

But, in my review of 2012 mash-up video's (that*fingers crossed* will actually appear in the article before YouTube yanks them for rights issues), I've found the work of Kees van Dijkhuizen jr. and Joel Walden, both of whom are doing wonderful video summations of directors' canon.

Here is Dijkhuizen's masterful look at Spielberg's work.

And Joel Walden's very clever summation of Darren Aronofsky's career (so far).

Black Swan

"The Red Shoes Diaries"
or
"Losing Control (She-Bop, Sh'Bop, Sh'Bop)"

Black Swan is a head-trip, alright.  Darren Aronofsky's latest of his films exploring the limits of obsession—the pursuit of it, the need for it, and its cost—never travels too far afield from the whirling dermis-dome of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman—brave).  A "girly-girl" to the nth degree, Nina still lives with Mom (Barbara Hershey—even braver) in a 12 year old's bedroom, blushes in embarrassment when sex is brought up, and still pursues the girl's version of what the Bible calls "childish things"—prima ballerina.

And like the dervishes who spin to achieve some form of religious ecstasy, she is looking for an epiphany in her pursuit of perfection.  Be careful what you wish for.

From the loges, it all looks so elegant, but on stage it's a board-thumping, sinew-stretching, bone-popping athletic performance, practiced to such an extent to be made to seem easy.  The body takes a beating.  Callouses form, bones snap, nails bear the brunt of the quest for perfection.  It's beautiful but brutal.  And, as any athlete will tell you, it's as much a challenge of the mind, as well.  There's the discipline to do the job unerringly, but there's also physical acting, as well.  Synapses fire to work the muscles, but those same synapses are under assault psychologically, fraying from the pressures on-stage and backstage.

For Nina, it's an obsession for perfection.*  Her director (Vincent Cassel) knows she can nail the star-part of the pure white swan in "Swan Lake," but the vixenish back swan is more of a challenge.  "Perfection isn't about control.  It's also about letting go."  For the more sensuous black swan, Nina is at a loss, so bottled up in being perfect, she's afraid to open up from the discipline.  "Live a little," he suggests, telling her to touch herself.

As if there isn't enough self-abuse going on.

The pressures start getting to her.  Given to obsessively scratching her shoulder, she develops a rash at her shoulder blades.  Toe-nails split.  Her fingernails turn bloody (at one point she tears off a length of finger skin down to the second knuckle).  She seems to be coming apart at the seams, and if she can't bear up, she'll be replaced like the departing prima Beth McIntyre (Winona Ryder**).  The number one candidate for the job is Lily (Mila Kunis), an earthy dancer from San Francisco, who typifies the black swan, and who becomes something of a paranoid obsession to Nina from their first glance.  By the time Nina actually pulls the bud of a black feather out of her scraped-raw shoulder, it's pretty apparent Nina has crossed a line and, like an exquisite ballet, fantasy has disguised reality.

It's scary, almost a horror film.  Aronofsky keeps the film taught, his restless camera taking a position directly behind Nina's head, clod-hopping behind her, seeing what she sees, agitatedly cutting out the dull parts.  Then it spins as she does, picking out the neck-snapping details that Nina sees in the blur. Fully a quarter of the film involves a reflective surface (even a shot of Nina looking at her mother's obsessive portraits of her—of course, Mom is trying to "get" daughter perfect, too), even if those mirrors don't always behave well.

And, as he did with The Fountain, Aronofsky proves himself a master of subtle sound-work, using extreme fields to further enhance the disorientation the audience feels inside Nina's head (more than once, I looked to see if there was someone behind me in the theater), and altering reality—making a toe-nail clipper sound like a guillotine, making you feel the gristle of toe-bones as they snap.

And he gets the best out of Portman.  It's a technically tough performance—she's in every scene, and her face, typically beautiful in serenity, is constricted in constant struggle, disrupting the planes of her face into a worried mask that seldom shows her at her best, veering into moments of hysteria.

For the sacrifice of art, she's not pretty, nor is the film, despite its subject matter and occasional forays into the dance-fantasy.  How can it be?  We're not sitting comfortably in the audience, but perched precariously in Nina's whirling head, dizzy with the spin, that even braking to a screeching stop, continues the momentum in our own minds long afterwards.

Black Swan is a Full-Price Ticket. 

* I don't want to get too far into this, although I'm sure Aronofsky and his scripters (Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz, and John J. McLaughlin) probably did.  There's something called the "Black Swan Theory," about large, unexpected events and their shock-wave effect on human psyches that must come to grips with it.  What's most relevant about it are the ten principles the theory's author, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, concocts to create a more predictable world: 

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become Too Big to Fail.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus.
4. Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to "restore confidence".
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible "expert" advice for their retirement.
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs.

Hmmm.  Some of this relates. 
  

** A glance at the four lead actresses, Portman, Ryder, Kunis, Hershey, and most of the supporting ballerinas reveals that they are all similar-looking women—a long line of raven-haired ingenues, like their own organic mirror images.

The Wrestler

"Career Suicide"
or
"Falling at the Meat Market"

The body is bulked up like a Macy's balloon. The face is lumpy and puffed from bad plastic surgeries to enhance his cheek-bones. The voice is full of razor blades, punctuated by phlegm-caked gasps. For awhile now, Mickey Rourke has only taken roles that hide his mangled features. But he's been never less than interesting in those roles (even when he's been less than intelligible). Whether with sunglasses or the elaborate make-up that turned him into Frank Miller's "Marv'" in Sin City,"* Mickey Rourke has hidden himself as he does his sporadic film work. Whatever demons drive the actor have made securing financing for films featuring him difficult at best.** There have been a lot of missed opportunities: can you imagine Mickey Rourke in a Quentin Tarantino film? There's a sleaze-match made in back-water heaven.

So, here he is, Main-Eventing "The Wrestler," freak-showed out, his face obscured for the first few minutes of the film, as if delaying the inevitable and pretty soon, you ignore the puffery and start to see the performance, as restrained and gentle as anything he's done in years. He's getting all the acclaim for the film's "broken-down piece of meat" scene in the trailers, but there are moments of brilliance here—the animal-eye-of-panic that occasionally creeps out of Robin ("Call me 'Randy'") Ramzinski, aka Randy "The Ram" Robinson during a match, and an extended scene that begins as "The Ram," a heart attack forcing his retirement, steels himself for a shift working the deli counter at his day-job super-market. He spends a sullen couple of hours learning the ropes, and then—Ram-Jam!—his natural entertainer's instincts kick in as he starts dealing with customers. It's a scene that brings out a smile because Rourke is ad-libbing his way through it, glorying in the eccentricity of it all. It's as good as it gets for Rourke and his anti-Rocky character.

It is not fair to say that Rourke is the only reason to see "The Wrestler." Marisa Tomei does good tough work here as a working-class stripper, and Evan Rachel Wood makes a lot of the under-written role of Randy's estranged daughter. And while Darren Aronofsky became overly-stagey in his last film "The Fountain," here he's dogging Rourke's path with tight point-of-view compositions that breaks the faykabe and paints the world of the small-time pro wrestler—at least from the point-of-view of a face at House shows.. The petty rivalries and the macho camaraderie, the brief pre-show negotiated calls, and the sweaty stage-craft of brutality are all on hand-held de-glammed display. It's a world of soiled bandages and card-tables and getting back into the ring. It's as sordid a picture as Aronofsky can make it, but it doesn't hide the moments of personal grace between screw-ups and free-falls. It also shows that the biggest falls these post-modern gladiators take are the self-inflicted ones. It's final shot is one I've been thinking about for days.

"The Wrestler" is a Matinee. Not quite top of the card.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
Mickey Rourke as he appeared in "Diner"

* The man even did his press interviews for the film in the camouflaging "Marv" make-up. How twisted is that?

** He was nearly fired from "The Wrestler" even after Arronofsky had secured a deal for making it for less money than intended. The actor in the wings? Rourke's "Rumble Fish" co-star Nicolas Cage.

The Fountain

Tapping a Dry Well

First off, this is the best-sounding film I've heard from 2006, with a subtle, supple sound design that makes great use of the stereo field to direct your attention. Secondly, it's one of the most beautiful--a truly different looking set-bound "green-screen" film that doesn't go for vast (and busy) pixilated papier-mache-feeling vistas ala "Sky Captain" or "The Lord of the Rings." There is a perpetually claustrophobic feel to it, despite the exotic locales that extend from an ancient Mayan temple to "the vast reaches of space."
And yet....one expects great things of a Darren Aronofsky film--not just in the images, but also in the ideas. Both "Pi" and "Requiem for a Dream" were visually and thoughtfully stunning, so one wanders into "The Fountain" expecting to be transported to new places, not only visually and aurally, but within the mind as well.

That's why I found "The Fountain" very disappointing. Though trying to say something profound, it offers up an idea so obvious that it occurs to me only every time I sit down for a meal, and that is: Out of Death comes Life. To make its point, there are three time-lines in the film--the first takes place in the present day as a researcher named Tom studies treatments of brain tumors in a frenzied race to save his wife Izzy's life. He is so bent on finding a cure that he loses all the precious moments he could be sharing with her. She is writing a fanciful book of a Spanish explorer named Tomas (wait, wait...don't get too far ahead yet. I mean, you're right. it's that obvious, but bear with me for a couple more sentences) who invades a Mayan tribe trying to find a fountain of youth (which is actually the sap of a specific tree) for his doomed queen Isobel--the story's a sort of parallel-o-gram to the researcher to wake up and see what he's missing. The next time-line features an older Tom, beneficiary of his research that has found the secret of long life (which involves the bark of a certain South American tree), in space-transit to restore his wife...from a tree... by means of the energy of a star (Xibulba) that figured in the Mayan legend of the explorer...well, everything relates--all the elements fall back on themselves in a self-referential heap.* All the Tom's of the film (portrayed by Hugh Jackman) are after Eternal Life in some form or another for their Queens...but mostly for themselves, while the Isabel/Isobel's (played by Rachel Weisz) know they will never achieve it. It takes him a near-eternity to learn that life is an eternal process (only not individually!) and that death is a necessary ingredient for it. The only original idea in the film is to state that to aspire to immortality is, rather than overcoming death, to deny the process of life and renewal. The idea should be profound, but it comes across as simplistic...and obvious. And dramatically inert. The tag-line for the film is "What If You Could Live Forever?" and the answer appears to be "Then You'd be a Selfish Bastard!"

Still, there is a sense of relief in, for once, seeing a film where death is the inevitable conclusion and you don't start whispering "So DIE already!" underneath your breath (curiously, part of the gorgeous sound-design has the film saying it for you...though not those exact words...frequently through the movie), but it did plant the seed of Elton John's "The Circle of Life" in my head for days for which it must be held accountable. And needless to say, "The Fountain" won't be at the top of the NetFlix list for the Schindler household.

The Fountain" will lose any visual splendor on the small-screen. Make it the cheapest of matinee's.

*"The Fountain" had a troubled production history. Millions of dollars were wasted in the first attempt at it (when it starred *shudder* Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett...hmmm, now, they're in "Babel"). One can only wonder if, when re-started with half its original budget, whole sections of the screen-story that might have given it depth, were ash-canned (I haven't read Aronofsky's graphic novel, which ala Neil Gaiman's "Signal to Noise" might be closer to his original vision) which is a pity. But I don't know. Aronofsky was supposedly inspired to attempt this film by "The Matrix," which is just one more thing that overrated geek-flick needs to answer for.