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By Jeremy Heilman, September 17, 2009 5:58 pm

A Serious Man    (Joel Coen | Ethan Coen)

This movie, about a Jewish family man facing a moral crisis in 1960s Minnesota, feels less well-constructed than it should be. The Coens, whatever their strengths as directors, aren’t particularly adept at sustaining tension, and this script calls out for a gradual increase of tensions throughout the film’s runtime. As the unrepentantly Jewish A Serious Man oscillates unevenly between cheap comedy and shrug-inducing drama, it feels as if it should be gaining in power, but no portent arises until the final five minutes, which do finally suggest the movie that this should have been all along. What results is more a dismissible comic treatise about the absurdity of being Jewish in America than any sincere attempt to grapple with theological questions. In fact, the acknowledgment that there are some things men aren’t meant to understand seems like a screenwriter’s device put in place to explain the Coen’s considerable indulgences. My opinion aside, I wouldn’t be shocked if many considered it a key work from the directors, although in being so on the nose thematically, it strikes me as an aberration in their oeuvre.

Rating: 38/100

Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire    (Lee Daniels)

Daniels’ first film (the overreaching, almost surreal Shadowboxer) did little to prepare me for the sheer power and tonal insanity of this hysterical, harrowing melodrama. It features stellar acting across the board, crude shifts between broad comedy and high drama that never fail to surprise, and an underdog who’s so pathetic that she’s actually worth caring about. Daniels is an undisciplined director (not entirely a bad thing here), and his biggest feat here is that he forces us to contemplate Precious (Gabourney Sidibe, who’s award-worthy), precisely the sort of figure that cinema works overtime to render invisible. Shades of The Color Purple abound, so your reaction to that film might help temper or stir your personal expectations for Precious. I found Speilberg’s work to be one of his finest. Many revile it, though, for reasons I can respect conceptually, if not emotionally. I suspect the same will be true of the immersive, indelible Precious.

Rating: 76/100

The Road    (John Hillcoat)

A perfectly honorable attempt to adapt a book that works in such vague, allegorical terms that something’s bound to be lost in translation. Hillcoat goes for literalism here, whereas abstraction might have worked even better. We get a relatively convincing portrait of a shell-shocked world, although some of the book’s horrors that have been carried over (e.g. the falling trees) seem like narrative aberrations on screen. The entire film is unremittingly bleak, but by the second hour the theme of the father’s devotion to his son has been well enough developed that the movie begins to stir emotions beyond despondency. It’s a strange, remarkably uncommercial movie that seems to struggle toward its end as much as its protagonists.

Rating: 62/100

Agora    (Alejandro Amenábar)

Despite its obviously big budget and lavish production values, Amenabar’s ancient Egyptian epic Agora seems to have been conceived with no particular audience in mind. It sees no problem with presenting people of all religions as petty political manipulators, and thumbs its nose at historical fact, inventing achievements for its factual heroine Hypatia (played by a haughty Rachel Weisz). It’s difficult to ascertain if it’s supposed to be a throwback to the old sword and sandal epics or a modern intellectualization of the genre. If it’s the former, it feels too lacking in scale and sweep, despite one or two impressively presented riots, a plot that spans several years, and frequent zooms that carry us until we can see the entire planet. If it’s supposed to be the latter, the disregard for historic fact, the dumbed-down level of discourse, and the unnecessary romantic subplots seem incongruous. The end result is by no means a total failure, but it is something of an oddity, seemingly designed in many respects to stir audience dissatisfaction.

Rating: 48/100

Mall Girls    (Katarzyna Roslaniec)

Although there’s nothing offensive or even inept about Mall Girls, there’s something all too familiar about it. Set in Poland, the movie traces the indoctrination of a teen girl (surely one of this TIFF’s main themes… see Precious, An Education, Fish Tank, The Unloved, etc…) into a group of fashionable girls who prostitute themselves out to buy the latest cell phones and clothes. The narrative trajectory here is predictable (there’s a pregnancy, a suicide, and a catfight or two), as are the shifts in the character relationships. What saves it from being a total bore is Roslaniec’s sure hand. She coaxes uniformly good performances from her cast as she effectively takes them on a course from insecurity to exhilaration to shame.

Rating: 43/100

A Single Man    (Tom Ford)

Tom Ford caters almost entirely to his built-in gay audience, with this adaptation of the Isherwood novel. It’s a sensitively drawn drama, set over a single day in 1960s Los Angeles, about a gay college professor (Colin Firth), who is contemplating suicide when faced with the prospect of life without his partner. The movie is rather overdirected, and at times garish, but it manages a somber mood that recalls the recent work of Stephen Daldry. Especially impressive here are the performances by Firth (probably never better) and Julianne Moore (often better, still damned good here).

Rating: 60/100

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By Jeremy Heilman, September 14, 2009 11:44 am

Le Père de mes enfants    (Mia Hansen-Løve)

Not so much nuanced as muted, this sensitively conceived family drama is split cleanly between two halves, showing us a family and a family business before and after a shocking trauma. Director Mia Hansen-Love is married to Olivier Assayas, and their films share a great deal of common ground stylistically. The use of pop songs to add texture, the harsh natural daylight, and the overwhelming international business wrangling found here could have come out of any of Assayas’ recent works. Just as in Assayas’ Summer Hours, there’s a desire to give credence to all viewpoints, but Hansen-Love seems to actively downplay conflict to an even greater extent than in that film. The movie seems designed to heal, not hurt, which makes it feel rather heartfelt, but also somewhat dramatically inert past its midpoint.

Rating: 61/100

Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Coming off at times like a parody of Michael Haneke’s work, it’s tough to tell how much of this film is intended as a serious critique of our tendencies to distort worldviews through the teaching and sheltering our children. The movie takes place almost entirely within a carefully controlled, hermetic household, in which the concepts of homeschooling are taken to an extreme, but it itself is a rather haphazardly mix of conflicting tones. The movie turns on a dime from black humor to queasy sexuality to outrageous violence, certainly creating an effective sense of uncertainty, but somewhat effectively obscuring intent. If it is meant to be an applicable allegory, it seems to create characters that are too psychologically extreme and too impersonal to really bear much resemblance to reality. Its absurdist tendencies make it entirely dismissible, and its ideas are too simply presented. If it’s meant to be a mean-spirited comedy, however, the movie can be faulted for its sheer unpleasantness. If the truth lies in between, though (and I suspect it does), it’s an experience to be sure, and the confirmation of a fairly powerful new directorial talent.

Rating: 66/100

Accident    (Soi Cheang)

Equally indebted to the work of director Jonnie To (who produces here), De Palma’s slow-motion set pieces and Coppola’s The Conversation, this entertaining Hong Kong feature follows a group of assassins who stage elaborate, Rube Goldberg-style “accidents”, so their murders are never investigated. Much of the film covers their intricate game of planning and waiting for the right confluence of events to set their work into action, which does mean that the movie is only intermittently exciting. Since there’s the strong possibility that a second group is planning to assassinate the assassins using their own techniques, however, tension always fills the air. The movie is somewhat predictable, but director Cheang (who fully seems to have absorbed To’s style) relays both the logic behind the traps and the fears of exposure with a sure hand. Ultimately, the movie is something of a trick, but its willingness to linger in its lead character’s obsessions and paranoia gives it more heft than the average HK action movie.

Rating: 63/100

The Loved Ones  (Sean Byrne)

This horror film, about a girl who turns her puppy love into a sadistic torture session, is likably nasty once it gets going, but it lacks much ambition or even psychological depth. It’s never for a moment plausible, and it scarcely tries to be, which is acceptable, even though it places a cap on how disturbing the movie can ultimately be. Director Byrne shoots each scene in an overtly commercial manner, trying to make every composition a contender for the movie’s trailer. The plot is hopelessly padded out, with so much arbitrary cross-cutting that the overall effect is reduced. A shorter, meaner movie with less comic relief would have both been harder to shake and would have allowed the movie to carve out its own head-space, outside of reality. As is, The Loved Ones is entirely dismissible as soon as the credits begin to roll.

Rating: 37/100

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By Jeremy Heilman, September 13, 2009 8:08 pm

Up in the Air    (Jason Reitman)

Considering the current economic climate, this extended attempt to convince us that corporate shills have hearts too is oddly timed. It’s a blatant misreading of the zeitgeist, taking a top-down view on America’s attitude toward our corporate overseers. It wallows in the miseries of those who inflict the pain while it reduces the voice of the white-collared common man to a series of clichéd sound bites. George Clooney, master of smarmy insincerity, is well-cast as a jet-setting job termination specialist, but he’s not nearly the highlight of his own movie. Those honors go to Anna Kendrick (finally capitalizing on her promise in Camp), who plays the ambitious twenty-three year old who threatens to render Clooney’s occupation obsolete via videoconferencing. The extended midsection of the movie, which focuses on the two of them doing their job and debating just how impersonal a layoff should be, is by far the best part here. It’s witty, surprising and seems deeply felt. It rescues the film after a botched opening, which fails to present Clooney’s travel-laden lifestyle as an attractive one or his job as a particularly necessary one. Reitman’s style here is hyperactive, but it thankfully settles down and finds its feet by the one-hour mark. Unfortunately, the high can’t last, and things eventually sink back to earth as Reitman journeys into About Schmidt or Elizabethtown territory, sending Clooney’s cad to an overlong family wedding that prompts a predictable epiphany. It’s an odd trajectory for the movie, as audience members will surely be more soulful and thoughtful than Clooney’s character ever manages to be. Attempting to convince us that there’s some tragedy in him finding himself is an odd tact. The weight attempted in the closing narration doesn’t feel earned at all. It, like too much of Up in the Air, reconfirms lessons that anyone who’s weathered the financial storm of the last year has already taken to heart.

Rating: 49/100

Les Herbes folles  (Alain Resnais)

This comic lark from master director Alain Resnais starts out jaunty and quickly grows downright baffling. It shows that there’s plenty of life left in the old boy yet. The plot here is simple enough. A woman’s purse is snatched. Her wallet is found by stranger who fantasizes about her and insists the two were meant to be together. Absurd entanglement ensues. It’s difficult to pinpoint what it’s all about, exactly, but it struck me as a questioning of the fragile nature of our lives, our romances, and our assumptions about ourselves. Resnais’ style is endlessly inventive, and offers meaning in and of itself. The director pulls us close to the characters, his camera movements externalizing the few thoughts that the narration or disjunctive asides do not. Rules of traditional narrative seem not to apply here. There are no transgressions too slight and no whims left unfulfilled. The characters’ indecision seems to have infected the movie itself, and the effect is exhilarating. It’s a movie that flagrantly discards predictability, throwing caution to the wind the same reckless abandon of a Frenchman in love.

Rating: 74/100

Survival of the Dead  (George A. Romero)

Subpar, even when considered outside of the realm of Romero’s classic zombie series, this latest entry (number six directed by Romero himself) is almost inarguably the weakest of the lot. A side story to Romero’s Diary of the Dead, it takes place mostly on an incestuous island off the coast of Delaware. There, two families that have warred for generations see their conflict brought to a head, as they disagree how to deal with the new zombie problem. One clan favors extermination, while the other holds out hope for retraining. This dichotomy, which was present in Day of the Dead, provides much of the thematic weight that’s present, although this entire enterprise feels more lightweight than the previous Romero-helmed entries in the cycle. Most of the energy is  unfortunately dedicated toward inventing new ways to kill the undead again. It’s not really enough. Unsatisfactory subtext is one matter, but the movie’s essential lack of scares or funny jokes and the completely inadequate acting are another. It’s a disappointing movie, to be sure, even though it fails mostly in comparison to what we know Romero is capable of.

Rating: 46/100

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By Jeremy Heilman,

Daybreakers (Spierig Brothers)

Set in 2019, Daybreakers is set in an alternate future in which vampires have run amok to such an extent that less than five percent of the human population remains. This tired premise doesn’t hold much promise, admittedly, but there’s even less to like here than one would expect. The Spierig Brothers, whose debut feature was the execrable zombie romp Undead continue to show their shoddy skills here. There’s next to no evidence of directorial control. Shock effects are privileged over any narrative momentum. The dialogue is so incredibly clumsy and expository that it becomes laughable. The visuals look thoroughly designed and thoroughly unconvincing. It hints at ways that it might push the vampire mythos in new directions (e.g. it has vampires mutate by feeding off of themselves), but few flashes of invention get capitalized on. Instead of horror or humor there are cheap, and cheap-looking, gore effects. Willem Dafoe alone musters any energy among the cast, but even he is just improvising a series of profanities at every turn. James Woods in John Carpenter’s Vampires showed how much more could be done with such a role, just as that movie, or countless others, demonstrate how feebly conceived Daybreakers is.

Rating: 18/100

Broken Embraces    (Pedro Almodóvar)

I’ve had a long-standing blind spot when it comes to most of Almodovar’s work, and his latest proves no exception. It offers a tangled soap opera about moviemaking and lovemaking that’s less convoluted than its chronologically tangled presentation would suggest. It’s a frustrating movie, because it seems to be constantly undermining itself with poor directorial choices. The usual Almodovar surface pleasures (bright colors, references to classic films, etc…) are stymied by Almodovar’s usual dour characters, unpleasant obsessions, and predictable plot twists. More shocking is how little the director builds from the intersection between the movies and the real lives of his characters who create them. The movie becomes a double-edged failure. The director doesn’t really intellectualize the melodrama, which is fine, but he acts as if he’s trying to, draining the immediacy of the genre’s excesses away. Most of the cast is a step away from mediocre. Penelope Cruz is the lone exception, unsurprisingly. The script gives only her the opportunity to be glamorous as well as the best moments to flash her dramatic chops. Even still, her turn pales in comparison to the work she’s done with Almodovar before. Perhaps nothing demonstrates how much this director, generally accepted as a modern master, has fallen from his peak with Broken Embraces more than the ending, in which he reverts to the mode of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. For a few minutes, Almodovar returns to his old groove, and completely exposes his latest work as a pale substitution for what’s come before.

Rating: 33/100

Fish Tank  (Andrea Arnold)

Andrea Arnold mines plenty of tension out of a slim scenario in her realistic British drama Fish Tank. Although there’s not much of a narrative here, there’s little included that feels arbitrary. Centering on a fifteen year old girl who is alienated from everything and everyone except her passion for urban dance, the movie is too fiercely conceived to fall in the coming-of-age genre’s usual batch of clichés. Arnold, in emphasizing suspense and sexual tension, captures the notion that the trajectory of the young protagonist’s life rests on a razor’s edge, wholly dependent on a series of major, momentary decisions that she’s ill-equipped to make. It’s a story that’s constantly threatening to come unhinged, creating moments of unease out of small events (such as a close-up on a wounded ankle) and potentially catastrophic ones (best not to mention those…).  The movie, which is quite similar to Arnold’s Oscar-winning short film Wasp in both style and tone, benefits greatly from ace performances from newcomer Katie Jarvis and British acting wonder Michael Fassbinder.

Rating: 63/100

The Hole   (Joe Dante)

Disaster struck several times at my screening of The Hole. The digital projector froze, prompting a several minute-long wait and reboot. Someone pulled a fire alarm, forcing an evacuation of Ryerson University’s 1250-seat theater and a premature end to the screening. Worst of all was the mild disappointment of the film itself, which is entirely serviceable as PG-rated horror, but entirely lacking when compared to most of Dante’s filmography. I haven’t seen it in its entirety, so I can’t be too harsh, but this is a certain step down from works like Gremlins or Looney Tunes: Back in Action, both in terms of visual invention, wicked wit, and thematic inventiveness. It seems to be a standard-issue spooky movie, with only the faintest amount of subtext (revolving around the cast of children’s various psychological issues). Dante’s direction is adequate, and he makes good use of his 3D technology, using it to exaggerate the depth of field, but the lack of ambition and relative restraint hurts a filmmaker who works best when not trying to adhere to any rules at all. Maybe the last twenty minutes blow the doors off of the movie, but I’m somewhat skeptical. TIFF personnel assure us that there will be a rescheduled screening. I’m not sure I’ll bother.

Rating: n/a

Additional ratings – Up in the Air 49, Wild Grass 74, Survival of the Dead 46

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By Jeremy Heilman, September 12, 2009 8:53 am

La Pivellina (Tizza Covi | Rainer Frimmel) The directors of La Pivellina have spent their careers thus far making documentaries, which comes as no surprise after viewing this melding of melodrama and nonfiction filmmaking. It deals with a foundling child and the circus family that finds her. Things begin promisingly, in a quasi-Dardenne mode, featuring handheld camerawork and jump cuts. In these early scenes, there’s some real joy in watching the interplay between the non-professonal adult actors, the convincingly played kids, and the frequent onscreen animals. By the midpoint, though, it’s indulging itself with scenes that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. For example, in two extended bits, the prospective mother and father of the orphaned child are shown teaching another surrogate kid about Italian history and how to win a fistfight, respectively. These scenes are good, and certainly feel realistic, but they are slack, and grind the story to a halt beyond confirming that the couple have some parenting skills. One can’t help but think that a filmmaker who valued narrative over verisimilitude would have chopped them short. When the storytelling eventually resumes, the latent political subtext about the Italian government’s antagonistic relationship toward its citizens, runs amok and overtakes the enterprise.

Rating: 48/100

Irene (Alain Cavalier) Director Cavalier, convinced that bearing his soul is enough, doesn’t bother with refined aesthetics or any organizing principle in his diary film Irene. Dealing primarily with his relationship to his wife, who died tragically in 1971, the movie sees the man literally filming and reading from his diaries in an attempt to come to terms with his unresolved feelings. It’s as self-absorbed as movies go, rarely shifting from its ponderous, searching tone. There’s not really any face shown in it beyond Cavalier’s own and those glimpsed in photographs. It tries to temper this by striving for universality, but the level of Cavalier’s documentation of his own life, and the length of his ongoing romantic obsession, seems to paint him as a special case. When Agnes Varda paused in The Gleaners and I to film her own hand and muse about her mortality, the moment was effective and touching. This blows that gesture up to feature length, for better or worse. There are a few one-of-a-kind bits, such as when Cavalier stumbles on an escalator while recording with his camera, but these moments generally serve only to underline the director’s self-confessed, ongoing obsession.
Rating: 47/100

The Ape (Jesper Ganslandt) This psychological thriller works overtime to conceal its twists from the audience, but anyone who’s paying any attention at all will be able to anticipate its plot revelations. To divulge much would spoil the few narrative twists that The Ape has to offer. It will have to be sufficient to note that while the film deals with repression, guilt, and man’s capacity for evil in a cursory manner, it’s too busy building a(n obvious) mystery to develop any of these themes in a satisfactory manner. For director Gansland, it represents a dramatic stylistic departure from his debut, Falkenburg Farewell, but the move is toward an anonymous and glossy Hollywood style.
Rating: 39/100

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By Jeremy Heilman, September 11, 2009 2:32 pm

Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang)

Although as sleepy as any of Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s recent work, Nymph is energized somewhat by the introduction of elements from Thai myths and the horror genre. Its gauzy, low-light photography and endlessly searching handheld tracking shots turn most of the spaces in the movie into virtual jungles. The jungle itself, though, dominates, serving as the backdrop for a noirish love triangle that gets further complicated by a menacing spirit. Admittedly, this movie is limited somewhat by its minor ambitions, but it’s elevated by its form. The repetition of the tracking shots drives home the mythic, repetitious quality of the story. As we’re shown in the opening shot, these conflicts have arisen before, and they will arise again. While it pales in comparison to the second half of Tropical Malady, which it greatly resembles, Nymph undoubtedly has some intensely realized mysteries of its own.

Rating: 64/100

The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude)

This comic drama is very much in the mode of the recent entries in the Romanian New Wave, but the repetitions here offer fewer dividends, as either comedy or drama, than something like the latter half of 12:08 East of Bucharest. Part of the problem is that it’s centered on a teen girl. While she’s being manipulated by adults and pulled in all directions, her self-centered immaturity and complete inarticulateness are constants. All conflicts end up reverting to those characteristics in her, and the effect on the audience is wearying. There’s some accomplishment here, to be sure, in the cinematic space that director Jude creates. The majority of the movie takes place amid a busy film shoot in the middle of a busy intersection, and never once is the illusion of reality broken. Still, since the central drama is so tedious, the film suffers.

Rating: 41/100

Huacho (Alejandro Fernández Almendras)

This better than average ethnographic film uses a simple yet effective structure. It episodically tells of a day in the life of a Chilean family of four. Each segment sees one member of the family navigating issues of scarcity, whether they are rooted in the rising price of milk or the simple fact that one’s body can do less labor with age. The director avoids sentimentalizing these peasants by observing the ways that they fail to reveal themselves to one another entirely, despite an outwardly intimate way of life. The style is sometimes unsure of itself, arbitrarily using its handheld camerawork at times, but the sum of the vignettes has a certain unexpected power about it.

Rating: 52/100

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By Jeremy Heilman,

An Education, Lone Scherfig’s May-December soap opera, attempts to impress audiences with its worldliness, but it comes off instead as an awkward, unformed teen fantasy run amok. Telling the story of an Oxford-bound girl who finds herself questioning the meaning behind her studies when she meets a worldly older man, the movie seems designed to offer up its predigested wisdom to audiences. In trying to dazzle presumably mature audiences with what seems to be its sixteen year old protagonist’s idea of sophistication, though, it panders to us. The result is an unconvincing narrative filled with the sort of stock characters that only someone who has done most of her living in books could imagine.

There’s so much deck stacking in Hornby’s screenplay that it’s difficult to know where to begin complaining. Everyone is painted as a buffoon so Jenny (Carey Mulligan), the sixteen year old protagonist, can appear worldly. When she’s courted by an older man it’s entirely understandable that she should be taken in by his dubious charms, but the film half-expects the audience to be carried away in her fantasy as well. Since the lie of her new life is never made convincing, though, the spell of romance never formulates. Just as strangely, though, there’s also no particularly productive exploration of her self-deluding nature. The result is one of the emptiest movies ever to purportedly be about growing wiser.

Mulligan is the closest thing An Education has to a saving grace. She gives the only performance that is layered and emotionally compelling in the movie. To say that she elevates or transforms this weak material would be overkill, though. She’s merely able to momentarily distract us from the absurdities and inconsistencies inherent in the other characters. Alfred Molina, who plays her alternatively overprotective and chauvinistic father, is given a character that’s especially ill-conceived. He’s so wrong at every turn that his presence simplifies every potentially thorny situation. The audience’s moral compass always points in whatever direction his does not.

There are a few witty bits scattered about here, but too often the film settles for titillation via faux-sophistication. The sheer preposterousness of An Education’s scenario, in which this young, supposedly smart girl is encouraged to make such terrible decisions, is never less than galling. Everyone keeps talking about intelligence, but no one ever demonstrates much of it. Even the rare moments of reproach that Jenny faces hold behind them an insecure plea for her approval. It’s as if teen anxieties were contagious in ‘60s Britain. The film’s audiences are forced into an impossible choice between being as guileless as Mulligan’s protagonist and the idiots around her or judging everyone in the movie harshly.

It’s no surprise that An Education’s ending sells out everything, including its supposed message. Everything about the movie is superficial. Even Scherfig’s style seems most remarkable for its ability to help us judge characters at a glance. As the film comes to its tidy end, and casually mentions the perpetuation of new lies (this time suggesting still-retained innocence), the movie flirts with irony, but given the overall tone of the piece it’s entirely possible that Scherfig and Hornby were just thinking they were cute.

Rating: 34/100

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By Jeremy Heilman, September 8, 2009 12:07 pm

A Norwegian war hero is celebrated with a big-budget account of his exploits in Espen Sandberg and Joachim Roenning’s slick WWII thriller Max Manus. Based, at least somewhat, in reality, this gleefully commercial movie moves quickly through its titular character’s wartime adventures, never flagging and never challenging the audience’s expectations of the genre. It flaunts its big budget with glossy visuals, sweeping camera movements and a broad, international scope. The end result is accomplished and anonymous, mildly pleasurable but eminently forgettable.

As Max Manus begins, a group of Norwegians, disappointed in their government’s weak resistance to the Russian and German armies, begin publishing a propaganda rag. Before long, they expand their efforts, engaging in more direct forms of resistance. Manus and a group of his compatriots form a covert terrorist cell in Finland, working to repel the encroaching German forces. They engage in a series of run and gun operations. These exploits, generally involving some sort of bombing, fill the bulk of the movie’s run time. What’s curious is how unexciting these potentially explosive scenarios tend to be. Though lives are lost and targets are destroyed, the sameness of the film’s action scenes reduces their effectiveness. The film ends up more formulaic than genuinely exciting.

Beyond these mediocre action scenes, Max Manus doesn’t offer much that stands out. There is a strong focus on the Scandinavian role in World War II, which is novel, but this comes packaged along with some crass nationalistic manipulations. A mother expresses her devotion to her son before we see him assassinated. A king, with a tear in his eye, commends a platoon on a job well done. This sort of shameless sentimentalism has a negative effect on the gritty realism of the rest of the film and feels at odds with the lead characters’ status as the few activists in a country that largely refused to fight. More promisingly, there’s some mild recurring cat-and-mouse action between Manus and a Gestapo commander (played by Ken Duken, in the film’s best performance), but largely the movie stays focused on its core group of dissidents, neglecting both the apathetic masses and the German oppressors.

Directors Sandberg and Roenning are obviously talented. They pace their material efficiently, keeping it from ever feeling repetitive, but they don’t do much to elevate it beyond the familiar patterns of its genre. To viewers outside of Norway, it is likely to feel entirely unexceptional. Max Manus can’t do much to compare to the structural inventions of the recent Inglourious Basterds and pales in comparison to Black Book when it comes to offering a new take on the cinema’s most well-trodden battlefields. A closer point of comparison, both in nationalistic intent and relative level of quality, would be last year’s Danish megaproduction, Flame and Citron. Like that film, Max Manus conservatively tells one nation’s resistance story, favoring a sturdy hand over any storytelling innovations.

Rating: 43/100

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By Jeremy Heilman, September 4, 2009 4:58 pm

By turns provocative, repulsive and downright elemental, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist churns with such a surfeit of unresolved energy that it’s likely to leave viewers dazed and confused by the end of its assault. For once, critics were right to be baffled by a movie at Cannes. Von Trier’s insane allegory is, by design, resistant to any definitive interpretation, whether it’s psychological, theological, or scrawled in a critic’s notebook. What the director conjures on screen certainly uses bold symbolism and blatant messaging, but the net effect of it is rather irreducible. Like one of the two characters in his film, von Trier seems at once to reject his own thesis and see it as a gateway to universal truths about the nature of man, the power of nature itself, and the role of women as mediators between the two.

This remarkable, unusual movie is never obscure from a plot perspective. Von Trier has better ways to fuck with us. His film follows a symbolically unnamed man and woman (played by Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg) from the throes of ecstasy into the throes of grief after the accidental death of their child. Much of the film involves his attempts to counsel her as she literally tears herself apart with sexual and maternal guilt. His choice in therapy is either staggeringly ineffective or tragically over-effective, depending on whether one believes psychology is an attempt to coax us into a comforting lie or a means of revealing truths about ourselves. As the film barrels toward a conclusion, it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate victim from aggressor in their relationship. Von Trier presents a confounding interplay between psychology and psychosis, misogyny and empowerment, spinning a positively demented air in which it’s impossible to assign values, or even motivations, to the characters’ actions.

For those looking for evidence of the film’s paradoxical nature, its mere title provides ample examples. It refers to many contradictory things at once. Nietzsche (whose name von Trier has used as an alias) wrote a famous tome, called The Anti-Christ, which, among other things,  argued that Christian man’s conception of God was too willing to overlook any destructive elements in His nature. The title of the film also nods toward a pagan, pre-Christian period, which the movie increasingly threatens to revert to. Certainly this same title could also be used to describe either of its lead characters. Both Dafoe, as far from Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ as possible, and Gainsbourg, whose character could be seen as a witch, fit the bill, depending on one’s point of view. The film’s credits even wink at its audience’s conception of its devilish director. The opening title card reads “Lars von Trier”. This is followed by a shock chord on the soundtrack and the title “Antichrist”, making the first moment of the movie an inescapable extratextual joke.

Audiences who don’t catch that gag are in for a long wait before they are going to reach the next moment in the film that is likely to provoke even nervous laughter. The first half of Antichrist is as much a display of emotional suffering as its notorious second half is a parade of physical assaults. The early part of the movie, which takes place after an intensely stylized, intensely felt prologue, is a somber chamber drama that seems to have genuinely fallen under the spell of a deep depression. Its dialogue is relayed in muted whispers, and it only truly comes alive during moments of intense physical pain or pleasure. All else in this passage is both purposefully numbing and utterly unsettling.

During these scenes, Dafoe’s character serves as the rational counterpoint to his wife’s irrational grief. At the same time, there’s condescension in his actions. He’s playing God here, insisting that there’s a meaning behind the suffering he inflicts upon his wife and persuading her that he alone is uniquely qualified to understand her and save her from herself. He detachedly asks her to explain her fears, which she feels deeply, but can’t put into words, setting up a dialectic between logic and emotion that will persist as the film plays out. As their extended therapy session moves to their secluded cabin in the woods, time and again, he’s confronted by the disturbing force of nature, but repeatedly chooses to ignore it. His hubris is unmistakable, but to many viewers it will seem a small sin when compared to his wife’s provocations. The director, however, may not agree. These scenes are less overtly scandalous than those that follow, but they are crucial to understanding what von Trier is attempting to do with Antichrist. The behavior of the husband certainly plays some part in pushing the wife over the deep end, and when she goes, she takes the film with it. At one point, Gainsbourg’s character explains, “That’s what fear is. Your thoughts distort reality,” bracing viewers for the literal and logical distortions to come in the film’s second half.

From the moment we’re told that “Chaos reigns,” Antichrist dives headlong into madness with a level of vigor that few films have ever managed. As its plot spirals seemingly out of control, it grows increasingly unhinged. Von Trier uses subliminal imaging, Biblical allusions, subtle lens distortions, hypnosis, hallucinations, analysis, role-playing, blatantly Freudian moments and Jungian symbolism to forefront his dive into the psychotic, but the movie feels fundamentally at war with itself, refusing to favor one viewpoint or mode of interpretation over another. Past its midway point, the distorted lens effects have given way to full blown hallucinations, eventually taking viewers to a state where reality can’t be distinguished from fantasy. By the end of the film, when madness unquestionably reigns, the only way that Antichrist’s mixed signals seem to hang together are as a bitter rejection of us all – a stark realization that there’s something evil in our nature, and nature’s nature, that we ultimately can’t escape.

A second viewing will help to confirm how thoroughly worked out Antichrist’s turmoil is. Details that predict what’s eventually going to happen are scattered everywhere. The water from the shower in the opening sex scene prefigures the rain of acorns later on. The camera zooms into the water in a vase in Her hospital room, indicating the murk lurking behind our idealization of nature. A series of extreme close-ups of Gainsbourg’s body parts shown in the first chapter as Dafoe explains the physical effects of her anguish is repeated at the film’s climax to chilling effect. Even the infamous close-up of His penis entering Her helps to prepare us for the body horror that is to come. Maybe, though, such order in the face of such willed chaos is an oxymoron. If so, that’s the only point on which von Trier’s film fails. Perhaps Antichrist would be stronger if it never made sense, or never felt “designed”. The sensation that von Trier has crafted such a deliberately contradictory contraption does on some level keep it from being the unbridled decent into madness that it needs to be, even as it redeems the director on some level, and allows his movie to emerge as a thoughtful work of art (as opposed to the ravings of a madman).

Just as much as Antichrist is sure to provoke debate, it is likely to provoke disdain. Despite providing a historical context (both in the film and in his own body of work) to explain his misogynistic premise, von Trier has already been attacked as a misogynist. Such a reading of Antichrist is oversimplified. This is a movie that dares audiences to declare either one of its characters an aggressor, especially since it situates each of them in a realm that shows nature to be just as aggressive itself. Von Trier’s movie damns any who sets out to interpret it. Despite appearances, it’s a film that’s too thoroughly researched and technically sound to be sloppily improvised and too deadly serious and disturbing to be a complete lark. Like the fox that appears midway, simultaneously explaining and devouring itself, Antichrist is a singularly painful and self-defeating movie.

Rating: 82/100

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By Jeremy Heilman,

Screenwriter Peter Morgan continues his dowdy, meticulous dramatization of recent history with Tom Hooper’s The Damned United. Recounting the tenure of Brian Clough, 44-day manager of British pro-football club Leeds United, and the unlikely journey that led to his post, the movie emerges as a picture of a pigheaded man whose sheer force of will almost seemed capable of taking a country by storm. It’s a showcase role for actor Michael Sheen, who presents an egocentric, narcissistic figure without ever overplaying or relying on mimicked sound bites. We sense his character’s concern when faced with the fact that his team’s performance is largely out of his control once the players take the field as much as we understand his hubris in taking credit for that same team’s performance. This is as good as Sheen has been, frankly. His Clough is a man who seems comprised of equal levels of class anxiety and determination. His work helps somewhat to anchor a movie that often struggles to stir emotional interest in its slavish recreation of sports history.

As one would expect from the man who wrote the screenplays for films like The Queen and Frost/Nixon, some of the characterization here is relayed via dramatic recreations of media events. The first substantial glimpses that we get of Clough and his predecessor Don Revie (played here by Colm Meaney) are in a televised interview and a press conference, respectively. Scenes like these are the least interesting parts of The Damned United, and it’s to the director’s credit that he resists including more of them. At times, Morgan’s script seems so beholden to verifiable fact that it feels more like a term paper than a fictional film. By choosing to show us ninety-odd minutes out of a six-year history, this movie inevitably begins to feel like a truncated assemblage of facts that most of its target viewers are likely to already know. Hooper’s direction helps to lessen this sensation somewhat. He shoots many of the scenes using long shots, and when he goes in for a close-up, he often creates an off-kilter or deliberately symmetrical visual effect that resists an easy comparison to what a person watching British television back in the 1970s would have seen.

Much of The Damned United’s subtlety and history, I imagine, will sail over the heads of audiences that aren’t British. The meticulous recreations of key games that Clough oversaw while in charge of the Derby and Leeds teams will similarly be more thrilling to those already interested in the minutiae of the sport of soccer. With a standing obligation to explain the obvious to non-fans, the abbreviated runtime becomes a liability. Clough goes from underdog to pariah and back again in a matter of moments. The plot structure, which reveals Clough’s eventual assumption of the position as Leeds coach up front, undermines suspense. Worst of all, as supposed tragedy strikes, and as The Damned United begins to focus on Clough’s fall from grace, it devolves into a morass of bitterness, losing even the rooting interest in the underdog that makes the formulaic structure of most sports films forgivable.

Rating: 39/100