My Blueberry Nights

Director: Wong Kar Wai

As Fabienne tells Butch in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, “Any time of the day is a good time for pie.” This is especially true when one is nursing a broken heart and in the first English language film from director Wong Kar Wai (one of Tarantino’s favorite directors), while love sick alcoholic police officer David Strathairn opts for shots and Otis Redding’s "Try a Little Tenderness" in a Memphis bar, beautiful singer Norah Jones decides on pie in New York with Jude Law in My Blueberry Nights. Gee, no offense to Redding and Strathairn but that seems like a no-brainer to this filmgoer as well, although like Ms. Jones and Mr. Kar Wai (IMDb), I’m not one for blueberry pie.

In her screen debut, Jones turns in a subtle, introspective and competent if admittedly unchallenging performance as Elizabeth, who, heartsick from her badly ended love affair with an unfaithful boyfriend, begins returning to the diner where she not only learned of the infidelity through the loyal owner Jeremy (Law) but also has offered up her keys as the latest set to fill his cookie jar of failed romance. Jeremy, who serves as the genial but unlikely go between for bitter exes, is all too familiar with Elizabeth’s story as his keys were one of the first ones dropped into that sad jar and while nobody ever seems to come back for the keys, Jeremy says that like the untouched, uncut dish of blueberry pie at the end of the night forsaken in favor of cheesecake, he likes to keep the keys and the pie there just in case. Relating to the tale and in need of distraction, Elizabeth’s ritual of coming in for pie ends in a gorgeous succession of shots with an obvious fairy tale homage as Jeremy leans over and upside down, manages to kiss the remaining traces of pie from the lips of the sleeping, heartbroken Elizabeth before she vanishes to Tennessee to get as many miles as she can away from her bad memories of the end of love.

However something unspoken has passed between those pie filled nights and tender conversation, and she continually sends Jeremy postcards and letters from her new life, working two jobs as a waitress in a greasy spoon diner and a bar, both of which are the daily haunts of Strathairn’s Arnie Copeland. Unable to divorce the unfaithful, much younger wife (Rachel Weisz) from whom he’s separated but still madly in love with, Arnie makes a promise every night that he’ll quit drinking, piling his one day AA chips on the bar, but with every time the jukebox record drops Otis Redding’s "Try a Little Tenderness" and Weisz saunters in, that resolution is helplessly abandoned.

After a tragic middle section, the episodic My Blueberry Nights moves out west to the tale of lady gambler Leslie (Natalie Portman) as she and Elizabeth become a mild Thelma and Louise until life catches up with them both. While Leslie’s story seems like an odd fit with the lovesick tales of woe, it does also concern a nonromantic heartbreak and serves as a nice release for audiences who were squirming in their seats, unfamiliar with the slow Kar Wai pacing and obsessions with the ends of affairs.

A Kar Wai fan since Chungking Express who still considers In the Mood for Love to be one of the most romantic films ever made, I was bitterly disappointed by the overly ambitious mess of 2046 that was so awful, it made my loyal film professor and movie going sidekick swear off Kar Wai and decide he would be the one to choose the next several films. And while My Blueberry Nights isn’t in the same league as Chungking or Mood, it’s still intoxicatingly sensual and filled with performers who instinctively feel at ease in Kar Wai’s gorgeous, impressionistic, and unabashedly romantic universe. And hopefully it will make filmgoers not only reach for the nearest slice of pie but hit the shelves of their local movie stores looking for the director’s best.

Note: For an in-depth analysis of In the Mood for Love alongside one of the films it influenced, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, click here for my article.

Goya's Ghosts

Director:
Milos Forman

For his first film since 1999, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus director Milos Forman decided to tell a story about a period of time he felt hadn’t been given proper screen consideration—namely an inside look at 18th century Spain during the last part of the harrowing inquisition. For his structural link-pin, he and his auspicious French co-writer Jean-Claude Carriere whose filmography includes collaborations with auteurs such as Bunuel and Godard decided to focus on controversial painter Francisco Goya, who, a court painter when the film opens has a unique first person view of the goings-on. Swedish star Stellan Skarsgard portrays Goya as a blank canvas—unassuming, hard to read and mild—a man who just happens to be in the center of the drama when the lives of two individuals whose portraits he has painted intersect in shocking ways.

Cast for what according to IMDb Forman felt was her uncanny resemblance to the “Milkmaid of Bordeaux,” Natalie Portman stars as Goya’s lovely young muse Ines, the daughter of a wealthy family who is subjected to the horrors of the inquisition after she’s called to testify. Her crime isn’t her association with Goya, whom the church feels has displayed dangerous commentaries on the Catholic Church in his works, but rather what the inquisitors feel is her curious refusal to eat pork while dining with her brothers. While Ines explains that it’s simply a matter of preference and she doesn’t like the taste of the meat, the inquisitors feel that she may be truly masquerading as a Catholic who secretly adheres to Judaism and proceed to torture Ines until she signs a confession thrust in front of her.

Desperate to gain his daughter’s freedom, Ines’s father pleads Goya for help with introducing the family to Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) who they feel will be able to secure her release. While 2007 found Bardem overshadowed by his other villainous role as the sociopath Anton in the Coens’ Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country for Old Men, he turns in the best performance in Goya’s Ghosts as the cunningly devious Lorenzo who manipulates all he meets for his own gain.

Although IMDb noted that Forman chose not to film in Spanish since he doesn’t speak the language, the film’s anachronisms in language do take the viewer out of the piece as we’re confronted by the various accents from Bardem’s authentic Spanish to Skarsgard’s posh British meets Swedish tones and Portman along with Randy Quaid’s (who portrays King Carlos IV) American accents that make one wonder why Forman didn’t instead have the actors at least work on creating convincing accents for their roles. Further curious is the title of the piece and the erroneous idea that Goya is in fact the main character as viewers ultimately end up walking away from the film with the same amount of knowledge they had on the painter going in or as Los Angeles Times writer Carina Chocano wrote in her review, “The biggest ghost of the movie is Goya himself.”

Nominated for three Spanish Goyas, the film’s ultimate saving grace aside from terrific portrayals by Bardem and also Portman playing dual roles is the sumptuous period photography by Spanish cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe who has not only been tapped to shoot the upcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but also shot two of Spain’s biggest critical hits of the decade, The Sea Inside and Talk to Her.

The Other Boleyn Girl

Director:
Justin Chadwick

Having never read Philippa Gregory’s novel, I remember the first time I saw the previews for The Other Boleyn Girl, which seemed to set up the movie as the ultimate catfight between two beautiful women played by Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson over the jaw-droppingly gorgeous Eric Bana and thought, well, Scarlett’s got the edge on this one, given the amount of press she’s gotten for her, ahem… exploits (I’m still trying to block out the Benicio in an elevator tale that I’m hoping is a rumor). After talking to a few people who’d read the novel, I found I wasn’t alone in my thoughts as a friend who came along to the screening also mentioned that it seemed like an odd casting choice to have Scarlett Johansson portray the pretty, sweet and innocent Mary Boleyn and cast Natalie Portman as the wickedly scheming tease Anne Boleyn, yet only a few minutes into the film, we realized they’d made the right choice. After having subjected Jude Law to an auto accident in the streets of London with her very appearance and tantalized Clive Owen in Closer, Natalie Portman (who indeed kicked off her career in Lolita like roles in The Professional and Beautiful Girls) has become one of our most fascinating and versatile actresses—a consummate professional who can tackle any role and accent (from Where the Heart Is to Cold Mountain)-- she’s come into her own and has the perfect platform in British television director Justin Chadwick’s latest feature film The Other Boleyn Girl.

Chronicling the Boleyn family from children playing in the field where they are observed by parents Lady Elizabeth (Kristin Scott Thomas, thankfully getting a chance to convey emotion) and Sir Thomas (Mark Rylance), they’re summed up as Mary, the sweet and fairer golden-tressed beauty verses the eldest daddy’s girl Anne, who while pretty, isn’t as classically beautiful as her sister, yet she has an edge about her that enables her to go from seductive to manipulative at the drop of the hat. It’s precisely this quality that inspires her father along with her morally reprehensible social climbing uncle The Duke of Norfolk (David Morrissey) to set Anne (Portman) up as flirtatious bait in the hopes that she may catch the heart and body of powerful hottie and King Henry Tudor a.k.a. Henry VIII (Eric Bana) who may be in the market for a mistress, seeing as though his wife Catherine of Aragon (Ana Torrent) has yet to bear him a son. After a spill that injures his masculine pride more than his body that one wonders may have been spurred on by the aggressively suggestive Anne, Henry’s attentions fall to the young woman nursing him back to health, the newly married and simple Mary (Johansson) whom he soon orders to come to court under the guise of being his wife, the Queen’s newest lady in waiting. Although her sister is invited along as well, Mary quickly learns his real motives when he summons her to his room almost immediately and the two begin an affair which blossoms into love on her side and something very nearly similar for Henry that deepens when she becomes pregnant with his child. While we’re never quite sure what becomes of Mary’s husband, the jealous Anne receives her comeuppance when she maneuvers her way into marrying a man betrothed to another before it’s annulled and she’s shipped off to France but she gets the last laugh when she’s sent to divert the king from taking yet another mistress as Mary, now bedridden and in a fragile state, looks on worried for her child. Despite the fact that her very purpose is to keep his attentions on Mary, we all know Anne’s true motives, especially women who have most likely gone to school with at least one (or in my case) several girls who make it their goal to steal men no matter what the cost, almost more for sport and social stance rather than for any real affection. Anne works her magic, toying with Henry like a puppy, sending back his gifts and bending him to her will before she’ll give him any hope of her body (his first wish) or her heart (his second) and it’s these scandalous motives that sets in motion the legendary events to follow as she tries to become Queen.

A sixteenth century soap opera, exquisitely photographed with enough sumptuous art direction and costuming to dazzle the senses in the same way as did Sofia Coppola’s similarly themed eye candy epic Marie Antoinette. However, while Antoinette was more of a modern and sensuous take on history, Boleyn, which was originally adapted for British television in 2003, is strengthened by its complicated plot and exceptional acting. Despite the grumbling of some theatergoers of seeing Bana as a far more intoxicating and alternately sensitive yet frightening Henry VIII, the casting of him in the lead I feel augmented the Boleyn’s feud for his affections and made it a bit more relatable. And as for the writing, there’s no more capable scripter than The Queen’s Peter Morgan who as Variety’s Derek Elley wrote not only “eliminates many of the more fanciful potboiler elements of the novel” but also managed “the difficult trick of making the narrative crystal-clear without dumbing down the actual material.” In other words, go see it and pick a side, even though it is Portman’s exceptional turn that, like Henry VIII, you will find commands the most attention.

Closer

Director: Mike Nichols

The tagline warns that if you believe in love at first sight, you never stop looking, which although a romantic notion does have an undertone of cynicism attached. The subtle tagline is actually a major understatement to Closer's much darker themes, including romantic rivalry, lust, infidelity and the cruel head games people play in the name of love.

Adapting his own award-winning play, Patrick Marber’s brutal tale of four strangers who meet under varying circumstances with shocking results begins in a traditionally swooning cinematic fashion as Jude Law catches sight of young American beauty in London, Natalie Portman, complete with Damien Rice’s shiver-inducing, infectiously romantic ballad "The Blower’s Daughter" blasting on the soundtrack.

The two soon become involved, but this—like all of the other romantic and sexual couplings in the film-- occurs only off-screen, implied instead by the dialogue and action preceding each hook-up. The explicit dialogue is shocking enough to make Glengarry Glen Ross’s screenwriter David Mamet blush but the film is mostly all sexy talk and little visual erotic action. Soon the movie jumps forward in time to certain life and relationship altering moments as Law becomes infatuated with Julia Roberts as another American lass whose name also begins with A (possibly for "American" in Marber’s mind), despite using his girlfriend Portman as the muse for his first novel.

The actors are all quite good and Pretty Woman fans never look at America’s Sweetheart Julia Roberts in the same way again after being hit by her extensive range in her more recent films, including her work in Closer and her Oscar winning turn in Erin Brockovich.

However, the real surprises are the film’s Golden Globe winners and Oscar nominees Clive Owen and Natalie Portman. Owen turns in his most dangerous turn since Croupier as a cad who unlike Law's character isn’t in denial about his true nature. Likewise Natalie Portman devastates as the young exotic dancer who is surprisingly the most innocent of all--if only in comparison to the rest-- complete with a beguiling twist that makes us realize that we never fully understood the depths of her character in the final moments of the film.

As he did thirty plus years earlier with Carnal Knowledge, The Graduate, and Who’s Afriad of Virginia Woolf, director Mike Nichols proves an impressive and analytical aptitude for the complexities of adult human relationships. Aside from the truly blunt dialogue which may offend viewers, one other major drawback to Closer is that, in the end, it’s difficult to have empathy for such disagreeable, unlikable and selfish characters so that (aside from Portman), we find that we don’t really care what happens to them.

Note: If you've never heard it before, you're going to want to download Damien Rice's aforementioned tune below. It makes a great inclusion for a romantic mix tape as do all the other songs from the film like another personal favorite "Caramel."

Songs Featured in Closer from iTunes


“The Blower’s Daughter” by Damien Rice


“Cold Water” by Damien Rice


“Caramel” by Suzanne Vega


“How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths