While We're Young

WHILE WE’RE YOUNG                 B                    

USA  (97 mi)  2014 d:  Noah Baumbach                   Official site

He’s not evil, he’s just young.

─Josh Shrebnik (Ben Stiller)

The kids are getting older - - that feeling of the inevitability of aging seems to be on the mind of writer/director Noah Baumbach, once seen as one of the cooler heads in the business, whose ruthlessly satirical semi-autobiographical The Squid and the Whale (2005) remains his definitive film, one of the quintessential indie films of the modern era that seems to define our place in the struggle, where his films are snapshots of distinctively uncomfortable and often sad moments in our lives, drawn from his own personal experiences growing up in Brooklyn, where his characters are often going through life-changing moments.  Prone to disappointments, Baumbach’s films feature restless, anxiety-driven characters along the lines of Woody Allen, both known for their acidic wit, but are usually made for a fraction of the cost.  Baumbach’s films have a fun factor associated with them, also exquisite performances, where the audience is literally sharing intimate moments with the people onscreen, much like a theatrical experience, where you hang out for a brief period with a few fictional characters of his own creation, where his films, even his failures, are always time well spent, featuring ingeniously written dialogue of characters in flux, small gems of personal life experiences that reveal our tenuous connection to the constantly changing world around us.   Whatever Baumbach may be, he’s never boring, where the optimum word is usually clever.   Anyone remember the animated opening prologue sequence to Orson Welles’ THE TRIAL (1962), often described as the doorkeeper myth, The Trial: Before The Law - YouTube (2:45), an existential dilemma suggesting that from the outset we cannot escape the inevitability of our fate? 

“Before the Law stands a doorkeeper,” the story begins. “A man from the country comes to this doorkeeper and requests admittance to the Law.  But the doorkeeper says that he can’t grant him admittance now.  The man thinks it over and then asks if he’ll be able to enter later.  ‘It’s possible,’ says the doorkeeper, ‘but not now.’”

The doorkeeper warns the country man that three even more powerful (if unglimpsed) guards lie beyond him—the impenetrable layers of the bureaucracy.  The man waits forever, until his death, until the gatekeeper closes the door meant only for him, but which he can never enter.

   

In Baumbach’s film, it opens with a few lines from Henrik Ibsen’s play The Master Builder, where Solness, an aging character, wonders aloud if he should “open the door” to the younger generation, anxious that they might “break in upon me” and seek “retribution.”  By the end of the film, we hear playing over the final credits Paul McCartney’s song “Let ‘Em In,” Let 'Em In Paul McCartney And Wings Lyrics Photodex ... (5:09):

Someone’s knockin’ at the door
Somebody’s ringin’ the bell
Do me a favor, open the door and let ‘em in

An amusing stroll through a generational divide, the story concerns a couple in their forties Josh and Cornelia, Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts, seemingly at a crossroads in their life, still unsure of themselves as they’ve become creatures of routine, completely dependent upon instant access from the latest electronic gadgetry, though in denial about their approaching middle-age, where earlier dreams of success have eluded them, finding themselves at odds with most of their friends who are fast becoming parents, where the focus of their attention shifts to their children, leaving Josh and Cornelia on the outside looking in.  As a result, when the opportunity comes to hang out with a younger couple in their 20’s, Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver, a revelation, and the underutilized Amanda Seyfried), both are infused with a newfound energy from the younger generation’s more carefree lifestyle, finding it invigorating, much less pressure, and somewhat liberating to be youthful again.   Mirroring the director himself (who is age 45), Josh plays a 44-year old documentary filmmaker who has a strained relationship with success, having had some degree of earlier critical acclaim for his first film, but feels the daunting pressure of living under the shadow of Cornelia’s more acclaimed father (for whom she works), Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), a Maysles or Wiseman style documentarian considered a legend in the field.  Still struggling for the past ten years with the shape and editing of a film he can’t seem to finish about the political, historical and militaristic connections of the last 50 years, (“It’s really about America!”), including a lengthy interview of aging, leftist intellectual Ira Mandelstam (Peter Yarrow, from Peter, Paul, and Mary), mimicking Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which also includes an interview with an aging intellectual, yet here the audience immediately senses Mandelstam is the most boring creature on earth, yet Josh refuses to cut any of his precious footage, leaving his film in an unwieldy state of seven hours long.  Making matter worse, his grant funding has run dry, leaving them precariously on the edge of financial difficulty, where he might be forced to swallow his pride and borrow money from his father-in-law, something that eats away at him, as if diminishing his own self-esteem or masculinity.  When he discovers Jamie is a budding filmmaker already familiar with his work, he’s not only flattered, but thinks perhaps he might be of some help offering an objective perspective, discussing many of the ideas on his film, but instead Josh gets sucked into Jamie’s first film project about reconnecting with a long lost friend on Facebook who turns out to be a suicidal war veteran.  While Josh sees himself more as a seasoned professional offering tutorial guidance and expertise, internally he wonders when he stopped being young and ambitious and instead began thinking of himself as something of a disappointment, where he’s been bogged down working on the same film for so long that he’s worried it may never get finished.  Little wonder, then, that he leaves his stagnant life behind and runs off with Jamie as his newly discovered best friend.  

Zany and hilariously “in-the-moment,” hanging out with the refreshingly different younger couple brings unforeseen energy into their lives.  Living in a warehouse loft apartment in Harlem that is surprisingly quant and authentic, the walls filled with vinyl records and furniture they built themselves, Cornelia notices with some surprise, “It’s like their apartment is full of stuff we threw out.”  Filled with the collected clutter of whatever appealed to them at the moment, Jamie seems interested in everything, always eager to try new things, where his idea of living is experiencing things as unfiltered as possible, playing board games instead of watching TV, where Darby makes organic ice cream in an assortment of specialty flavors.  Wearing T-shirts that say “Some crappy band,” or “Some college I didn’t go to,” Darby’s darker impulses include exploring empty subway tunnels or taking hip-hop dance classes with Cornelia, who can’t figure out the dance moves, asking quizzically “What kind of class is this?” while Josh and Jamie ride bikes through the city streets (which Josh cuts short due to arthritic knees) or go shopping for fedora hats, where Josh confesses, “Before we met the only two feelings I had left were ‘wistful’ and ‘disdainful.’”  When trying to recollect a pop reference, Josh instinctively pulls out his smartphone, but Jamie and Darby prefer the mystery of trying to remember without an electronic gadget that can find easy, readily available answers for you.  And if they can’t remember, then they simply move on to something else.  It’s reminiscent of an era of bringing electronic calculators into the classroom, where students were allowed to do all the calculating electronically, even on tests, where previous generations were forced to memorize all the formulas and do all their own calculations.  Curiously, inverting one’s expectations, it’s the “younger” couple that prefers the “older” challenge.  In a dinner scene with friends their same age, Josh and Cornelia, along with others, are all seen on their smartphones, where someone utters the rationalization, “It used to be rude, but now it’s accepted.”  Similarly, when Josh hears a song he hated when it was released in the 80’s but suddenly finds inspiring when heard again, Lionel Richie’s “All Night Long,” Lionel Richie - All Night Long (All Night) - YouTube (3:48), or the dreadfully overplayed ROCKY III (1982) theme song “Eye of the Tiger,” Survivor - Eye Of The Tiger - YouTube (4:10), he instantly recalls, “I remember when this song was just bad,” now suddenly being rediscovered by those hearing it for the first time.  This trip down memory lane, however, gets derailed when they decide to attend a spiritual cleansing that involves a fake shaman and hallucinogenic drugs, where the outcome grows more grotesque than absurd, where they’re obviously closing a moral line of questionable bad taste, where it also serves as a reminder of just what, exactly, have they gotten themselves into?  While always maintaining he was a purist, willing to spend ten years refusing to allow any phony commercialism to taint his movies, Josh always believed filmmaking was “capturing the truth of the experience.”  When he realizes Jamie’s work is an utter fraud and fabrication that conveniently accepts deceitful motives, staging events for real life and passing it off as truthful, for instance, Josh finds this an irreconcilable difference, a perversion of the truth.  While the film loses some of its sanity, with Ben Stiller having a meltdown and reverting to form as one of the more contemptible characters onscreen today, for further evidence, see Greenberg (2010), but Baumbach wrote the film especially for him while attempting to expose how what passes for the truth today is altogether different than previous generations, having been raised in an era of instant gratification where images are captured by cellphones and posted on Twitter or YouTube, where there is no longer an editing process, per se, but an immediate flood of public opinion that determines what’s essentially the truth.  This is a film that you want to like more, but it grows curiously weaker by the end, lost in its own ambiguity, where even the title feels somewhat lame, but overall it has more inventive charm and pizazz, even if it’s not altogether a success, than most other directors working today.  

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE)       B               

USA  (119 mi)  2014  d:  Alejandro González Iñárritu        Official site

This is a self-reflective, existential dark comedy about the inner life of an artist trying to make a comeback of a career that’s taken a tailspin into irrelevancy, a film that resembles the real life career of actor Michael Keaton as Birdman, as Keaton played Batman twice but refused to do it a third time, while in the film he made the multi-billion dollar blockbuster movie Birdman three times, but refused to do another, where in both cases his career plummeted soon afterwards.  Stylistically, González Iñárritu has made a freshly innovative and thoroughly entertaining film, grabbing the audience’s attention with a daring bit of supernatural energy on display, as Keaton has a continual dialogue with his inner self throughout the entire picture, where his darker, inner impulses speak in a no nonsense, profanity laden lower register that resembles the voice of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, but is, in fact, Keaton’s own.  While expressing what appears to be telekinetic forces, which may only be in his imagination, the film gives the impression that he possesses super powers, while denigrating everyone around him as lowlifes and hangers on, while he’s the real star of the show.  This alter ego is a nasty piece of business that often shows up as Birdman in costume, hovering around or even flying behind Keaton, spewing his venomous chatter that’s meant to puff up this fragile ego into believing he can do anything.  Driven by a jazzy drum score by Antonio Sanchez that expresses a ferocious energy, becoming the second film, after WHIPLASH (2014), showcasing a feverish drumbeat, providing an incessant stream of improvisation for the actors to feed off.  Perhaps just as quirky is the flashy technique of cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose everpresent camera follows the actors around everywhere, in and out of backstage rooms, down narrow corridors leading onto the stage, as if the entire film was composed of a single shot.  Like a run-on sentence, this technique never allows the audience to catch their breath, as there is no down time, no breaks in the action, where it feels as if something is always happening.  This constant motion, along with the off-kilter atmosphere behind the scenes, feeds into the manic energy of continual interruption and confusion when staging a play, going through the incessant rehearsals, stroking the delicate egos, listening to the various demands, remembering the names of the stage hands, having to deal with last minute emergencies, where there’s simply no time to collect one’s thoughts.    

Keaton is Riggan Thompson, a former super hero actor who is trying twenty years later to regain his credibility as an artist by adapting, directing, and starring in Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, a collection of short stories from 1981, several of which were used by Robert Altman in Short Cuts (1993).  One of the personal revelations is discovering Riggan attributes his choice of acting as a profession to a complimentary note he once received from Raymond Carver written on a cocktail napkin.  Riggan has enlisted a rag-tag group of offbeat choices to inhabit this play, produced by Jake (Zach Galifianakis), his lowlife agent, best friend and personal attorney, starring first-time Broadway actress Lesley, a jittery Naomi Watts, a co-star he’s sleeping with, Laura, who may also be pregnant, the sensually alluring Andrea Riseborough, a last minute fill-in, Mike Shiner, Edward Norton, an egocentric New York theater superstar that guarantees increased box office, a loose cannon who thrives on method acting, is very specific about certain requested details, who’s also sleeping with his lead actress, while also reuniting with his own daughter fresh out of rehab, Emma Stone as Sam, a recovering drug addict still bitter that her father was never around, now serving as his assistant.  Some of the best moments of the film are reserved for Stone, who never seems to disappoint.  Keaton has always thrived on an understated, nervous energy, but here he is the butt of all jokes, constantly besieged by his alter-ego, a victim of his own increasingly dark hallucinations, much like the dancer in Aronofsky’s THE BLACK SWAN (2010), while the machinations of staging this play is a walking disaster, as everything that can go wrong does go wrong, becoming an absurd commentary on the supposed higher artistic realms of theater.  What cinema brings into the landscape is the element of fantasy taking place in Keaton’s head, where at times he can float on air, or fly through the streets of New York as his character Birdman once did, or with the snap of his fingers make things explode with a barrage of movie special effects that seem hilariously cheap and silly when seen in this light.  González Iñárritu seems more interested in using these techniques to get inside this perplexing character, who always seems on the verge of a breakdown while trying to maintain stability, which is interestingly enough the mindset of an actor, always challenged by the unfamiliarity of the next role.

Of course, this kind of thing has been done before, and to much better effect by John Cassavetes and the incomparable Gena Rowlands in Opening Night (1977), another troubled stage production that delves into the internalized anxieties of an actress who has doubts about playing the role, who thinks it’s all wrong, who wants it changed, even though it was written specifically for her.  While Cassavetes grounds his film on the beauty of live theater, where the agonies and self doubts are brought into the rigorous rehearsals onstage, where the performance is the thing, bringing to life a living and breathing quality to every moment, González Iñárritu accentuates through artifice, where one of the more brilliantly staged moments is when Riggan takes the stage, but his words are drowned out by the immaculately beautiful and devastatingly sad orchestral music of Mahler, Mahler 9th Symphony (1/9); 1st movement; Bernstein ... YouTube (10:00), a soaring work that initially seems to float on air, adding a profound sense of eloquence and poetic grace.  It’s the kind of ravishing moment that takes your breath away, that exists nowhere else in the picture, but in an instant, it’s gone.  There’s another surreal scene where Riggan gets locked outside the theater where he has to walk half naked through the crowds of Times Square, where people immediately recognize him as Birdman, wanting to take selfies, calling out that name, as if from the depths of his own conscience, where he will forever be inseparable with the role, yet he also becomes an overnight viral sensation, attracting the interest of thousands who would otherwise not be paying attention to him at all, but this is the younger generation’s concept of fame.  The problem is the film can’t sustain this kind of glorious energy, as there’s an uneven quality throughout and there are some questionable choices made as it winds down, where it all has to lead somewhere.  As opening night approaches, everyone’s worries and self-doubts are magnified, exaggerated by the omnipresent voice of Birdman, who has utter disgust for the entire human race, whose contempt expresses the degree of Riggan’s self-loathing, where there’s apparently a reason he hasn’t been heard from in 20 years.  Riggan loses his bearings, questioning the worth of it all, getting into a senseless verbal sparring match in a bar with the leading New York theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) who denounces the play without even seeing it, claiming he’s not a real theater person, that he’s a celebrity, a cheap imitation, despising his adolescent sense of entitlement.  The film is, in fact, a portrait of egocentrism, where every sequence revolves around the star, where the light can either shine or it can literally extinguish itself. 

King Kong (2005)

KING KONG             C                    

USA  Germany  New Zealand  (187 mi)  2005  ‘Scope  d: Peter Jackson

The film that inspired Peter Jackson to become a filmmaker, where the story has it after watching the movie on television when he was 9, he woke up the next day and began making models, turning his own updated version into something along the lines of an Indiana Jones adventure story, where much of the look of the landscape feels as if you are at Disneyland wandering around one of the artificially designed set pieces, a special effects bonanza, where the director obviously got carried away with the buckets of money he was given to make this film, so much of it is overdone to the point of excess, some of it downright ridiculous, as so much is over the top, but in the quiet moments, which were few, it works wonderfully.  The Fay Wray part was extended and reconceptualized with Naomi Watts, where she plays a down on her luck burlesque performer during the Depression, her face seen through a reflection on a sidewalk window glass by safari adventure photographer Jack Black, who dreams of making a film on the never discovered Skull Island, an unchartered island that remains perpetually “out of time,” a place where compasses and navigational equipment don’t work.  Black obtained a kind of treasure map which led him to this journey, where he brings Naomi Watts along for the ride. 

The opening sequence on the island is creepy and scary, beginning with a ridiculous move by Black to offer a piece of chocolate candy to a horrid looking native child, believing everything will be under control.  So of course, all hell breaks loose as they are attacked by almost zombie-like decrepit-looking humans that could be hundreds of years old.  These are the black-skinned, nose and face pierced, face painted native inhabitants, who could just as easily eat you as look at you.  But the boat crew arrives with guns to clear the way.  But Naomi has escaped in the night to the thunderous sound of drums with Kong.  The journey to find her leads to a stampede of dinosaurs, where men are running underneath them in a scene resembling INDIANA JONES (1984), but also the stampede sequence of LION KING (1994).  Instead of stepping to the side, they continue to run underneath where they can easily get squashed.  Surprisingly, all but a few survived.  Meanwhile, Watts inexplicably decides to perform her burlesque act in front of Kong as a means of pleasure and amusement, which leads to a huge temper tantrum when she stops.  But that’s the last of his bad moods, as Kong fights off a series of dinosaurs, perhaps a half-dozen or more, including three at once, all with Watts in his hand, switching her back and forth as he crushes skulls, breaks jaws, swings them around like a wrestler, throwing them against the rocks, even socking them square in the jaw.  Only at the end of this prolonged sequence does Watts realize she’s safer with him than without him.  Kong looks at her like, what do I have to do for you to pay attention to me, and walks off in a huff.  She yells after him, “Hey, wait for me,” and runs after him where he scoops her up and throws her on his shoulder as he thunders through the jungle.    

Meanwhile, the boys from the ship, with all their weapons, have their hands full with the dinosaurs and bugs, including a swamp sequence where giant sucking creatures swoop down atop a man’s head and suck him in, something right out of Alien (1979), or another giant roach eating sequence that is really gross, where machine gun bullets wipe them off of human bodies, without so much as a scratch to the humans.  What aim!  And this from a kid who has never fired a gun before, who throws it away afterwards like it’s tainted goods.  Again, the crew from the boat save the day with still more weapons, most all of whom survive, but oddly, all are on one side of a canyon while Adrien Brody, the supposed script writer and romantic interest (showing zero chemistry), the only man who actually cares about saving Watts, is on the other.  So he sets off alone into the jungle to find her.  Within a few film seconds, he amazes us by finding the exact spot where they have laid down for the night to snooze, a spot perched high over the entire valley with the river below and the sun setting far away.  ”It’s beautiful,” Watts repeats to Kong, attempting to humanize his feelings.  Brody finds her, and as Kong awakes pissed off, catching him stealing his girl, giant flying bats decide at that moment to descend upon Kong in droves, distracting him sufficiently while Brody and Watts can escape, grabbing hold of giant bat wings and descending to the bottom of the canyon falling safely into the water — another one of the ridiculous moments.  The beauty of the original King Kong (1933) is in its simplicity, where the cutting edge special effects were a marvel of invention at the time and continue to elicit awe and amazement well into the next century.  If Jackson’s film causes audiences to revisit the original, it can be viewed as a success.   

Needless to say, Kong is on them within seconds, and purely by accident they are able to subdue to beast with a bottle of chloroform to the nose.  Black sees dollar signs in his eyes and the scene shifts to New York for the extravaganza opening for the Eighth Wonder of the World.  When all hell breaks loose, Brody has mysteriously anticipated it all, and only he senses that Kong’s wild rage will only be subdued by the presence of Watts, and he tries to lure him to where he thinks she is.  After a scene that could just as easily be car crashes and city mayhem from SPIDER MAN (2002), there is a momentary calm.  Out of the steam rising from the street walks Watts, almost in slow motion, like Clint Eastwood entering the scene in a Sergio Leone movie.  When they reunite, it’s the closest thing to happiness in the entire movie, reflected in a magical sequence where he takes her into Central Park in the snow, where he slips on the frozen ice, and the two slide around on his giant butt, as if ice-skating, laughing with glee, as if they are the only two beings on earth.  This is the money shot in Jackson’s remake, a beautiful expression of extreme tenderness, where nothing in the rest of the movie is as memorable.  Enter the military, who make their idiotic presence felt late at the end of the film, stupidly shooting without thinking.  Kong’s climb to the top of the city’s highest building is a delight, carrying Watts most of the way, stopping to enjoy another sunset where Watts can again utter “It’s beautiful,” but as the airplanes appear, he carefully places her out of harm’s way and climbs alone the last few stories. 

In perhaps the film’s most ridiculous moment, the darkness following a sunset suddenly turns light and the rest of the film plays out in the daylight.  Amazingly, she climbs an outside staircase up to the top to join him, where the airplanes are sending a barrage of bullets at him and the accumulated damage is slowing him down, but the two have moments together at the top of the world, where Kong looks sad and somehow aware of his mortality.  Both are infatuated by what they can’t understand, but there’s a peculiar peace between them, where love is certainly in the air.  Brody breaks through the police barricade and rushes up the 100 floors or so on the elevator to greet Watts after Kong tumbles down to the ground, which is captured with a sky cam.  Down below, the wretched humans are gleefully praising the Air Force, but Black, or course, has the last line, “It wasn’t the airplanes, it was Beauty killed the Beast.”  There are simply too many references from other films on display here, where imitation is a form of flattery, but very little is original, and the victimization of Kong in the hands of his enemies is over-accentuated to the point of wretched excess, attempting to dramatize all the lurid melodramatic aspects of the story, but it brings nothing new, where the romantic notions eventually lose weight and are overcome by an overlong, overindulgent and often annoying CGI special effects/action/adventure movie.