Clean

CLEAN                       B+                  

France  Canada  Great Britain  (111 mi)  2004  d:  Olivier Assayas

A break-up picture, very much reflective of the personal separation of the director and his ex-wife, leading lady Maggie Cheung, who parted and went separate ways.  This is a character driven film, with a terrific international cast, but not always a seamless feel.  Don McKellar is Canadian, Nick Nolte is American, Maggie Cheung is Chinese but multi-lingual, and the rest of the cast is French, including the likes of Jeanne Balibar, Rémi Martin, and the always superb Béatrice Dalle.  As the film is in English, it occasionally feels somewhat unworldly, yet that is the distinct intention of the film.  There is a marvelous soundtrack, a trademark of Assayas, this one driven by the imagination of Brian Eno, which also includes a stab at singing by Cheung with the recording of the song, “Down in the Light” clean.wmv  YouTube (2:49), very much within her character, hushed, quiet, with very spare music underneath, sounding like the personalized, early music of Nico from the Velvet Underground.  This film could be her biography.

One is reminded of another film that centered around the what-about-me people in the music industry, featuring a dominant lead performance, Frances McDormand in LAUREL CANYON (2002), a film that didn’t live up to the strength of her performance.  While a lot didn’t feel right here, namely any sense of naturalness in the actual sound of the words, yet overall, it was quite intense and emotionally affecting, with bits and pieces that were superb.  There’s an in-your-face feel to the opening segment which lures you right into the muck and mire of the music business, a back-stabbing world of self-centered stars who believe the world revolves only around them.  But the music is hypnotic, as is a live opening act performance in a dream-like Annie Lennox mold, featuring Emily Haines, a Canadian indie phenomenon, the lead singer for Metric singing the song “Dead Disco” Dead Disco - Metric - Clean - YouTube  (4:33).  But things fall apart instantly, leading to a momentary disconnection between a heroin-addicted couple, a fading rock star and his Yoko Ono-like-blame-her-because-she’s-pulling-you-down girl.  There’s a beautiful widescreen expanse where she drives alone at night and sits in her car shooting up facing a lit up giant industrial plant in Hamilton, Ontario spewing its toxic waste into the air 24 hours a day, a metaphor for the effects of her own poison, both internal and external.  When she returns, the rock star has overdosed, his career instantly takes off, accomplishing in death what he could never accomplish in life, while she’s blamed for his death and immediately sent to prison for 6 months.  They have a young son, currently living with his grandparents, Nick Nolte and Martha Henry in Vancouver, and due to the potential added pain of her presence in the boy’s life, she is asked to stay away for a few years, so she flees penniless to Paris.         

Eric Gautier is the cinematographer, and his hustle and bustle street shots in Paris are just filled with energy and life, the camera is never still, it keeps moving, as does Cheung at that time in her life, continually looking for anything to get her life, her career, back on track, with absolutely no success.  This leads to two of the better scenes in the film, as Cheung tries to re-establish old contacts, first shooting pool with Dalle in a packed bar, as Cheung brings her a demo tape she made with another inmate while incarcerated, where the fluidity of motion is completely in balance with her fluctuating world, and the next is a near surreal, out of body experience, as she’s sitting in the waiting room to see Balibar, a cable TV executive where Cheung got her start, and her personal secretary, in a gutty and powerful appearance by Laetitia Spigarelli, starts recounting the story of Cheung’s life, including all the vivid details of an obvious infatuation.  What’s brilliant about this scene is how it creates such an exact picture in our imaginations, and then takes us elsewhere.  Yet the secretary’s bluntness is unforgettable, as is one of her later scenes where we see evidence of the secretary’s sexual domination of her boss.  All of this leaves Cheung out in the cold, where we hear the chilling effects throughout her emotional turmoil in the repeated refrain from Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” CLEAN (4:10), heard earlier in the industrial complex scene, a hauntingly spiritual ascension that became mesmerizing to listen to, but Cheung is startlingly and incomprehensibly rescued first by Dalle providing her a room, then by Balibar who pulls some strings to get her a low level sales job in a department store. 

Meanwhile, the family in Vancouver has flown to London for special medical tests, as the grandmother’s health is deteriorating.  Nolte has to come to grips with what to do with the child, as he feels unable to cope with him alone, so against his wife’s desires, as she holds Cheung responsible for her son’s death, a feeling transferred to her grandson, Nolte opens the door a crack and allows Cheung the opportunity to reunite with her son.  Nolte’s feelings are key to this film, as he breaks from his wife’s fervent wishes, and he loves his wife intensely, yet without his belief in forgiveness and the possibility for change, the whole self-absorbed texture of a tortured rock star’s widow might have been different.  As it is, it’s beautifully open-ended, all generated from a marvelous speech by Nolte when Cheung is finally honest with him, bravely transferring for the first time a little bit of family trust to her shoulders, with the little boy looking innocently in their direction, a heartrenderingly pure moment that is without an ounce of overreach.  This allows the first breath of air for Cheung to breathe in the entire film, as she’s been on the run, frantically searching in every which direction, and Nolte actually puts his arm around her shoulder in the most surprising of moments, which finally allows her the chance for redemption.  It’s just a momentary spark of recognition, without which, her life may have been emotionally shattered forever—again, a wonderful reflection of Assayas’s own personal break up with Cheung.   

Warrior

WARRIOR                  B                     

USA  (140 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Gavin O’Connor

While there’s nothing particularly novel about this formulaic story, a ROCKY (1976) picture with Nick Nolte in the famous Burgess Meredith role as the aging fight trainer, with the role of Rocky split between two brothers, Tom Hardy as Tommy and Joel Edgarton as Brendan, split from one another as teenagers and forced to lead very separate and distinctly different lives.  Hardy plays a brooding ex-Marine, a loner with so many complications in his life he can barely utter a word, a guy carrying a grudge who turns into a horrifically brutal fighter, while his brother Brandon is a high school physics teacher, married with two children, but about to have his home foreclosed, forcing him into a state of desperation where he can pick up extra cash from the fight business.  Joel Edgarton is the screenwriter of the very stylish The Postman Always Rings Twice style Australian film THE SQUARE (2008), directed by his brother Nash, and one of the criminal brothers in one of he best pictures of last year, ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010).  Here he plays the older brother who got the better end of the deal, as the younger brother was forced to flee from an abusive father, taking his terminally ill mother with him, basically fending for himself at an early age, losing all contact with his family.  Neither one has any use for their father, who finally after all these years is trying to get sober, but barely even registers as having a pulse with these two guys, as they’ve left him behind ages ago.  Rather than playing football in Mark Wahlberg’s INVINCIBLE (2006), wrestling from Aronofsky’s THE WRESTLER (2008 ), or boxing in David O. Russell’s THE FIGHTER (2010), this movie features the latest fighting craze called the ultimate fighting championship, mixed martial arts, which allows boxing, wrestling, and various martial arts techniques where a fighter wins by points, knockouts or submission holds, where in this case, a round robin battle of 16 leads to 4 fights within 24 hours, the winner takes all, a $5 million cash prize.  

While the actual narrative is familiar, but rather than shown in an indie style picture, which is usually all character development, this is a tense, highly stylized, Hollywood action picture that takes us directly into the center of the ring where it becomes an adrenaline-laced fight picture, an old-fashioned popcorn movie that stars three men who are so damaged they are barely articulate, who haven’t spoken to one another in years, and when they do have the opportunity, they still have next to nothing to say, so it’s all about what happens inside the ring.  Tommy is a former undefeated high school State wrestling champion, but his quick exit from the state curtailed his promising career, while Brendan had a brief, fairly ordinary ultimate fighting career that also came to an abrupt end as his wife Tess (Jennifer Morrison) couldn’t stand to see her husband get pummeled.  But both are completely off the radar when it comes to ranking the best fighters in the world, so just getting into this tournament is something of a stretch.  However, the acting in this picture is superb, among the best performances of the year, where they each complement one another nicely, where Nolte is the odd man out, bruised, beaten, old and weary, who dares to hope against all fading hope that he can reconcile his differences with his two sons who refuse to acknowledge his existence, who spends his time listening to a tape in his ear of a reading of Melville’s Moby Dick.  Tommy went off to Iraq and bulked up, but so little is known about him that his life is a mystery even to himself, as he keeps everything secretly locked up inside, very much in the mold of Stallone in FIRST BLOOD (1992), where fighting is his true release, seen kicking the living crap out of a championship contender as a walk on fighter in a dingy gym, which is how he earns his reputation.  He’s also recognized by a soldier in Iraq as a war hero, but the Army has no clue who he is.  Brendan is a popular teacher, but imagine the looks on the kids faces when he walks into classes with cuts and bruises all over his face, where he’s the talk of the school forcing the administration to step in, as this is not the kind of example they’re interested in setting for young well-educated teenagers.               

While there is a working class setting of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there is little connection to actual working class problems, as few, if any, American households can attempt to save their homes via ultimate fighting prize winnings.  Most would stand a better chance beating the odds of winning an extreme makeover offered by the Oprah Winfrey show, where they may refurbish, redecorate, and pay a year’s mortgage to save your home from foreclosure.  Instead this is all about the promised lure of dollars, where instead of hunkering down and figuring out what most families would need to do, like sell one of their two high-priced automobiles, they rely upon a Hollywood dream, a clichéd option that really doesn’t exist, only in the movies.  This movie would barely be a consideration except that the production values are excellent, the acting is extremely compelling, the suspense is palpable, using a split screen and quick cut editing technique, all adding to the build up of tension, where the ass kicking action in the ring is riveting, reinforced by the musical soundtrack by Mark Isham, all of which adds up to a remarkably well made motion picture, one that will likely delight audiences as one of the feel good pictures of the year.  The question will be whether this film has any staying power, whether any of the emotional connections have any resiliency, and whether there’s enough fan interest in the action scenes.  The blue collar setting is interesting, but the degree of dysfunctional family relationship is dark and disturbing, where the option of organized crime never intrudes, as these boys would likely have been recruited as teenagers by neighborhood gangs.  As bleak as the unfolding narrative can seem, real life often offers far darker alternatives.  There are weight divisions in every fighting match, including weigh-ins, but that seems to have been thrown by the wayside, where the fight tournament actually resembles Bruce Lee in ENTER THE DRAGON (1973), continually fending off bigger and stronger contenders, where the most patient and disciplined fighter often prevails, defying all odds, where a guy never given a chance still has a chance.  In times of financial ruin, where people are legitimately losing their jobs and their homes, not to mention their pensions and their futures, this film, like the director’s earlier 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey dream on ice, MIRACLE (2004), feels like a hope and a prayer.