2014 Top Ten List #10 Frank

FRANK           A-             
Great Britain  Ireland  (95 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Lenny Abrahamson       Official Site

One of the more unconventional films dealing with outsider art, a social reality outside the comprehension of most viewers, where the character Frank, Michael Fassbender in a giant cartoon, papier-mâché head that he never takes off, is the leader of a small, almost exclusively unseen and unheard of rock band called the Soronprfbs, a name even the group itself can’t pronounce.  While they are the picture of dysfunction, playing a style of music that defies definition or form, perhaps noise to some, they are a band where the anti-social behavior habits are curiously intriguing, featuring Clara, the ever dour and always angry Maggie Gyllenhaal (outstanding, literally carrying the picture with her resolute defiance) in the Yoko Ono role as the outrageously extreme Theremin and synthesizer player, two French-speaking bohemians (François Civil and Carla Azar) on bass and drums that refuse to even speak most of the time, and the artistic master Frank as the lead singer, a man they all seem to worship, where the demented humor is so off-the-wall that it’s easily one of the funniest films of the year.  Jon Burroughs, Domhnall Gleeson, son of actor Brendon Gleason and one-half of the Weasley twins from HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS Pt’s I and II (2010, 11), is a more ordinary kid stuck in a small town in Ireland with ambitions to write songs and play in a rock band.  Purely by chance, Jon happens to be at the beach one day when the keyboard player for the band is seen knee deep in the water supposedly trying to commit suicide, with the police and paramedics on the scene fishing him out of the water.  When the band’s manager and guitar player Don (Scoot McNairy) expresses remorse that they’ve lost a keyboard player, Jon almost instinctively exclaims he’s a keyboard player.  Don walks to a nearby van and confers with the other members of the band before returning, asking, “You play C, F, and G?”  Nodding happily, Don invites him to show up for a performance later that night.  The intersection of Jon’s mediocrity and the group’s outright weirdness becomes the focal point of the film, where Jon becomes our man-on-the-scene narrator offering insight into Frank and Soronprfbs, while also exploring hero worship through a somewhat surreal, musical groupie mindset of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS (2000).  The film’s premise borrows from a similar cartoon-headed character of Frank Sidebottom, the stage persona of English musician and comedian Chris Sievey who appeared on British television throughout the 80’s and 90’s, passing away in 2010.  The film is dedicated to Sievey, using his image as Frank, so to speak, while taking off from there into unforeseen territory. 

A decade ago this director made his debut with ADAM & PAUL (2004), a likeable losers buddy movie following two down-and-out heroin addicts around the streets of Dublin as they drift aimlessly from fix to fix, suffering the humiliation of rejection wherever they go, yet told in a hilarious and heartbreakingly realistic manner, so Abrahamson is familiar with characters on the outer fringe of society.  The writing team of Peter Straughan and Jon Ronson deserve much of the credit for creating such a uniquely original look inside the world of outsider artists, where Ronson based the film on his own experiences playing keyboards for Chris Sievey’s Oh Blimey Big Band, using Gleeson as a stand-in for his own real life character, adding elements of Daniel Johnston, who’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and also Captain Beefheart, whose own band eventually quit on him due to his abusive conditions, but who also suffered from multiple sclerosis during his career.  From the first show, however, it’s clear the band has hostility issues, (“Stay away from my fucking Theremin!”) so when they explode in a fury of anger onstage, with Clara breaking her instrument and throwing it at her other band mates, all leaving the stage in an explosion of rage and confusion, Jon is left appropriately stunned as they drive off in their van afterwards without a word.  But when Don invites him to join the band, telling him Frank thought he brought something “cherishable” to the group, Jon jumps at the chance, though what he apparently thought would be a weekend performance turns into an eighteen month long retreat into seclusion at a private estate in Scotland where they could work on recording an album.  To perhaps no one’s surprise, he’s immediately met with a wall of resistance, where the band members believe he’s unworthy of sharing the stage with Frank, Clara especially, as she feels an obsessive need to protect Frank, especially from the likes of someone as mainstream and conventionally normal as Jon, as like the rest of society, clearly he doesn’t “get it.”  For lack of anything better to do, Jon starts tweeting about the band, placing video clips on YouTube and sharing them with the world, where his social media entries become the narration of the film, perhaps centering more on Jon than we’d like, as the person we want to know more about is Frank.  While Jon is in a state of curious bewilderment over that fake head, he asks Don, “He never takes it off?  He sleeps in it?  What about eating?  How does he clean his teeth?”  Don’s toned down, deadpan response is simply, “Jon, you’re just gonna have to go with this.”

As it turns out, Frank is the heart and soul of the band, leading them all to their “farthest corners,” where everyone is in awe of him, refusing to record a single note until the entire album is ready, as instead he puts the group through rigorous exercises which always seem to evolve into fights, where “Chinchilla!” is their chosen safety word, though routinely ignored.  Don, we learn, has his own issues, as he has a history of doll fetishism, where the relationship that he prefers most is with mannequins, as otherwise women have to lie completely still.  Having met in a mental institution, Don thinks Frank is the sanest guy he’s ever met, believing they all want to emulate him, but there can only be one Frank.  When an irate German family arrives to their retreat, where Don acknowledges they’ve spent all the rent money and were supposed to be out a month ago, Frank goes out to speak to them in fluent German, not only calming them down, but as they leave voluntarily, one of them is thanking him for “this new truth in my soul.”  Jon’s dabbling on social media, however, eventually accumulates an audience with 23,000 hits on one of the videos he posted, so he secretly signs the group up for the SXSW music festival in Austin, informing Frank that they have an “audience.”  While Frank appears tempted by the idea of getting his music in front of an actual audience, composing what he calls his most “likeable” song, Frank 2014 - Frank's most likable song ever YouTube (30 sec), the rest of the band has no interest in money or fame, finding it a meaningless diversion which has nothing to due with their true calling—making art—seeing it more as a sell out, the worst kind of bourgeois capitulation.  Shooting the scenes in America in New Mexico and the mountainous plains of Kansas as a substitute for Austin, Texas, Jon leads the band to the Mecca and supposed promised land of indie music, where the film is an outrageous comedy of defied expectations, becoming something more than theater of the absurd, where Jon’s push for stardom and public interest has a detrimental effect on the others who want no part of this publicity stunt, as they could care less about pandering to an audience, eventually having some serious things to say about mental illness, where we find ourselves asking, “How crazy is Frank?”  Instead of this thunderous rush of SXSW Mardi Gras excitement, it’s a plunge into a downbeat, Lynchian netherworld reminiscent of BLUE VELVET (1986) with Maggie Gyllenhaal reprising the Isabella Rossellini role onstage, singing a moody, super slow-motion version of “On Top of Old Smoky” in some empty dive bar to drunks and derelicts that couldn’t be farther away from where Jon wanted to take them, while Frank, without the controlling help of Clara, veers totally out of control, and only then does Jon finally realize he doesn’t “get it.”  It’s a look behind and under the mask, told without any fanfare, quietly probing under the surface at the real anguish and pain that drives some of these troubled artists, who are overcome by an assault of mangled nerves and psychoses, where an audience finds entertainment in the performance of their inner turmoil, unleashed as it is in a stream-of-conscience barrage (“Screeching frequencies of pulsing infinity!”) of wounded psychedelic images that resemble the crazed inner ramblings of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl, leaving the audience transfixed in a haunted state of bewilderment.    

The Rover

 
 

David Michôd (left) on the set with his two stars

THE ROVER            B+               
Australia  USA  (102 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  David Michôd       Official site

You should never stop thinking about a life you’ve taken. That’s the price you pay for taking it. 

—Eric (Guy Pearce)

Following the brilliance of his earlier film Animal Kingdom (2010), one has come to expect great things from this Australian director, who has turned to a particular style of end of the world, post-apocalyptic film that continues the tradition of fellow Aussies George Miller, who introduced us to the nihilist universe of MAD MAX (1979), but also John Hillcoat, whose equally impressive films The Proposition (2005), as well as his vision of Cormac McCarthy’s death march in The Road (2009), both happen to feature the star of this film, Guy Pearce.  It was Pearce, along with fellow Australian actor Russell Crowe that broke onto the scene with utterly exhilarating performances in the Hollywood film noir thriller LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997), where Crowe went on to become a big star, now reduced to something of a caricature of himself, while Pearce has continued to do stellar work all along.  This film is impossible to imagine without him in mind, as it’s largely a wordless, nightmarish, apocalyptic vision taking place in a barren Australian wasteland set “10 years after the collapse,” with no more specifics ever provided.  Don’t get to your seats late as what happens early determines the rhythm and tone of the entire film, as Eric (Pearce) wanders into a lone bar in the middle of nowhere, a quiet, dusty hole in the wall.  But through the window, we see a truck barreling down the highway upside down, where the bloodied occupants crawl out afterwards, and like parasites stealing other bodies as hosts, these three outlaws break into Eric’s car and drive off into the emptiness of the outback.  Being the enterprising person that he is, Eric is able to get their truck unentangled and goes off after them.  After a brief exchange on the road, where all Eric wants is his car back, he’s instead left for dead on the highway as the outlaws continue on their path to oblivion.  Things fall apart even further after that, like a trek into the heart of darkness, where civilization as we once knew it has all but disappeared, and what’s left is a savage graveyard of dead bodies and souls, where killing people is the best way of getting what you want, as words are a mere afterthought.   What describes this film best is the strange and eerie musical soundtrack by Antony Partos (who also scored Animal Kingdom), much of which sounds like industrial noise, but it has the capacity to reflect the altered sense of consciousness that pervades throughout this dusty landscape, certainly as effective as the legendary music by Ennio Morricone in Sergio Leone films, but supercharged with creepy effects. 

Introduced through a flashback sequence, Robert Pattinson as Rey is similarly left for dead on the roadside, and though badly wounded, he crawls into a vehicle until unable to continue.  By a strange act of fate, these two are mysteriously brought together in the vast emptiness, as Rey recognizes the car Eric is driving, claiming it belongs to his brother.  Eric demands to know where his brother is, but doesn’t get far after giving him a crushing blow that only knocks him out.  Driving into a surreal abyss, with dead bodies strung onto the passing telephone poles, it’s a precautionary reminder of what to expect if one ventures further, like a ghoulish nightmare.  A visit to another weird stop on the road leads him to a somewhat deranged grandmother (Gillian Jones) who passes as the madam in a dingy brothel, who can’t seem to understand why he’s so intent on finding his car, “What a thing to get worked up about in this day and age,” where Eric picks up some weaponry, but at a heavy price.  The menacing tone exists throughout the film, made even more pronounced when Rey comes to, where we discover he’s something of a half-wit, viewed initially as little more than a mangy dog left on the side of the road after being hit by a car, but slowly a more resilient personality begins to take shape, almost by surprise, but not until after Eric discovers the whereabouts of a doctor, a woman living in the outback (Susan Prior), where one of the more somber scenes in the film is watching Eric stumble upon a room with a dozen or so dogs in cages, where he sits and stares at them, identifying with their state of captivity and their loss of freedom, but they’re alive, all abandoned by their owners who disappeared into the night never to return.  After another horrific scenario plays out, a continuing pattern that recurs throughout the movie, breaking the mood of what is otherwise a movie set in quiet and near silence, Eric brings his recovering patient along as they barrel down the highway into the bleakness of the night.  While they presumably have a destination, as Rey’s condition improves, he freely acknowledges where his brother is likely to be, Henry (Scoot McNairy), and his two cohorts Caleb (Tawanda Maryimo) and Archie (David Field), as he’s just as curious about finding them, especially after they abandoned him.   

Though they’re on the road for most of the picture, the film is not so much a road movie, more a depiction of gruesome, neverending horror, where the grim circumstances never relent, shown without any trace of humor, but as time goes on, the movie delves into the psychological interiors of the two men, both considerably damaged, though Rey’s mental confusion makes him comparable to Lennie from Steinbeck’s depression novel Of Mice and Men, seen here as a kind of caged animal that doesn’t know his own strength, who is instead constantly viewed through the fragility of his mental weakness.  At one point he’s rambling on in the car about his farmer neighbors, this after learning Eric was a farmer before the collapse, until he’s rudely interrupted by Eric wondering why he’s telling him all this personal crap, and Rey meekly retorts, “Not everything has to be about something.”  The movie comes to reflect the shifting tones between these two characters, where there are subtle changes in their feelings toward each other, where the audience is drawn into this as well, as initially the focus is upon the heroic aspects of Eric, seen as a lone warrior against an out of control wilderness, but slowly the viewer takes an interest in the more vulnerable Rey, whose crazed ramblings may reflect the last vestiges of humanity.  What’s intriguing about Rey is his need for companionship, where he’s afraid of being left alone, where he’s the kind of guy that can’t decide anything for himself, as he needs to be told what to do.  In one of the more hypnotic moments of the film, in the still of night, while the two are sitting by a campfire, Eric intently tells Rey not just what awful things have happened to him, but what God has done to him, stripping through the layers, exposing his real fears, leaving him utterly defenseless to the kind of pain that is ripping the earth apart.  It’s the closest we come to the kind of excruciating pain and anguish, which is all that’s left in the world.  This film at least attempts to do what Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), for instance, fails to do, which is get in touch with the end stages of human emotions once the realization is made that all is lost.  Rey has a flashback moment where the car radio plays Keri Hilson - Pretty Girl Rock - YouTube (4:14), a reminder of the superficial vanity that once was, an era consumed by mindless impulses and myopic convictions, replaced by a vast wasteland where there’s nobody left that cares.  As bleak as they get, this all takes place under the scorching 110 degree heat of the Australian outback with flies everywhere, shot where it’s 9-hours by car in any direction to the nearest civilization.  Michôd is excellent in creating a world that is frighteningly unforgiving and cruel, yet portrayed through realism and raw emotions, where every last character has become alienated from their former humanity, suggesting how easy it is for civilization to simply disappear off the face of the earth.  Something of a concept film, reminiscent of those 50’s novels where nuclear fallout would inevitably destroy the world, like Alas, Babylon, On the Beach, Level 7, or Fail-Safe, here one’s worst fears have already become realized and there’s simply no answer for the neverending sadness that greets each empty moment with an all-consuming silence. 

Killing Them Softly

KILLING THEM SOFTLY          B                

USA  (104 mi)  2012  ‘Scope  d:  Andrew Dominick                Official site

America is not a country, it’s a business.                   —Jackie Cogan (Brad Pitt)

Dominick is a New Zealand-born Australian film director and writer, adapting the screenplay from the 1974 George V. Higgins novel Cogan’s Trade, described by The New York Times "No Innocents in This Jungle" article as “the seamy netherworld of the savage seventies” where none of the characters can be considered good.  In fact, like Don Siegel’s CHARLEY VARRICK (1973) or the Coen brothers NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007), the premise is stealing money from the mob, where they send a guy to track down the money, a kind of avenging angel fixer who cleans up the mess left behind.  While the story is set in Boston, the movie was shot in New Orleans, much of it resembling an urban wasteland, where a good deal of time is spent navigating their way through this urban jungle.  While the story concerns a couple of small time hoods, Frankie (Scoot McNairy) and Russell (Ben Mendelsohn), who think they can make a big score by ripping off the mob, the film is a series of character sketches defined by lengthy scenes of endless talking, where at times it can be clever or hilarious, but there’s also a running thread throughout that comes from continuous television or radio news reports in 2008 announcing both Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama’s vision for America, followed by President Bush describing the first signs of an unraveling, economic freefall that defined Obama’s first 100 days in office, as reality forced his hand and co-opted his feelgood vision of change, forcing him instead to bail out the banks, Wall Street brokerage houses, and the auto industry, forcing him to clean up the mess left behind by the unfettered deregulation run amuck during the Bush administration.  While this offscreen political narrative always seems to protrude into the scene, like a necessary evil, it parallels the theme of a professional mob enforcer cleaning up after the reckless behavior of undisciplined, small time punks.         

Who has a more recognizable face of the mob than Ray Liotta from Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), playing Markie, a local mobster that runs an underground card game.  Having bragged once that he ripped off his own card game to make a big score, Frankie and Russell figure if he was negligent once, he’s sure to be blamed again, taking the heat off of them.  What’s interesting about this duo is their colorful flair for lamebrained ideas.  Frankie is the kind of hood that can’t keep his mouth shut, nervous and twitchy, where he’s just a bundle of nerves, while Russell, taking a page out of Seven Psychopaths (2012), earns a living by stealing dogs and then reselling them on the black market.  Russell has an everpresent layer of sweat and grime on his face, where he’s such a lowlife junkie that it’s immediately apparent he’s not to be trusted, but for Frankie, he’s his best and only friend, so like an idiot, that’s his chosen partner in crime.  The two pull off the scam and a price is immediately placed on their heads, where even as they’re pulling off the heist, Markie tells them matter-of-factly, “You know you’re dead, don’t you?  Are you sure you want to do this?”  All we see initially is just the boots, and then an offscreen voice, but the fixer sent in the clean up the disarray is Brad Pitt as Jackie Cogan, the title character, exactly like Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, something of a throwback to Harvey Keitel’s original clean-up guy, Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe, in Pulp Fiction (1994).  While Dominick, like Tarantino, shares a love for outlaws and quirky dialogue, Dominick’s characters are less fantasy and more grounded in reality.  What’s amusing is the continually running scene with Pitt in the car with Richard Jenkins, known only as the Driver, where the two have a discussion about murders for hire, but the Driver reflects the modern era mob mentality, as he’s a legitimate businessman who answers to what amounts to a collective board of trustees that has to vote on everything they agree to before it’s authorized.  Cogan would rather make things quick and easy, save time and trouble for everyone, where his motto is “I like to kill them softly—from a distance,” but not this group, as they hesitate and agonize over every little detail in what amounts to a stalling tactic.  Cogan goes along with it, as it seems like easy money once these guys actually make up their minds.  

Cogan brings in an out-of-town partner, James Galdofini as Mickey, who drinks like a fish and screws every hooker in town, yet his colorful language is absolutely killer material, easily the best thing in the movie.  At heart, he seems to represent the viewer’s idea of a typical mob operator, as he’s all brass and balls, the kind of old-school mobster whose gutter mouth feels like a character pulled out of a David Mamet play.  But Cogan doesn’t see it that way, expecting something professional, where all the guy wants to do is drink and tell stories, where he’s as evasive as the Driver, guys that continually procrastinate and never get down to business.  As we hear the background sounds of Washington politicians promising a new world, they all seem to talk the same game about a united country, but then can’t agree among themselves how to make it happen, reduced to squabbling and incompetency, all while the country’s economic woes spiral out of control.  Cogan has to cut through this haze of pie-in-the-sky bullshit, which he finds almost mocking in tone, a kind of doublespeak that amounts to a paralysis of inaction.  He, on the other hand, after undergoing the agonizing, exhaustive, soul searching conversations about restoring the rightful, unlawful order of the criminal underworld, which are themselves a graphic picture of gangster slang, has a fairly lethal yet simplistic approach—just put a bullet in the guy’s head and be done with it. The conversations are actually funny, but there’s plenty of empty space between action scenes, plenty of down time where you’d think instead there’d be chase scenes and action galore in a movie about gangland slayings.  There are plenty of graphic scenes of violence here, given an almost ballet-like slow motion choreography, but the picture is really about probing the interior mindset of hardcore criminals, displaying a unique ability to capture the rhythms and textures of their language, heard in parallel with flowery political rhetoric espousing the nation’s ideals, all while observing the subculture of mob capitalism at work, apparently not that different from Washington, where “In America you’re on your own,” a place where selfish interests rule, where the bottom line is every action is a negotiated business decision designed to make the most amount of money.  What’s different about the mob, however, is they actually collect on their overdue debts.