Friday, February 17, 2017

THE SILENCE SURROUNDING ‘SILENCE’

By Dominique Paul Noth
Liam Neeson in "Silence."

On paper, everything about “Silence” grabbed the wheelhouse of my interests – a favorite director, important novel, serious cinema and global moral dilemma.

It is faithful to the intentions of a renowned novel from 51 years ago -- the master culmination of the themes of Japan as a swampland of repression written by celebrated Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo. 

Or should that more clearly be Catholic Japanese? Because Endo reached into 17th century Japan with a semi-historic novel to make his emotional and theological point – unspeakably cruel rejection of Christian villagers (but not too cruel for the cinema).  They were forced into secret cults and then boiled, beheaded, crucified in the ocean or hung upside down like pigs to die.  Yet this was nothing compared to the elaborate physical and  mental torture inflicted on the Portuguese Jesuits who attempted to minister them, so ferociously did the dominant Japanese society reject the faith of the outsiders and compromise its leaders.

The mental chess match between priests and inquisitors, using the Jesuits’ own intellect and agony against them, becomes after the first hour the centerpiece of the film. So it was onstage in 1995 when the Milwaukee Rep collaborated with Japan’s Subaru Acting Company.  That production of “Silence” also asked whether a western religion could take root in Asian soil (much like people today ask if our western form of democracy can take root in the Middle East) and whether there wasn’t self-destruction in a religion built around blood and suffering. 

The priests of the story are seduced by their own concern for the lives of the faithful.

Another lifelong attraction is director Martin Scorsese, who has been exploring the nature of guilt and defiance since I admired his first film more than 40 years ago, “Mean Streets.”  Endlessly versatile, enamored of American and Japanese film history, Scorsese provides a nearly too perfect sheen of fog, unforgiving landscapes and grubby villagers, trying to marry the postures of Japanese behavior to the depths of physical discomfort the Jesuits – played by Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver – must submit to in missionary zeal. 

Liam Neeson has an elaborate cameo as the fallen priest they have come to rescue – a mouthpiece for the nobility of compromise. The Japanese co-stars are effectively cast for looks and behavior, both malicious and noble. Tadanobu Asona, an incredible one-man theater comic, is a standout as the amusingly grim Inquisitor. The movie has its own Judas figure who again and again encapsulates the internal dilemma of the devout Christian’s belief in forgiveness while standing firm when God himself remains silent.

So in depth of purpose, nobility of style, cinematography that is its lone Oscar nomination and intent, the film cannot be questioned.  But as a film it can be questioned.

It is laboriously long, more to be studied than felt. Despite the brutality of its images the movie keeps us inspecting its protagonists more than sharing their conflict and pain.

At times, such as the head of Jesus shimmering in the water, the directorial choices can be misrepresented as selling Catholicism when the attempt is to dig inside the minds of the Jesuits.  It is something like Alfred Hitchcock thinking that superimposing opening doors in the head of Ingrid Bergman in “Spellbound” was saying something the actors couldn’t, but it still comes off as way too obvious.

“Silence” is a spectacular exercise in admiration more than the dive within characters that marks the best of Scorsese’s work.

No strong audience has found this film, though its hopes for coronation were high. It wasn’t even released until two days before Christmas of 2016 to be Oscar eligible and then generally released in January.  Within weeks despite the names involved, it disappeared from the nation’s main screens.

Other recent film reviews include “La La Land,” “Moonlight” and “Lion,” “Florence Foster Jenkins,” “Jackie,” “Hidden Figures,” “Fences,” “Manchester by the Sea,” “20th Century Women” and “Loving”.


About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 



Tuesday, February 7, 2017

HOW LOVING AND FRIENDSHIP HAD LITTLE PLACE IN OSCARS

By  Dominique Paul Noth


Ruth Negga is the lone Oscar nod despite Josh Edgerton's strong
performance in "Loving."
One measly nomination for “20th Century Women”? That  was not the intention of producing companies Annapurna Pictures, Archer Gray and Modern People, as this reviewer has discussed

It’s awards that help keep East Coast financiers interested in an era when most films need these multiple sources.  That’s  why most movies’ introductory logos convey a multitude of unknown investment companies, many of whom are also doled out “executive producer” credentials.

It takes a lot of cooperative money -- sometimes strange money. As hedge fund manager, new Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin invested some $500 million in films, but he also  used the fortune he amassed on Wall Street, and  working for Goldman Sachs,  and running his own bank,  to finance other movies well into 2016, earning constant executive producer designations.

He actually has  one film in the Oscars – a sound editing nomination for “Sully,”  directed by Clint Eastwood. It also clearly had broader Oscar hopes and pumped in vain for Tom Hanks as best actor.   

The “20th Century Women” partners carefully released the film in New York and Los Angeles in December before turning to  general release the following year -- clearly hoping for deeper Oscar  recognition at the last minute for more nominations than the one they got.

Similarly  “Loving” chose a November release though ready six months earlier.  Its Oscar hopes were barely realized, not even a best picture nod in an expanded field of nine despite director-writer Jeff Nichols’ previous credentials and an entertaining cast.  

Joel Edgerton is remarkably good as the strong silent type --  Richard Loving, a reticent reluctant public figure even when sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for interracial marriage. But only Ruth Negga landed an Oscar nomination as his wife in a performance of luminous compassion and determination – and recognition that she is a star in the making. 

Negga’s Mildred, as seen by writer Nichols, is factually  fabricated to make her environment  friendlier and her heritage not the partial American Indian the real Mildred claimed in interviews but more outspokenly “black.” But the performance contains its own truths about human behavior even more than about the landmark Loving  case.

The Lovings couple took their 1950s  legal troubles to the Supreme Court in the 1960s and won an end to miscegenation laws nationwide -- certainly a timely reminder of the importance of the courts in social progress. The acting, the historical significance and the truthfulness of government indifference have kept the film around, which is not the fate of other 2016 entries that failed to win big respect at the Oscars.

(Looking back and being blunt, the producers of “Captain Fantastic” -- a July release that landed a best actor nod for Viggo Mortensen --  and crime thriller “Hell and High Water,” August release yet four Oscar nods and strong box office, are probably wishing they had pushed Hollywood voters even harder.)

Documentary and foreign film specialists can probably signal Oscar overlooks (though bravo for the documentaries including “I Am Not Your Negro”). But credit the Academy voters generally for coming down to mostly respectable choices (except for the strange placement of star Viola Davis of “Fences” in the supporting actress character and inserting Octavia Spencer there, the weakest performance but biggest female name in “Hidden Figures”). 

Never pretend there isn’t a lot gamesmanship behind the scenes -- nor how obvious it is  when studios give up despite positive sounding press releases.  A case in point is  “Love & Friendship” despite the awards  track record of films based on the  works and late blooming popularity (after more than two centuries!) of Jane Austen (“Sense and Sensibility,” “Pride and Prejudice”). The clarity of that times’ class structure and the pertinence of Austen’s verbal skewers always hold out great opportunity for film-making.


Kate Beckinsale as the venom-dipped Lady Susan.
Faithfully adapted by director Whit Stillman from the Jane Austen novella “Lady Susan,”  the production promised elegant 18th century fashion and humorous dissection of the battle of the sexes, focused on an endlessly scheming penniless widow who uses her looks and shy daughter to force a lucrative outcome.

It was plugged hard in June . . . then  quietly  moved to Amazon’s DVD market by September. The industry pretty much knew then  the  producers had given up hope that either well-known Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan or Chloe Sevigny as her gossipy confidante would gain awards  attention. 

Quite right, too, because Beckinsale is concerned more with elegant style than internal conviction about  Lady Susan’s powers over men, an essential dramatic element even in comedy. Sevigny’s amused arched eyebrows are similarly not enough.

The film cannot be saved by some inventive visuals to keep the complicated plot from tangling – or  even by those delicious Austen bon mots. (Lady Susan’s vicious wit is on constant display: one targeted husband is  “too old to be governable and too young to die”; a miscarried scheme brings the Trump-like complaint, “Facts are horrid things.”) 

The epigrams cluster like locusts but except for Tom Bennett’s amusing turn as a rich ignoramus, what should have been a comedy of manners becomes a comedy of mannerisms.

Recent film reviews include La La Land, Moonlight and Lion, Florence Foster Jenkins,  Jackie, Hidden Figures, FencesManchester by the Sea and 20th Century Women.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com. 


Sunday, February 5, 2017

OSCAR SENSIBILITIES AND 20TH CENTURY WOMEN

By Dominique Paul Noth

The curious but understandable Oscar neglect of Annette
Bening in "20th Century Women."
A release date reveals a lot of what producers and studios are thinking about Oscar nominations – or lack of them.

Not seasonal perennials of course. The “Star Wars” franchise routinely locks up the family holiday audience ever year in December, not expecting much from the Oscars (good thing, too -- only a visual effects nomination for “Rogue One”). Action and superhero films think similarly, throwing in Thanksgiving. 

But more serious, explorative  and  socially comedic  films are given release times that will help them leap out of the pack and force industry Oscar voters (and the foreign press association, and the Screen Actors Guild and other much televised exercises) to pay attention.  These releases are often placed at the end of 2016. The studios don’t have much belief in their own industry’s attention span.  

Such was “Nocturnal Animals,” given a limited sneak peek for New York City and Los Angeles in November  (this big city  release is a condition of the Oscars) before entering general release December 9.  Try to find it now.

Supposedly a suspense film in which a violent rape in a novel affects the writer’s former wife, forcing her out of her  cocooned luxury, Tom Ford’s film is flat pretentious in its visually elegant stylings  and only partially believable in plot. 

That did result in one surprise and rather strange  Oscar nomination (supporting actor Michael Shannon as a cancerous quixotic sheriff) and an equally surprising  Golden Globe for Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a showy sometimes naked extreme villain, a role any good actor would kill for (figuratively).  There is strong screen presence from veterans Jack Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams (Amy in particular keeping us interested in a boring woman). But the film’s producers clearly hoped for much more.

Amy Adams (in "Arrival") failed to register with Oscar
in two films.
It is Adams’ misfortune that another Oscar hopeful starring her also  opened in November, partly to stir Oscar but mainly for Thanksgiving sc-fi attention  – “Arrival,” something of a cross in plot between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.”

Adams’ work in that seemed Oscar bound -- a linguistic professor with guts and curiosity (and a hidden mental insight) willing to risk exposure to alien visitors. Her acting keeps the movie palatable even more than the extensive visual effects – and remember, she has been much nominated in previous years.  This time she came a cropper despite (or maybe because of) two films in the crucial final months.

 The film got recognized in the best picture, best director, best director and five technical categories, but it wanted Oscar to fall in love with Amy, who one day will win one of these things.

But Adams is not the one cited as Oscar’s major oversight. That belongs to the frequently nominated   and always interesting Annette Bening. Her tabloid fame may come from domesticating Warren Beatty but her acting prowess has made her the most reliable inhabitant of diverse characters next to Meryl Steep.

She picked a doozy keeping  “20th Century Women” humorously afloat – as a mother who came of age well before feminism and open talk about sex in the 1970s. Clinging to old habits (chain-smoking Salems) she seeks to help adolescent son Jamie (played engagingly by Lucas Jade Zumann) safely navigate this raucous new world of punk dress and music,  jackass stunts and promiscuity. 

Director-writer Mike Mills has long tapped his personal experience and added playful memories. (A humorous moment comes when a devoted punk artist captures every moment in her day with her Polaroid, something hardly unique  today --  everyone has  a smart phone.) The movie dances among visual extremes (fast motion, acid blurrings and straight naturalism) with some blunt dialog that won Mills the film’s single Oscar nomination  in a category where he is outranked (best adapted screenplay).  Would you like to go up against Fences, Lion, Hidden Figures and Moonlight?

Elle Fanning (with Bening) in "20th Century Women."
Neglected were  pleasant but mainly behavioral acting exercises from Greta Gerwig as the punk artist and Elle Fanning as the object of Jamie’s unfulfilled desires.  Billy Crudup circles the feminist and documentary undertones as a securely hippie and hedonistic handyman. But the film becomes lost in episodic incidents and overly obvious social commentary. Where it should fly it swoons and even a final image intended to keep the film afloat drags the audience down to earth.

For these reasons, I don’t consider the general exclusion of “20th Century Women” a mistake --  though it is curious that Meryl Streep is again nominated for a film that is already on pay TV, “Florence Foster Jenkins.”  But hers  was a more impressive acting job. 

Bening’s character is a  less attractive acting challenge -- as much an object of helplessness as intended hopefulness.  The actress loved unearthing the contradictions and invests meaning even when there doesn’t seem much of a purpose. I would have preferred her in a New York minute over Natalie Portman, but the mystique of  Jackie won Oscar voters over the slightly comic portrait of a confused 1970s mother.

Recent film reviews include La La Land, Moonlight and Lion, Florence Foster Jenkins,  Jackie, Hidden Figures, Fences and Manchester by the Sea.

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com