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Clean
Under discussion:
Clean
(2004)
In
Clean
(2004), Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) must get her act together—kick heroin, find employment, alter attitude—if she is to see her young son. Screenwriter and director Olivier Assayas says on the sleeve for the D
V
D, “ Society tells us relentlessly to live for today, and offers instant gratification through the consumer goods that it puts at our disposal. Drugs are still the best way of achieving precisely that aim. They give us the peace that we ache for, and give satisfaction, just like medicines, which treat the symptoms and leave the disease untouched.”
When I tell people the
Clean
story, they say, “That sounds good.” But for the story to work, the screen writer/director has to address and overcome one fundamental problem: After we are introduced to Emily as thoroughly despicable, we suddenly have to care about her. The only thing
Clean
does to get us on side is have Emily played by a superb actress. She can, however, only bring to life what she’s given. We would care more about her fate if she weren’t presented entirely negatively: entirely at odds with her musician husband (who then overdoses), incompetent at everything (e.g., trying to manage her husband’s career), and badmouthed by everyone (yes, everyone) in the music business. We would understand better her strong interest in her son if, early in the movie, we’d seen them together. Instead all we get is someone wondering aloud why you’d have a kid and then never see him.
Unfortunately, given this structural problem,
Clean
presents some of the most uneven acting you’ll see. Maggie Cheung is excellent, trying successfully to hold our interest with a raised eyebrow or a downcast glance. One Spout critic denigrated her performance
as being unlike a methadone addict, but I haven’t been a methadone addict and neither has anyone close to me, so I cannot judge the veracity. Regardless, the movie uniquely focuses less on the horrors of withdrawal that the everyday insults of trying to find employment and a career. But her counterpart, the taciturn grandfather keeping her from her son is consistently terrible. It’s as if Nick Nolte, whom I’ve like in many movies, got a take on the reserved old boat builder which was off-base and unconvincing but he clung to it consistently throughout the movie, giving each of his scenes a discomfiting inauthenticity. This is not to say that the scrip for old Albrecht is not wonderful. But let
‘s separate the two. The script has a wonderfully level-headed, no-nonsense guy, but Nolte never does it justice, leaving us to do the work of making the great lines work. Fortunately, the little boy (James Dennis) is wonderful. In the scene where he and his mother are at a French zoo, he compares it unfavourably to the zoo in
V
ancouver, then launches into this kid-like story about beavers being everywhere in Canada. When his mom asks if they’re dangerous, he says, no, they’re stupid. Not only is the unconventional logic typical of many young kids, but James Dennis delivers the lines with such verve and spontaneity that I wonder if they were improvised. As grandparents are want to say, he is a special kid. It is too bad the movie didn’t show him together with his mother early on, for then we might have better understood her motivation and cared whether she changed enough to warrant her son.
posted on Monday, August 20, 2007 4:01 AM by
JimBell
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