Karina on SpoutBlog

Whether or not you “like” their work, if you’ve spent any significant time this decade at film festivals (or reading the blogs that cover them), you’d be hard pressed to deny the impact that Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have had on recent art cinema. With traces spottable in films as diverse as Berlinale winner About Elly, Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler and Jacques Audiard’s over-praised A Prophet, the Dardenne style (handheld camera kept close, hyper-naturalistic performances, real locations, a general hard-on for brutality wrapped in the mundane) has become the dominant style of serious movies about ordinary people. This is what happens when you win two Palme D’ors in less than ten years, I guess — other filmmakers presume that you’ve cracked the code. The dirty secret, of course, is that the audience for an actual Dardenne brothers film consists almost entirely of other filmmakers and critics, and neither group has done a sufficient job of persuading that this shouldn’t be the case. This decade’s key art film phenomenon is — ironically, considering the Dardennes’ preferred subject matter — virtually completely inaccessible to any sort of audience outside of the elite circle that made it a phenomenon in the first place. If you are reading this, you are probably part of that elite. If you are not reading this, you probably hear the phrase “Belgian film about poor people” and run as fast as you can in the other direction, and frankly, I don’t blame you.

That said, the Dardennes’ follow up to the Cannes-winning L’enfant is of interest for two reasons: with a pulp kick giving way to psychological intrigue before the globo-political thesis kicks in, it’s more entertaining on a base level than “a Belgian film about poor people” has any right to be, and it reveals why the Brothers are not only worthy of emulation, but also why they do what they do so much better than their pretenders.

Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), an Albanian immigrant who dreams of opening a cafe with her largely absent boyfriend, has married Belgian junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier, nearly unrecognizable at about 30 pounds lighter than in his last stateside release, Summer Hours) to secure citizenship, which will allow her to get a bank loan. As part of a deal set up with taxi driver/low-level crook Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione), Lorna has agreed to make her newly-acquired Belgian citizenship useful by passing it on to a Russian stranger via another marriage. Claudy thinks he’s going to be paid 5,000 Euros to divorce Lorna so the second half of the deal can go through, but Lorna knows that Fabio really plans to kill Claudy and make it look like an overdose. When Claudy asks for her help in getting off heroin, Lorna tries to convince Fabio to spare Claudy’s life, faking domestic violence so that they can get a quickie divorce. At the point where Lorna is self-inflicting head injuries, it looks like Lorna’s Silence is on the road to a happy ending. It’s not.

Formally, Lorna’s Silence is above repproach. There’s a pure beauty to the imagery here that seems antithetical to the concerns of most films made by Dardenne pretenders, an ease with color and a subtlety of light that seems distinctly related to classic Belgian painting. The Brothers also understand that sometimes a fixed camera doesn’t impede immediacy, but actually enhances it. Their visual minimalism is all about quiet control.

Lorna’s emotional complexity is such that when I saw it first 14 months ago at Cannes, I interpreted Lorna and Claudy’s relationship — the heart of the film, the area where her silence most crucially comes into play — as a different beast than it seemed to be when I screened the film again last week. It’s clear that lonely, self-loathing Claudy would love for Lorna to be a real romantic and domestic partner, but Lorna’s motivations are much more ambiguous. Why does she suddenly becomes emotionally invested enough in Claudy to try to save his life, to the point where she literally throws herself mind and body to the cause, when everyone she trusts insists that a junkie’s life is expendable? Fabio suggests at one point that her show of basic human empathy is out of character with “the Lorna I know.” Something has happened over the course of the marriage to change her; on first viewing, I assumed that she had fallen in love, but the second time around I was sure it wasn’t as one-note as that. Indeed, the Dardennes’ project here seems to be emotional whiplash: when you suspect you have a character pegged you’re proven wrong, the moments of lowest spirit bump up against the highest, and there’s a dark humor to its deepest horrors.
Also seemingly more complex on second viewing, and ultimately more difficult for me to reconcile, is Lorna’s ending. It’s because of the Dardennes’ commitment to speaks-for-itself naturalism that they’re able to make the point, without ever stating it in anything like literal terms, that the 21st century globalist dream of a middle class life in a Western country inevitably resolves in either death or madness. And then in the final scene, any pretense towards realism is thrown out the window, as a desperate Lorna finds and, thanks to a conveniently placed crow bar, gains access to a safe haven, all in about 30 seconds. At this point, Lorna has without question been driven by guilt and grief to some kind of madness, so it’s possible a psychotic break has occurred — in a film that often makes use of narrative ellipese to throw the viewer off the track of the narrative, it’s possible that we’ve switched from an objective view of her circumstances, to her fantasy. I’d like to believe that’s the case; I’d like to believe the Dardennes are too good to suddenly change the rules of their game at the last minute.

Judd Apatow’s Funny People feels like an attempt to graft the writer/director/producer’s patented brand of semi-raunchy character comedy of latent male adolescence on to the template of a certain kind of studio film rarely made today — think 1980s Oscar bait, like Terms of Endearment, The Accidental Tourist or even Beaches: the gently melancholic dramedy in which someone in early middle age is suddenly forced to reconcile their lives. This unlikely hybrid serves as the vehicle for a meta-epic work of autobiography that pays tribute to one of the writer/director’s oldest friends/collaborators, diverges into a love letter to his wife, contrives to get the wife and the friend in bed together, and then drags in Eric Bana to get them out. All the while, Seth Rogen is milling about, mostly as a surrogate for the filmmaker, until he suddenly switches over and starts speaking for the audience — during the film’s draggiest stretch, he is very vocal about not wanting to be there.

If this sounds bizarre, it is. What’s more bizarre is that this mix of personal project-as-product actually succeeds — at least intermittently. Though not formally bifurcated, Funny People practically plays out in two sections (another 80s flashback: it feels like the kind of film that used to come packaged on two VHS tapes). It peaks emotionally at about three-quarters of the way into the first section, makes good on track laid in that scene about a third of the way into the second section, and then rapidly devolves from there into a domestic sitcom that can only resolve itself in a “girls may come and go, but bromance is forever” fade out. The film is so self-referential, so quick to pounce on and twist what the audience thinks it knows about Apatow and his players (from multiple references to Seth Rogen having recently lost a lot of weight to Adam Sandler repeatedly begging Rogen to show him his dick) that to reaffirm the bond between two men this way almost seems like an act of defiance. “Yes,” Apatow seems to be saying. “This is a movie about me, and yes, my primary concern as an artist is platonic male love. So … suck it.”

By the time that statement arrives in the 146th minute, it’s almost redundant. Very litle attempt has been made to veil the correspondence between Funny People’s narrative beats and Judd Apatow’s actual life history. Adam Sandler plays George Simmons, a stand-up comedian-turned-movie star best known for a number of blockbuster comedies that involve him playing high-concept characters mainly of interest to kids (though there seems to be little narrative resemblance between Simmons’ Merman and Sandler’s The Waterboy, the vocal performance of the two titular characters is pretty much the same). After he learns he has a rare, fatal disease with an eight percent survival rate, a depressed George shows up at a comedy club to do an impromptu set about mortality. He bombs, and is followed by Ira (Rogen), a young comic who makes up for his own lack of material by pouncing on Simmons’ performance. The next day, George calls Ira at the apartment he shares with his more successful friends (played by Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman; Apatow became roommates with Sandler in the late 80s after meeting him at a comedy club). George offers Ira a job writing jokes (Apatow wrote jokes for superstar comedians such as Roseanne Barr before breaking into TV and film), and soon Ira is showing up daily at George’s ridiculously large, ornate, empty mansion.

George is a prickly, permanently single, co-dependent loner who soon sucks Ira into his life nearly full-time, leaving the young comedian as the primary witness to this movie star stranger’s deterioration. Eventually Ira convinces his boss to tell his friends about his disease, and though he insists that he has none (“Andy Dick is not a friend”), soon faces from his past, mostly other comedians, start hanging out. By this point, the film has made so many nods to Sunset Boulevard (Gloria Swanson had Buster Keaton and Anna Q Nilsson as wax works, Adam Sandler has Norm Macdonald and Colin Quinn) that it’s surprising when the film suddenly breaks through the hermetic seal of George’s depressingly one-track life, and starts to explore his unending regret over losing his one true love, an actress named Laura who gave up her career before breaking out as a star to have a family with another man (Bana).

Laura is played by Apatow’s real-life wife Leslie Mann, whose actual pre-motherhood career is sampled here as Laura’s “acting reel”, and whose real-life daughters make their second appearance after Knocked Up as her daughters on screen. After George and Laura share what is — as far as I remember — the first genuinely tear-jerking scene in Apatow’s canon (involving what is certainly the most humanesque acting work Sandler has ever committed to screen), the film takes an even more abrupt shift: breaking out of George’s house, jumping ship from what seemed like its reason to exist, and suddenly becoming an adultery farce. Funny People feels like two films stitched together, in a manner reminiscent of a messy epic like Reds. The second half of Apatow’s film — like the back end relegated to the second VHS tape of Warren Beatty’s — couldn’t exist without the first half, but it carries on with a completely new set of stakes, a completely separate emotional arc.

Though Funny People is the first Apatow film to not be shot like a comic strip (Janusz Kaminsky’s high-contrast cinematography Looks Like Art) the director has not, in his previous directorial efforts, been all that shy about his evident desire to push beyond the generally accepted boundaries of the modern dudecom genre. Still, up to this point, in practice that push has mostly been limited to each film’s rather extended running time and uncommon earnestness in grappling with the pleasures of marriage as well as its discontents. Funny People is a much more ambitious film than The 40 Year-old Virgin or Knocked Up, and a far less audience-friendly one. Though gently funny throughout, there is no comic setpiece here on the order of the mushrooms scene in Knocked Up.  There’s nothing as quotable as the “bags of sand” bit from Virgin. None of the characters seem as destined for viral iconhood as McLovin (although Eminem’s cameo comes close). It’s hard to imagine this film pleasing an audience drawn in by its stars — one man’s catharsis is rarely another’s invitation to escape.

I have nothing but respect for Apatow’s ambition. What I struggle with are his instincts as a director, which, from an artistic standpoint, tend to be bad. If there’s no one telling him he can’t make a 146 minute Adam Sandler film, it’s not surprising that there’s no one cockblocking his natural proclivity to get crazy indulgent with the montages. In this film, that tendency teeters on (but unfortunately, doesn’t cross) the line of self-parody with a Dying Man Finally Learns How To Live sequence, set to a cover of the post-humous Beatles tune “Real Love,” sung/lipsynced on camera by a guitar-strumming Sandler. This is worse than mere schmaltz, because schmaltz works when it’s built around the universal. Dig through the layers of this schmaltz — a faked cover of a song made by a computer over a decade after the man who actually sung it was murdered –– and you’ll find nothing real, love or otherwise. And this is the problem with Funny People, writ microscopic: Apatow has taken blisteringly personal material and filtered it through tropes and cliches borrowed from trite, mainstream factory-line cinema of another era. Judd Apatow the writer deserves a better director.

indieWIRE has news of dozens additions to the lineup for the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. Most interesting to me: the world premiere of Todd Solondz’s Life During Wartime (guess that rumor that it had been retitled Forgiveness was bunk) and Hipsters, the Russian musical whose Cannes market guide summary famously promised to “never leave the audience indifferent.” Oh, and they’re also showing movies that people think are legitimately good, like A Prophet and An Education. More at the link.