SlipOfTheTongue Blog

Under discussion:

Boy A  (2007)

BOY A is a good reminder of just how difficult it can be to translate theme and narrative from novel to screen.  Directed by John Crowley, this film nearly gets everything so right that it is an absolute shock when the film flies off the tracks in the last act.

Andrew Garfield plays a young ex-con with a secret in his past.  This secret is so dark that he is forced to change his identity during the film's opening sequence.  He chooses the name Jack.  Case worker Terry (Peter Mullan) coaches him through the transition with sensitivity and patience.  During this sequence, completely unaware of what I was about to see, the film La Femme Nikita came to mind.  What was Jack in for?  Would he become entangled with the governement?  With the police?  BOY A peels back the onion slowly and you really do not know what is going to happen.  Through the use of soft, desaturated images, tight close ups and low angles a feeling of unease is gradually built and as Jack begins his transition we slip in and out of flashbacks and the narrative thread is off and running.

Every scene is so visually assured and so well acted that you begin to give your trust over to the filmmakers completely.  The story is populated with interesting working class British characters.  All of them seem honorable in a way.  There is a wounded nature to working class characters.  They bond to one another.  It is not that unlikely in such stories that a person might be asked to forgive a friend's (or a lover's) past transgressions in service of creating a bond in the present.

At the center of this story is Andrew Garfield's performance, which is charming and dead on believable.  It is difficult to take your eyes off of him, so fully does he create his own interior world as an actor.  Everyone else is teriffic too.  Everyone.  The camera work is unusual, keeping you off balance with unconventional angles.  The intercutting from present to past works well.  Everything is great.  And then comes the final act.

Jack's secret is revealed rather abruptly by a secondary character (one who is not very well developed).  There is little suspense or intrigue in how it happens.  It just happens.  The set up for this is bungled as we don't feel enough for the secondary character who snitches.  At this point, the story has been so skewed toward Jack's current relationships, state of mind and memories of the past that the revelations and plot twists come off feeling stale and obvious.  In fact we see everything coming from a mile away.  And all of our wonderful characters disappear from the story.  There is no meaningful interplay between them as Jack's world falls apart.  He simply clutches his head and sinks into a corner, as does the film.  It feels like a coward's ending to a great story that might have been. 

Everything that comes before the last act is of the highest caliber.  Everything that occurs in the last act feels overly arty, overly cutty, and uninterestingly morose.  Suddenly we find ourselves in a freshman film school project.  What a shame.

It is said that first impressions are everything.  But in the movies, nothing leaves an audience with a bad taste like a botched ending.  It is just so sad to think about what a great film BOY A almost was.

Under discussion:

Must Read After My Death  (2008)

MUST READ AFTER MY DEATH offers an intriguing opportunity for viewers to look into the tortured lives of a Connecticut family that struggled to regain its composure and its emotional stability as the decades passed and things got progressively worse.

Allis and Charlie got married and had four children (Ann, Chuck, Bruce, and Douglas).  Allis documents the unhappiness in the early years by use of a dictaphone and later through the use of a tape recorder.  She would often go out and sit by herself in the car to do so.  Years later, these recordings were wedded to stills and family home movies by Director/Producer/Editor Morgan Dews (grandson to Allis).  He is able to document this American tragedy with the dispassionate but loving eye of a family member one generation removed.  Yet more passion and more insight into the reasons for the family's emotional disintigration might have turned this film from something interesting into something truly riveting.

After the film's U.S. premiere screening at the L.A. Film Festival on Sunday several comments by Director Dews stood out to me.  We were informed that Allis and Charlie were "free thinkers".  They were not tied to pre-conceived notions of how a family should be raised and perhaps they had felt any problem could be addressed if approached objectively.  Their "open mindedness" led them to psychiatry's doorstep at a time that the discipline was stil in its infancy.  Psychiatry during the 60's was still developing and it was not uncommon for a patient to come out of therapy more screwed up than when he went in.  One wonders if directly or indirectly the fact that Allis and Charlie were free thinkers may have contributed ultimately to some of the family's problems.  I know that my own family had similar ideas about changing the world when I was growing up.  Those lofty ambitions do not always benefit the development of children trying to grow up and live a normal life.

Another intriguing fact was that the parents were into futurism.  This included high tech gadgets such as the dictaphone and tape recorder.  Without this penchent for the latest and greatest "tech" perhaps none of the family's history would have been preserved in the first place.

In the Q&A., Dews also alluded to the fact that it was difficult to isolate a clear story line while editing the film.  In other words, from all of the countless hours Allis committed to film and tape, Dews had to find a way to choose what was relevant and what to focus on.  I wish he had developed a clearer idea of what made his family tick.  The lack of clarity shows in his lack of vision putting the film together.  We never really know the full story.  Charlie had been an alcoholic.  Had it all been his fault?  Was there a genetic component for mental illness on either side of the family?  Did Dr. Lenn, the family psychiatrist, steer the family in the  wrong direction during therapy?  I guess we'll never really know.  It just goes to prove that even when you have a ton of evidence, conclusions about what made people unhappy in the past are not always easy to come by.  Blame is not always easily fixed.  Catharsis often remains just out of reach.  That is why putting the past behind us and learning to live in the now is so very important.

This is not to say we should not re-visit the past, but we should be prepared to be confused by it, and at times disappointed.

Under discussion:

Encounters at the End of the World  (2007)

I have never seen a Werner Herzog film so this is the perspective of one who is essentially experiencing his filmmaking for the first time.  Take from that what you will.  I have been aware of Herzog's work for years and have nibbled around the edges but never jumped in.  I nearly rented Fitzcarraldo more than a dozen times and almost saw both Rescue Dawn and Grizzly Man in recent years.  Both films sounded fascinating, as did this one.  Perhaps it was the inherent bleakness of some of his work that held me back.  There is bleakness in ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD but there is also a deftly humorous touch and (at times) the hand of a showman who knows how to play to an audience and ask engagingly human questions.

The scene on Saturday night was one of a packed house.  This was day three of the Los Angeles Film Festival.  There was an introduction by a rep from the Sierra Club.  I knew that we would have global warming on the brain that night.  Encounters is not about global warming per se but about Herzog's exploration of the personalities and mysteries that inhabit a science outpost at the South Pole (McMurto Station).  The people who have come there are eccentrics, quite often brilliant, though sometimes a bit daffy.  They are ecclectic square pegs that just wouldn't fit anywhere else.  Or so Herzog would have us believe.

This film is interested in science but it is really more of an exploration of mysticism and a search for answers at the Earth's end.  Herzog likes to create mini-narratives and vignettes of larger than life personalities.  He will not sit still for interviewees who are full of themselves nor will he hesitate to leap in and ask engagingly silly questions.  While talking to a geneticist and an arctic ice diver about the discovery of three new microscopic species found on an ocean dive Herzog blurts out,  "So...is this a great moment???".   His question is an attempt to seize back the narrative back from clinical professionals who damn well don't know how to tell a good story.  Herzog needs for the moment (any moment) to be larger than life, proto-religious even.  Filming academics and scientists must be as difficult as working with kids or animals.  They just never do what you want them to do.

The South Pole is stunningly beautiful even as it begins to melt before our eyes.  The people who come there seem to appreciate this drama though they are often quite stoic in how they respond to things that would vex a normal person.  It is a harsh environment and the people there know how to survive.  It is an odd mix of personalities.  As one worker amusingly states, "Everyone not tied down, falls to the bottom of the planet."  As Herzog meets them one by one he  creates portraits of these people by asking them unusual questions and then letting the camera continue to run far after the question has been answered.  In the spaces between the dialogue, the camera captures the essence of who they are and we laugh at them at times because they can be downright goofy.  At other moments we appreciate how incredibly interesting and soulful they are, and we are grateful to have audience with them.

In the bleak shadow of global warming the appropriate balance for this film appears to be one part inquisitiveness, one part humor, and one part resignation to our own impending demise.  We are the modern day dinosaurs.  Herzog overtly states that most scientists here feel there is no hope for the human race.  We are beginning the slow march toward the end.  But it's good to know that in the shadow of our own demise we can still appreciate factiods about homosexual penguins.  We can nod as we observe the thin line between the behaviors of animals and those of ourselves.  We can glory in the radiance of natural light as we look up from the ocean's bottom and glare through a melting ice shield.  We can appreciate the people who work in this environment.  We can learn from the fact that among these blue collar workers and scientists, global warming is not "subject to further study".  It is a fact.  And that "factiod" is coming to get us.  We had better enjoy the beauty and grandeur of these changes as they happen because otherwise, there isn't a whole lot of other pleasantness comin' our way.

I enjoyed the experience of watching this film and I genuinely get the feeling Herzog enjoyed making it as well.