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To adapt a work of classical literature is just about the most unnecessary burden to which writers and directors force themselves to succumb. One can only wonder what John Huston was thinking when he tackled Moby-Dick. In his decision to simply ignore the encyclopedic chapters concerning the anatomy of the whale, he focused solely on the bare structure of the novel, which obscured Melville’s themes and vision. It became a story about a bunch of lunatics on a boat. Poets, in general, have been absolved from this bastardization. Every once in a while Homer receives a disservice or a director throws a poem up on the screen as an epitaph, but overall the works of the great poets are safe from the murky waters of film adaptation. So when Jane Campion became attracted to doomed Romantic poet John Keats, her only choice was to tell the story of his life. Unfortunately, Bright Star is not about Keats (Ben Whishaw), but instead focus on his love interest, Fanny Brawne.

Brawne (Abby Cornish) is an early nineteenth century socialite. She dances with all the men and makes her own clothes, which are of a colorful, if not flattering, austerity. In talking about Brawne, the word ‘bright’ can only be used to refer to luminosity, not intelligence. She can’t even properly lie about her literary pursuits. When talking to Keats’s boorish friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider), Brawne claims to have read all of The Canterbury Tales, The Odyssey, and Paradise Lost over the previous week. Falling in love with a Romantic poet is perhaps her most ill conceived notion of all. The lifespan of the Romantic poet was considerably short and they are not the most desired lovers. On one end of the spectrum you have Lord Byron, whose principle character, Don Juan, parallels his own lecherous sexual conquests. On the other end is John Keats, who is alluded to as a possible virgin. Keats confides to Brawne that women, including his mother, confuse him. By the time of his death at twenty-five, despite being engaged to Brawne, their relationship never progresses past a kiss. But what a kiss! The first kiss between Brawne and Keats is a moment of high erotic tension and power. They’re lying on the grass, Brawne is elevated above Keats, and their lips just connect. While not quite matching the moment in Campion’s The Piano when Harvey Kietel fingers a hole in Holly Hunter’s stocking, this bit of eroticism in Bright Star is still enough to shame most other films in their gratuitous, un-erotic use of nudity, which desensitizes our perception and appreciation for true pleasure and beauty.

The film succeeds the most during the limited portion of when the two are happily in love. Campion provides her boldest images in this sequence. Keats lying on top of a tree bathing in sunlight; a room full of butterflies that creates a poetic sense of elation. However, most of the film deals with Brawne in despair and Keats dying. Individual moments of story evaporate and the second half of the film becomes an exercise in tone, creating an indistinguishable narrative of utter despondency. The film, which promises to be an authentic recreation of love, becomes one of dread and loss, which is fine, and in doing so more or less succeeds, but it sacrifices narrative. Nothing notable happens in the second half of the film outside of some minor character development of Charles Brown. Keats is absent from the second half too, so we’re stuck with Cornish, who’s emotional range is limited to sad eyes and hysterics. Cornish needs Whishaw’s Keats to stabilize the film. Whishaw plays Keats not as any person or individual, but as the human embodiment of Keats’s poetry. He longingly looks into the sky, fails to express himself in simple emotions, and has the countenance of a dying puppy. In one scene, Keats, because of his lack of funds and resources, explains to Brawne that they cannot marry. Cornish’s crying reaches levels of histrionics, but the scene works because of the amount of thought behind Whishaw’s heartbroken eyes. Later, after Keats dies off-screen and Brawne is informed of her lover’s demise, she screams, and King Kong is nowhere to be found.

-Jason Bardin

With The Cove, the liberal agenda documentary has officially become a subgenre. It can often be overbearing to watch film after film that documents what’s wrong with the world, while telling me that I need to help fix it. Al Gore said I need to save the planet and Food, Inc. advised me to be more cautious in the supermarket. Meanwhile, Michael Moore keeps yelling in my face. Louie Psihoyos, the director and star of The Cove, separates the world into two kinds of people: activists and inactivists. That’s a rather strong and controversial distinction, but Psihoyos has earned the right to be obstinate. His film documents how he organized a group of specialists to film the mass slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, which is an annual occurrence.

The film’s main protgonist is Ric O’Barry. When we first meet him he appears a little paranoid: a man not to be trusted. He’s wearing a doctor’s mask on his face so as not to be detected by the local authorities in Taiji. From this initial impression, I developed an immediate cynical response to O’Barry as just another crazy left-wing lunatic. Later, when Taiji’s chief of police is tailing O’Barry’s van, my cynicism dissipated. As the film progresses, and we learn who O’Barry is and what he stands for, it becomes evident that O’Barry is brave for even being near Taiji and that his paranoia is justified, and perhaps too mild for his own safety. The trouble is that we don’t get enough of O’Barry. Here is a truly fascinating man. He trained the dolphins for the original Flipper, including his favorite, Cathy. However, he came to realize that it is cruel to harvest dolphins for entertainment, by manipulating them as slaves. He feels deep regret for having taken part in popularizing this form of punishment. He also keeps mentioning, in some sort of disgusting, ironic glee, that if he weren’t an activist out to save Dolphins, he could easily be making millions of dollars by capturing them.

What Psihoyos does get from O’Barry is a direct challenge to Aristotle. O’Barry insists that Cathy willingly committed suicide. He claims that dolphins are cursed with the appearance of always smiling so that we cannot detect their inner pain. The film makes a case that dolphins are potentially smarter than humans. They actively engage in fun and entertainment, understand sign language, and communicate with each other. This depiction of dolphins as being self-aware provides a significant level of empathy that contributes to the overall impact of the entire film.

Unfortunately, Psihoyos is not interested in a deep exploration of O’Barry’s inner psyche and life philosophy. He merely skims the surface of a complex human life. I believe that an opportunity has been missed. In the hands of a great documentarian like Errol Morris, O’Barry would become a film subject to rival the likes of Robert Crumb and Robert S. McNamara, providing a deep meditation on the human experience. Instead Psihoyos makes the same error as This Film Is Not Yet Rated. He centers the film on how their information was obtained. Just as This Film Is Not Yet Rated became more of a private detective procedural than an examination of the MPAA, The Cove settles for being a nighttime, espionage thriller. It’s a well done thriller, but it dilutes the purpose and distracts from important, and frankly more interesting, issues involving mercury content and Japan’s bribing of third world countries. To compliment the tone of a thriller, Psiyohos provides a standard, manipulative score, which both hypes the moments of suspense, and attempts to create tears out of the quiet, gentle passages. Ideally, the film doesn’t need a score at all. The images speak for themselves and what we lose are the sounds of nature. Using the theme song to Flipper proves to be an exquisite musical choice, as the more we hear it, the more grotesque and soulless that little melody becomes. But then Psihoyos uses “Smile” in a similar way. It’s not appropriate to potentially link Chaplin’s life affirming tune with the image of slaughtered dolphins. On the other hand, the use of David Bowie’s “Heroes” serves as the perfect note to end the film.

What makes The Cove special, transcending past the likes of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 451 is the image of the slaughter. It’s a shocking, despairing scene: the fulfillment of God’s first plague on Egypt. A bold and striking depiction of the carnality of man. An almost unbearable spectacle, only made palatable by Ric O’Barry’s following coup, which represents hope, triumph and personal reassurance in the civility of the human race.

-Jason Bardin

Sometimes I think that I should take it easy on this type of movie, since it’s the type that people say is “ambitious” or “going for something.”  But instead I’m starting to think that I should be especially hard on a comedy about souls that fails to say something of its own about the soul, to criticize people who try, or at least to be consistently funny.  Even if an audience member were totally unaware that he was attending a movie about souls, opening the movie with a quote from Descartes confirms that this is indeed a highly intellectual production.  It’s a story about a distraught, middle-aged intellectual actor who (Paul Giamatti, playing himself for no good reason that I’m aware of), through a creative conceit of the movie, involves himself with a company that allows him to trade his soul for that of a Russian poet so as to better play Uncle Vanya (Descartes isn’t enough—we need Chekhov too).    No matter whose soul he has, Giamatti takes long walks alone on the Coney Island boardwalk with red bleary eyes.  Don’t be deceived by the intellectual trappings-this movie is severely lacking in character, imagery, and plot, with the exception of a few fun moments, is nearly worthless.

Paul Giamatti has a wife (Emily Watson), but all we know about her is that she shares a bed with him and is at least somewhat concerned with his well-being.  Watson’s talents are completely wasted—the material written for her throughout this entire screenplay doesn’t allow her to do a fraction of what she was given in her small role in Synecdoche, New York.  Nina (Dina Korzun) is called a “mule” because her job is to serve as a host for souls and smuggle them from Russia to the U.S.  For a woman who has experienced so many souls, she has a shocking lack of insight into the human condition, and the most interesting thing she does is put little stickers on her fingers so that she can get past a bioscan at customs.  Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) runs the soul-swapping business and gets in a few good lines, but he doesn’t leave much of an impression in your mind when he’s not in a scene or after the movie is over.  Oleg (Boris Kievsky) is the leader of the Russian smuggling business, and his wife Sveta (Katheryn Winnick) is a star in Russian soaps.  Both behave exactly as you’d expect them to.

Especially given the ample creative opportunities granted by a script that deals with souls, the movie’s visuals fail to hold the viewer’s interest.  When she wants to get emotion out of the camera, director Sophie Barthes rapidly brings it out of focus and then back into focus.  Getting your soul sucked out looks an awful lot like getting an MRI.  When we do get a brief glimpse at Giamatti’s inner soul, all we get are some images of mother and child and strange, powdered white creepy-looking people.  I had no emotional or intellectual response to these images to speak of.  If you did, please comment and tell me what I was missing.

The plot is as follows: Giamatti’s soul is stolen and taken to Russia, and then he goes to Russia and retrieves it.  That’s all there is to it.  While movies can certainly succeed without intricate plots, this one drags horribly.  Still, this movie had its moments.

A fine short could have been made out of Giamatti’s first scene with Dr. Flintstein and his performance of Vanya while soulless.  Gags and one-liners give these scenes a zaniness that the rest of the movie lacks.  Jokes include a soul that looks like a chickpea, two lovers who are excited that their souls will be stored together, fear of a soul being sent to New Jersey for storage, and the ridiculous contrasts between performances of Vanya with and without various souls.  While I think you’d enjoy watching this short if it is ever made, this handful of scenes cannot hold up the rest.

-Robert Henderson

Ang Lee’s latest film is a bit of a departure from his past body of work.  The director of an eclectic mix of tragedies (i.e. The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Brokeback Mountain) has opted to make a light comedy based on Elliot Tiber’s memoir, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert and a Life.  Lee’s abridged title removes “a true story of a riot, a concert and a life;” this seems appropriate considering how screenwriter James Schamus has managed to glaze over all three of these pieces to what might have potentially been a very impactful story.

The year is 1969, and Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin) is trying to help his Jewish parents, Jake and Sonia (Henry Goodman & Imelda Staunton) save their dilapidated Catskill motel from being foreclosed.  Jake and Sonia clomp around their property with a disdain for the lifestyle they have chosen to lead.  They both hate their business, and there’s never any clear motivation on any character’s part as to why they didn’t sell the old place years ago and make a living doing something that they both don’t utterly despise.  Then some rather uninteresting things happen, all of which laying a path for Elliot to act as a middleman in getting the Woodstock Music Festival moved to Bethel, NY.  The festival that was supposed to have a little over a hundred thousand attendees quickly has half a million.  Throughout this, we are only privy to Elliot’s experience at the festival (after all, this is based on a memoir).  The memoir is supposed to explore the complexities of leading a double life as a Greenwich Village gay-rights advocate and a straight businessman in the conservative town of Bethel.  The movie virtually ignores this entire theme, with the exception of a minor romantic subplot that has no impact on any other events in the story.

The first half of the film exists solely to establish a range of clichés.  First there are Elliot’s decidedly Jewish parents, an old married couple virtually incapable of showing any affection for anyone.  In one not particularly memorable scene Elliot’s mom extrapolates on life after potential foreclosure with the line: “And then on goes the gas!”  It’s moments like this that complete her Seinfeld-esque transformation into the archetype Jewish parent.  Next we meet Elliot’s childhood acquaintance, Billy (Emile Hirsch), the ex-Vietnam vet who has sporadic (yet somewhat comical) flashbacks.  He spouts such indelible insights as “over in Nam I’m fuckin’ normal!”  There’s also the “variety” of Bethel townspeople, who all seem to hold the same predictable opinions, and act at all times with a terribly un-endearing mob mentality.  There’s the group of cliché hippies running the festival, and their accompanying suits who seem to do little more than carry briefcases and stand in clusters.  It would be nice if the movie went on to force these varied groups to unite and hopefully learn to appreciate one another; a pity no such thing happens.  There might be a single uniting of unlikely characters alluded to, but nothing such happens on-screen.

The main issue with this film is its floundering of purpose.  It’s a movie about Woodstock that never makes it to the festival.  It’s a film about a closeted homosexual that never quite has to deal with coming out.  It’s a movie about a family learning to trust one another for profit.  It’s nearly two hours about varied groups doing nothing with any apparent variety.  Essentially, this movie is about an incredible event, told in a painfully un-incredible way.

It’s a given that any film about the 1969 Woodstock Festival is going to take a lot from the definitive film account of the festival, Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary, Woodstock.  Where Taking Woodstock tries to be about the impact of the festival on one person and his direct acquaintances, Woodstock is a direct account of the festival itself.  Ang Lee has done homage to this nearly 40-year-old film foremost in his cinematography.  While Wadleigh used split screen as a means to emphasize the diverse experiences all happening simultaneously at the festival, Lee has opted for this “multi-ring circus” concept instead as a mean of convoluting the point of view of his lead character.  Woodstock had multiple cameramen shooting multiple actions from multiple angles, therefore split-screens make absolute sense.  Taking Woodstock is about a single person’s perspective, yet split screens persist, seemingly giving Elliot several consciousnesses, all gawking at different things simultaneously.

Lee also has stuck in a few recreations of specific events depicted by Wadleigh.  Sometimes he is just content to show a recognizable image in the background (i.e. a nun giving a piece sign to a cameraman).  These moments aren’t obtrusive, and act as fun “easter eggs” for those familiar with the 1970 film.  There are other times, however, where Lee takes a piece of Wadleigh’s imagery, and attempts to inject additional meaning into it by having a character explain its personal significance.  Before Billy slides down the famous muddy hill, he explains to Elliot how this hill has been a reoccurring object in his life.  His explanation coupled with his proclamation, “I love this hill!” seem to devalue all of the other attendees similar enjoyment of said hill.  This moment isn’t one about sharing an experience with likeminded people— it has been debased so that only Billy seems to have a reason to feel something.  These isolating moments fall one after another, culminating in Elliot’s acid trip in the back of a stranger’s van.  Elliot never bonds with his fellow trippers, or any other specific people.  He exists as a narrator that doesn’t participate in the grand point of the festival.  The emphasis of Woodstock has ceased to be one of togetherness; Lee has ignored the ultimate point of the festival and instead made a movie about vague personal growth.

-Paul Brinnel