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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

Gaze up at a bright moon, and then follow a line of moonbeams down from the sky, away from the horizon, across a lake, and into the enraptured blue eyes of Sérephine (Yolande Moreau), who is digging up muck with her bare hands. From this first shot of the film it’s hard to tell whether the plump middle-aged woman has found something or is still looking, if she’s in agony or in ecstasy.  Next, watch the red and orange glistening sunrise on the Gothic cathedral that in the summer of 1914 still towers over the French town of Senlis, but has lost its spiritual power over the citizens—except for Sérephine, who quietly and joyously sings a hymn and burns an offering.  It has been less than two minutes, and you already have peered into Sérephine’s soul.

Sérephine (based on painter Sérephine Louis) keeps a careful guard over her inner life so that she can work as a maid in a boarding house without calling attention to herself.  Her biggest complaint about her job isn’t that it’s strenuous and demeaning, but that it takes up so much of her time.  She wants more time to climb trees, pick flowers, and most of all, to paint frantically late into the night. Wilhelm Ulde (Ulrich Tukur, also based on a real person), who stays in the boarding house, also tries to keep a low profile so that he can have some peace.  Parisian socialites fawn over him because he’s the art dealer who discovered Rousseau and Picasso.  Less sophisticated folks taunt him because he’s German.  Germans won’t accept him for being gay.

Sérephine and Wilhelm can fool everyone but each other. When they first meet, Wilhelm takes a very brief glance at Sérephine’s ankle, almost as if he were aroused by her.  Willhelm tries to get to know Sérephine better and she also seems curious about him, but the social barriers are too strong to overcome.  He tries to make conversation, and she keeps answers as short and obedient as she can.  When he finds out that she’s an artist and sees her work, he thinks that she can become a famous artist in the “naïve” untrained style.  He somehow knows that her paintings of plants have been inspired by past misfortune.  He grows upset with her in a very master of the house kind of way, and sits her down for a lecture.  When he realizes that he is quite literally talking down to her, he bends down, looks up at her, and continuous to talk condescendingly.

Both the boarding house and the woods lack electric light, and there seems to be a clue in every corner, behind every shadow.  As she cleans Wilhelm’s room, Sérephine uncovers the books, papers, and drawings that mark him as at least an intellectual, if not an artist.  While Wilhelm doesn’t hug and sing to trees like Sérephine, he takes a stroll, and finds her bathing in a stream deep in the woods.  These silent moments of discovery, are when the relationship between Wilhelm and Sérephine is at its best.  As a side note, I hate how the word “relationship” has become so heavily associated with romantic relationships.  A romantic relationship ought to be called a “romance”—it sounds much nicer, and it frees up the word “relationship” to describe what there is between Wilhelm and Sérephine, who are very close to each other but are neither friends nor lovers.

Sérephine is a lot of what I wish I could be.  She is simple but wise.  She is a steadfast believer in the God of the Bible.  She is in touch with nature.  And most of all, she is an artistic genius.  As Wilhelm becomes her patron and moves her to Paris, part of me wants her to continue scrubbing floors in obscurity, as if the purpose of her life were to live out my bourgeois fantasy of the starving artist’s life.  This is an unfair expectation.

As A.O. Scott points out in his review, a story about an artist’s response to success runs a huge risk of not saying anything new, but this one does.  Sérephine does have her time in the spotlight, but it’s the type of short stint that makes someone hungry for more attention but only able to get it from oneself.  At first I thought that Sérephine’s newfound self-love was overemphasized.  Her quiet, charming hymns sung to herself become booming off-key oratorios that everyone in the house can hear.  Her thankfulness to God for inspiring her becomes a love of herself for being the inspired one.  She stops making her own paints.  She begins to strike poses, looking the way she thinks an artist should look.  She wants a big house, fancy things, and servants of her own.  Her transformation may seem too extreme to be believable, but this is only because she hasn’t completely lost herself.  When compared with the arrogance expressed by Wilhelm and his protégé/lover Helmut (Nico Rogner), we find that Sérephine’s arrogance lacks nuance because it’s unnatural for her.  No matter how much she changes, she can never get to the point at which she can get lost in it and start spewing nonsense like Wilhelm’s “I sell to collect.  I don’t collect to sell” or Helmut’s “I don’t care about fame—that’s for after I’m dead.”  But neither can she return to her naïveté.  I want to say that she’s been corrupted but I can’t.  Wilhelm may be a bit full of himself, but he treats her very well, providing her with whatever she needs both for her work and for her personal satisfaction.  She may not have been hurt or corrupted, but she has been put into a situation in which there’s nowhere for her to bare her soul with that ambiguous stare.

-Robert Henderson

Given how some critics have compared this satire of the lead-up to the Iraq war with Dr. Strangelove, perhaps it should have been subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the F-Bomb.”  In the post-Soviet world, State Department officials have to deal with a new kind of munitions gap—the British are winning the four-letter arms race.  Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other powers that be lurk far off-screen pulling the strings, already having decided that America and Britain would march to war.  The task of legitimizing this decision on both sides of the pond is left to incompetent bureaucrats and their baby-faced overachieving twenty-something assistants.  The rules of the game are simple: advance your career as much as possible by speaking the party line in the right time, the right place, and the right way.  If you have difficulty doing this, blame other people and barrage them with witty arrangements of expletives.

The camera work must have been entrusted to a hyperactive child, and, at least for the first few minutes (which feel much longer), the audience is treated like one.  Mommy, is this the zoom button?  Wow!  I can zoom in, and out, and back in again, and really fast!  Gee, that man (British minister of international development Simon Foster, played by Tom Hollander) sure looks angry.  I’ll follow him back to his office!  It’s so boring holding the camera in one place.  I can look from this side, and that side, and that other side too!  This other man in the office (civil servant Malcom Tucker, played by Peter Capaldi) says a lot of naughty things that make me laugh really loud!  In a sense it’s a gift to be able to laugh loudly whenever any combination of a certain set of seven words is said.  Like other natural gifts, it’s much more considerate to enjoy it at home than in the movie theater.

The lingua franca between the two countries divided by a common language seems to be the one-liner.  Some are clever, some are mediocre, and many are threats of sexual violence delivered in a Scottish accent.  Delivering the one-liners is a small army of one-dimensional characters.  Unfortunately, none of them is played by Peter Sellers.  Simon was born with his foot in his mouth, and his young press secretary Toby (Chris Addison) is charged with fixing his reputation during their trip to Washington.  But Toby’s American old flame Liza (Anna Chlumsky) lives in Washington, and he’s under the delusion that “what happens in Washington stays in Washington.”  Liza seems to be the only person in the State Department who thinks the war’s a bad idea, who convinces her helpless boss Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) to advocate for peace, along with a fat, sensitive general (James Gandolfini) whose war-mongering rival is Linton Barwick (David Rasche), whose aide is—enough already, if you want to know who he is, go to IMDB.  And there’s a prim and proper Oxbridge man (Chris Langham) and an attractive woman (Gina Mckee) thrown into bit roles just for kicks.

The movie tries as hard as it can to be zany with its quirky characters, speed-talking, quick takes, and calm, classical score that brings these features into relief.  Alas, fast-talking alone does not zaniness make.  The dialogue between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night is both razor-sharp and hilarious, but it wouldn’t work without images like the hitchhiking and the destruction of the walls of Jericho.  In The Loop gives us far too few memorable images, but they’re fairly well done.  The fat general calculating troop concentrations in a little girl’s room using her oversized pink talking calculator.  The Capitol Hill staffers burning off steam in a mosh pit.  The dissatisfied constituents in an ancient gym and a collapsing brick wall which, of all possible things, brings about Simon’s political ruin.

This movie falls short even in its strong suit of one-liners.  Dr. Strangelove gives us the timeless exclamation of, “You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!”  When the Meditation Room at U.N. Headquarters is overtaken by profanity warfare, the British ambassador briefly spoils the fun by reminding the belligerents of the room’s intended purpose.  But then Malcom’s filthy mouth opens yet again.

-Robert Henderson

Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) is pathetic at best, and downright self-absorbed at worst. In these tough economic times, he’s naïve enough not to realize that his orchestra can’t continue playing for near-empty houses, and yet hard-headed enough to sell his cello and abandon doing what he loves. Like thousands of unemployed people, he returns to his hometown, and responds to a “help wanted, great pay, no experience needed” ad in the newspaper. But instead of working hard at a gritty job and being thankful just for making ends meet, he is greeted as the Chosen One by master undertaker Ikuei Sasaki (Tsutomo Yamakazi), whose idea of job training is providing extra pay and flattery. Daigo’s new job as a ritual caretaker for dead bodies gives him such a spiritual revelation that nothing else matters to him anymore, including his cello career, his wife (who’s carrying his future child), and his anguish toward the father who left him. Daigo has lots of problems in his life, but he’s so apathetic and self-absorbed that he doesn’t let any of them actually bother him, and they wind up fixing themselves anyway.

In a long montage of Daigo passionately playing a simple song from his childhood, we get the impression that he has discovered powerful new emotions within himself, and plays more passionately. Maybe he has had some sort of epiphany that’s allowed him to play better. He values this sense of fulfillment so much that he’d be willing to lose his wife over it.

While playing the grandest of symphonies before the thinnest of audiences, Daigo at least could have paid attention to the lyrics. In the second verse of the “Ode to Joy” (in internet-quality translation), Schiller writes: “Whoever has created An abiding friendship, Or has won A true and loving wife, All who can call at least one soul theirs, Join our song of praise; But those who cannot must creep tearfully Away from our circle.” Daigo loves his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) dearly, as long as she does everything to accommodate his needs and he doesn’t have to go out of his way to accommodate hers. After his first tough day on the job, I’d expect Daigo to tell Mika something on the order of, “this job is tough but rewarding; I’m happy that we’re making it here in these tough times; working with dead people makes me appreciate you just for being alive, etc.” A loving silence could also convey such emotion. We do get a silence, but of the “I had a hard day—let’s have some quick sex in the kitchen” variety. To Daigo, his “true and loving wife” (carrying his unborn child) is nice to have around, but she is expendable. The pain and yearning for his father causes a little more of a problem, but nothing that a few pebbles can’t solve. Overall, Daigo pursues his mystical journey at the expense of his family.

Which brings us to Ikuei Yamakazi, the carnivorous cleric. I can understand having pride in one’s job and finding meaning in it even if it has a social stigma attached to it. But only an arrogant blowfish would interpret a reply to a “help wanted—good pay, no experience needed” ad as a sign of fate. Even the secretary (who merely answers phones, and does not engage in any of the holy rites) does this not as a decent 9-5 gig with some overtime, but because she also buys into the hokus-pokus. While I was certainly moved by how Daigo learns how to respect the dead and comfort the living (who are the only ones who really matter anyway), we only get to see the most extraordinary of cases, and never business as usual. Whenever the Chosen One performs a funeral, he either turns frowns into smiles and reconciles deep family conflicts or causes anguish by using the wrong kind of eyeliner. These types of extreme moments come in any career, but it is the less dramatic moments that are more interesting and more revealing. Take the office sequences of Ikiru, a great Japanese film that actually has something to say about death, as case in point. And by the way, the off-key song of a monophonic amateur can convey a lot more emotion than the choreographed song of the stereophonic professional.

-Robert Henderson

At first I thought that grotesque images, evil corporations, and harms to people’s and the planet’s health, perhaps with some high-fructose corn syrup added for good measure, would make the perfect ingredients for a medium liberal documentary with a hint of self-righteousness.  Instead, I had the rare feeling of being only somewhat manipulated, and thought that the film’s arguments were so well-done that no matter how long I ruminated on them, I couldn’t refute them. 

The documentary focuses its case on health and safety issues, and keeps raw emotion and nostalgia to a minimum.  While not everyone may think it cruel to grow chickens with breasts that are too large, not enough room to breathe, and often no sunlight, nearly everyone can agree that it’s cruel to ourselves to allow infected and unhealthy food to dominate our supermarkets.  Even when the mother of a child who died of  e. coli is shown, it’s not meant to generate easy tears, but to point out how much of an outrage it is for a developed nation to allow this to happen.  The problem is that in this country we are quite literally eating shit, and don’t care as long as we get to taste the sugar, salt, and fat that our species has always craved. 

How tempting it would be to pander to the liberal documentary crowd and demonize the big businesses that run the mass-poisoning operations.  The film does succumb to the usual temptation of presenting a few titles that say “we repeatedly contacted so and so but he didn’t respond” as fair representation of the corporate perspective.  I desperately want to know if as much effort was made to get an industry representative to give an interview as was put into finding the one farmer out of hundreds who agreed to show the inside of her chicken house.  But the film isn’t trying to make the case that corporations and technology are inherently evil, just that they shouldn’t trample individual freedom.  Monsanto can go ahead and produce its genetically engineered pesticide-resistant seed if that’s what sells.  What it should not be allowed to do is force its will upon farmers through corporate secret police and gag laws.  There’s nothing wrong with cheap fast food.  The problem is that it is made artificially cheap by subsidies written by those who benefit from them.  As a result, a poor, hardworking family has no choice but to eat themselves sick on the only food that they can afford.  If we are open-minded enough to criticize corporations for their actions rather than their existence, we find that Walmart (of all companies) is ready for change.  It is perfectly willing to buy all sorts of organic products—as long as they sell.

We then get the message that up until seeing the movie I had always thought was a bunch of hippiesh kumba ya.  YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD!  YOUR PURCHASES AT THE SUPERMARKET ARE VOTES!  Change our society so that health and environmental costs are reflected in food prices, making organic food much more competitive!  What’s stopping us from bringing back reforms as comprehensive as those made after the publication of The Jungle!  Hopelessly optimistic?  Perhaps.  But it’s much better than turning a blind eye and believing that your food is “natural” and “farm fresh” without acknowledging the realities of how it was made.

If you enjoyed the way Food, Inc. makes its case, I would highly recommend that you watch The Plow That Broke The Plains and The River, two short documentaries produced in 1936 as part of the New Deal that show how the environment was being destroyed by forces similar to those discussed in Food Inc., and how it was being re-built thanks to the efforts of the CCC and WPA.  Amazingly, all three films use similar visual contrasts between the popular fantasy of simple living and the reality of irresponsible use of technology (in both farms and factories) and the destruction it brings.  It becomes fascinating to compare the way similar documentaries were made in different eras, especially the treatment of issues of race and class and the sharp contrast between the 1930’s message of “together we are building huge dams and planting vast forests” and the 2000’s message of “you have the power to help change the world every time you buy groceries.”  I was fortunate enough to get a chance to see both The Plow That Broke The Plains and The River in a theater.  The two are available together on DVD, but since they’re in the public domain, you can also watch them for free at the Internet Archive (click on the names of films to get there).  If you do decide to watch one or both, be patient.  At first they may seem like hokey overdoses of Americana, but by the end you will have seen environmental documentaries with a persuasiveness that Al Gore can only dream of.

-Robert Henderson

It’s sometimes the mark of a masterpiece to set up a fascinating plot and group of characters at the beginning of a film, only to throw them away for something even better.  The first half hour of Psycho could’ve been continued to make a good (who knows, maybe even great) movie about an alienated office worker on the run with $40,000.  Synecdoche, New York could’ve been a good family drama about a sick theater director with weird poop and a failing marriage whose life was turned around by Fluorostatin TR.  Hitchcock and Kaufman took huge risks by shifting their plots so drastically, and produced masterpieces.  Julia, however, takes a fatally wrong turn when it changes from an honest and extremely well-acted story of addiction to a drawn-out and clichéd thriller.

I want to know more about the daily lives of the destructively alcoholic Julia (Tilda Swinton), her mysterious neighbor Elena (Kate del Castillo), her saintly ex-boyfriend Mitch (Saul Rubinek), and Elena’s observant but still childish son Tom (Aidan Gould).  The performances of Swinton and the supporting players were so strong that there is no doubt in my mind that they were capable of making a movie as gritty and honest as The Wrestler, giving us a real window into Julia’s world rather than a cursory glance.

What is accomplished by denying us true character development, and instead taking the movie into the realm of the implausible?  We see a few cycles of Julia’s drinking binges and mornings after, one scene in her office, and one scene at an AA meeting, a few scenes with Elena, and a few scenes with Mitch, but this isn’t enough to really get a good idea of who any of them really are. I suppose you could make the case that we learn about Julia from when she takes off her mask, where she points her gun, and how she chooses to deal with the suitcase full of money.  But that’s the Julia who inhabits an implausibly exciting world, not the Julia who could be living down the street.  At first I thought that Elena would remain mysterious throughout much of the movie, and that I’d have the joy of trying to piece together who she really is.  Unfortunately, all of the mystery was resolved within fifteen minutes.  I’d rather see more of Mitch trying to save Julia by warning her in his living room than by negotiating with her in Tijuana.

As slow and clichéd as the last hour and a half (or so) of the movie becomes, a few parts of it made it a little closer to bearable than it otherwise would’ve been.  In a very impressive performance, Gould captures perfectly the phase of childhood when a kid understands what’s going on around him, but nonetheless is still a kid.  Though the whole movie collapses along with the border fence, that shot was an especially effective transition.  It was also nice to be reminded of Greed when the film took us to the California desert.  You know what? Why not just watch that instead?  Not only does it allow its characters to develop, but if you like gun-pointing and lots of cash, you can find them there too.  How horribly ironic it is that so many of the best parts of Greed were cut, and so many of the worst parts of Julia were allowed to stay.

-Robert Henderson

At first I didn’t think that I could be sympathetic toward the plight of three wealthy siblings who have the onerous chore of deciding how to dispose of their extensive inheritance, which consists of a house and art collection that once belonged to a successful artist. While most of us leave behind heaps of junk headed straight to a garbage dump, nearly everything that Hélène Berthier (Edith Scob) leaves behind, down to the smallest vase, has a potential home waiting for it in a museum or private collection. The sensible thing to do would be to donate a few major pieces to museums for posterity’s sake, keep a few personal items for sentimental value, and sell the rest. As she anticipates her death, Hélène not only wishes, but knows that this is how things will play out. After all, people are much more motivated by economics than by art or memory.

To Hélène’s son Frédéric (Charles Berling), the inheritance isn’t just beautiful and valuable, but allows the family to remember and to re-live the house’s past summers as a Romantic oasis, where life is ruled by artistic considerations, and not economic ones. As desperately as Frédéric tries to convince the public, his family, and himself that people are not beholden to economic laws, his case is untenable. His brother Jérémie’s (Jérémie Renier) utility would be maximized by using his share of the inheritance to support his career in international business by starting a new life in China, complete with a new vacation home in Bali. While his sister Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) does have an affinity for art, she prefers the contemporary variety, and needs cash to bolster her career as a designer in New York. Even Frédéric finds that his seemingly infinite love for two paintings has a price tag associated with it.

But is it really the things themselves that are so important to Frédéric, or the activities that surround them? He can visit some of his mother’s most prized possessions at the Musée d’Orsay (which produced the film) whenever he wants, and all of the public can enjoy them with him. The problem with the museum is that it is calm to the point of lifelessness. The objects of art are behind glass, the sunlight shines unceasingly through the skylights, the tourists quietly walk through unmoved, and the music (very important in this film) is mellow. Frédéric not only wants to save the house, but he wants to prevent it from turning into a museum. It is not just the objects that make the house, but the fact that children are playing in the garden (with a frantic camera emphasizing their activity), vases are filled with flowers, and the whole family sits down to lunch together.

I was most struck by this film when I realized that it wasn’t about economics, art, or the struggle between the two. I will even be bold enough to say that the film isn’t really about memory either. The film is about how we must play our own roles in life, and how, in a Walt Whitman sense, there is a beauty and dignity to nearly every activity, as long as we do something and, as the cliché goes, are true to ourselves. From the beginning of the film, Hélène realizes that her role as a woman at the end of her life is to contemplate to herself and to get out of her children’s way. Jérémie does what a man who wants to get ahead in business and raise a family should, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We cannot condemn Adrienne for trying to advance her career and begin life with a new husband. We can only go so far in chastising Frédéric’s daughter Sylvie (Alice de Lencquesaing) for her nonconformist boyfriend, cheap liquor, pot, and bubble gum pop. After all, she is a teenager. Frédéric will never find peace until he realizes that he is a father (it was easy both for him and for the viewer to forget over the course of the film) and economist, and not an artist or art collector. He must allow himself to see that he can behave rationally without betraying his family heritage.

If, as I hope, you enjoy Summer Hours, keep on the lookout for a possible sequel dealing with Adrienne’s life in New York. It will be interesting to see what she does with her mother’s tea set.

-Robert Henderson