There's a lot more to be thankful for this Thanksgiving than just pumpkin pie, a day off work and the possibility of getting through another year without a major fight with one or more family members. The Thanksgiving season is traditionally one of the most notable times of the year for movie openings, and this year is one of the biggest and best ever. In addition to the really big guns that we all knew were coming (not to name any names, Harry Potter), there's a veritable slew of incredible smaller films slated to open this week. There's such an embarrassment of riches on this week's plate, in fact, that there's no way we could cover it all in a single column — which means that you'll have to direct your attention to our Outtakes section for reviews of Steve Martin's neo-noirish Novocaine, that aforementioned little Harry Potter thing and a few other intriguing odds and ends. In the meantime, have yourself a merry little, Harry-free Thanksgiving with one or more from the following basket of goodies.
Beginning with the very best of the lot: Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie is one of the sweetest, most life-affirming movies you'll ever see, but don't assume that means it's somehow lacking in substance. If Amelie is fluff, it's fluff raised to the level of art, a trifle gilded with something approaching genius. You may remember Jeunet as the dark visionary behind Delicatessen, City of Lost Children and the universally underrated Alien: Resurrection, but Amelie is a much brighter and more elemental confection.
Amelie wears its heart proudly on its sleeve even as it calls to mind all those glorious old Looney Tunes freak-outs where something is always happening and the screen literally vibrates with visual and verbal gags. If the film feels like a cartoon, though, then it's a cartoon of the cosmic variety — as much about fate, destiny or whatever you want to call it as anything by Kieslowski (or Tex Avery). Our plucky and quintessentially quirky heroine Amelie (played by the saucer-eyed Audrey Tautou, who actually looks like a cartoon character) spends the entire movie tempting fate by arranging good deeds and choreographing love connections for her neighbors and, eventually, herself.
As is his stylistic wont, Jeunet crams every inch of the film with marvelously composed shots of bric-a-brac and arcane doodads, lavishing equal, fetishistic attention on a kitschy garden gnome and the sensual pleasure of cracking open the crust on a well-turned creme brulee. The film, which is really as much a fairy tale as it is a cartoon, brims over with imagination and emotion, and the impossibly fetching Montemartre neighborhood setting is as much a dreamscape as it is an actual physical location.
That's been one of the main criticisms of the film, in fact (at least in France, where Amelie is so popular it's become a genuine cultural phenomenon): that the Paris it depicts is somehow too beautiful. The politically correct, hot-shot aestheticians can whine all they want about how the movie's idealized world debases the real world, but, from where I'm standing, it looks an awful lot like it's the other way around. Simply put, this is a wonderful movie, and one that makes us nostalgic for people and places we've probably never known.
There's a just-short-of-omniscient, voice-over narration that runs through much of Amelie, and there's also one in the Coen Brother's The Man Who Wasn't There. But that's about all the two films have in common — other than the nearly boundless imagination and chops possessed by each. The voice-over in the Coen's new film seems to belong to a man who's already dead (and may in fact already be), and the film itself is as inky and icy as Amelie is filled with warmth and light.
From its very title to its blackmail- and murder-laced plot, The Man Who Wasn't There is about as close to classic film noir as the Coens have ever come (Blood Simple included), albeit with a few flying saucers and Lolita-esque nymphets thrown in, just to screw with our heads. You might even say the movie is a bit of a one-note wonder, but what a note it is. Billy Bob Thornton is just about perfect as the title phantom, a milquetoast of a husband trapped in a loveless marriage (to a domineering Barbara Stanwyck clone) and a joyless job (he's a barber who dreams of being a dry-cleaner, just one of the Coen's numerous droll gags this time out). Thornton is way beyond passive here; everything happens to him — and much of it bad — but he seems incapable of reacting or registering a single, readable emotion. He's like some kind of modern sphinx, a motionless, inscrutable noir cipher, around whom whirls a crazy vortex of Coen-infused atomic particles.
The movie is probably the Coen Brothers' most visually stunning ever. Roger Deakins' black-and-white photography is lush and mesmerizing, filled with enigmatic but unforgettable imagery — hairs floating in a bathtub, the hypnotically swirling stripes on a barber's pole — that recalls the wallpaper-slowly-peeling-off-the-wall moodiness of the Coen's equally atmospheric Barton Fink. And like the title character of that earlier film, Thorton's ghostly, long-suffering barber is one of the Coens' most puzzling and deeply human characters yet. Rebounding nicely from the brightly colored ball of confusion that was O Brother Where Art Thou, the Coen Brothers have crafted one of the most intriguing and oddly contoured concoctions of their career.
The Man Who Wasn't There might have also served as an appropriate title for Richard Linklater's Waking Life, a film where our hero literally floats through time and space, and where everything that he sees and hears and does may be happening inside a dream, or maybe even in some afterlife state. Probably the headiest offering of this week's film cornucopia, for better and sometimes worse, Linklater's film is a circle dance of ideas and eccentricities, some of which eventually interconnect and some of which just drift off into the ether.
Waking Life is similar in structure (or lack thereof) to Linklater's resolutely nonlinear breakthrough Slacker, in which a stream of what amounts to talking heads basically just parade through the film, offering up a series of monologues expounding a variety of worldviews, some intellectually rigorous, some simply silly, and all distinctly skewed. What transforms Waking Life into something considerably more than Slacker or any of Linklater's other films is a revolutionary process by which the director and his team of digital artists basically turned the film's human actors into constantly mutating, elaborately animated paintings. The animation is beautifully done and not quite like anything that's been seen before. At times, it seems like some new kind of Expressionism, in that it's a remarkably effective way to give the character's abstract feelings and ideas a concrete form.
Waking Life, which might have been merely watchable or even pretentious as a live action film (anyone remember Mindwalk?) is transformed by the digital re-imaging into something more than the sum of its parts, becoming a fascinating synthesis of form and function (and a great, semi-psychedelic head trip, to boot). It's unlikely that Waking Life signals anything quite so grand as the birth of some new art form, but it's still pretty darned wonderful to watch a movie so clearly thrilled at being on the frontlines of the process of creation.
And finally, what would have been the most unusual offering in a week of unusual offerings is Cure. Its premiere in our area has been postponed, news of which came as our paper was going to press. But do go see it when it does come out — Cure is a strikingly original horror movie/art film from Japan. The setup is familiar, even generic — a dedicated young police detective becomes obsessed with a series of murders he's investigating — but Cure takes off from there into unimagined and very puzzling heights. The murders, all motiveless and apparently committed by people who can't even remember their actions, turn out to possibly be the result of hypnotic suggestions — and it just gets stranger and more compelling from there.
Cure may just be the world's first minimalist serial killer flick, and it's certainly its best. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) creates a mood of sustained tension by establishing a rigorous, oddly objective perspective, eschewing flashy, artificial style and close-ups for a deliberately paced, low-key, and refreshingly unaffected approach that amplifies the sense of deepening dread found in the movie's everyday reality. Cure is enigmatic almost to a fault, and I can't honestly claim to conclusively understand what it all means. At the same time, have I been able to get the movie out of my head since I saw it? Not a chance.
Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or by calling 813-248-8888, ext. 157.
This article appears in Nov 15-21, 2001.