The moment Bay area film fiends have been anxiously awaiting is finally here. Madstone Theatres is open for business.
Unless you've been hunkered down in that cave next to Osama's for the past few months, you've probably heard all about Madstone and its master plan. Madstone has a brand new Tampa venue, located in the same spot that formerly housed AMC's Old Hyde Park 7, and has promised great things — from innovative programs and festivals, to wine tastings and discussion groups, to a comfortable spot to simply hang out.
And then there are the films themselves.
Madstone is all about the movies. First and foremost, it's dedicated to presenting the very best in independent, foreign and classic films, but the company isn't snobby about it. The theater's bookers love to mix it up, and have no problem showing mainstream Hollywood fare (that's what pays the bills, after all) as long as the movie has merit.
Don't be surprised, then, to find Clint Eastwood's surefire Oscar nominee Mystic River among the films scheduled for Madstone's opening week. Eastwood's highly visible, big budget opus will screen along with less well-known and less well-financed but equally acclaimed independent features such as Shattered Glass and Gus Van Sant's astonishing Elephant. Then there's the gangsters-get-wired saga This Thing of Ours and Sylvia, in which Gwyneth Paltrow stars as everybody's favorite depressed, schizophrenic, dead female poet, Sylvia Plath,
For the truly adventurous, there's also a French import among Madstone's initial offerings, although it's a far cry from the elegantly charming romances we often expect these days from that part of the world. In My Skin is a tough sell — a provocative study of a woman obsessed with self-mutilation — and, while we were unable to preview the film, we're recommending it (cautiously).
Directed, written by and starring Francois Ozon's frequent collaborator Marina de Van, this much talked-about film has polarized audiences and critics alike. It has also generated comparisons to the early, edgy visions of David Cronenberg and David Lynch, and earned raves from the likes of the New York Times, which called it, "As unrelenting an exploration of isolation and disassociation as Roman Polanski's Repulsion."
De Van's reportedly intense and very graphic feature debut sounds pretty scary. But it also sounds like just the sort of thing our other local art houses almost never touch — which is one more important reason for Madstone to exist.
Meanwhile, at what might be assumed to be the opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, we find Hollywood A-list director Ron Howard's The Missing, another of the films slated for Madstone's opening week. But while it's true that The Missing boasts a big budget and big name stars like Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett, it's also a perfect example of a mainstream movie that doesn't always feel like a mainstream movie.
Howard's film takes place in the Old West, and it consciously recalls classic Westerns like The Searchers, big movies about obsessive quests, family, redemption and the land. At the same time, The Missing has an intimate, distinctly anti-epic feel, with only a handful of central characters involved, and a mood that often feels tense and uncomfortably claustrophobic. In some ways, in fact, this isn't a Western at all; it's a horror story.
Blanchett is in typically fine form as a frontier doctor in crisis when a band of outlaws kills her lover and kidnaps her teenaged daughter. With no one else to turn to, she enlists the help of her estranged father (Jones) — a conflicted and tragically flawed white man who's spent most of his life living with Indians — and together they ride off in search of the stolen child.
As in so many classic Westerns, The Missing takes place in a world where order barely holds off chaos, a concept that seems more salient than ever, post-9-11. Howard's characters wade in shades of gray, but even the most problematic of them, Jones' faux savage, makes mistakes, pays for them, and is eventually offered the possibility of redemption. Ultimately, The Missing is a movie after George Bush's heart, with little room for moral relativism or irony. The film not only admits to the existence of Evil, but gives us a humdinger example in the form of Blanchett's and Jones' nemesis, a scarred Apache witchdoctor who sells young girls to the highest bidder, causes blood to pour from men's eyes, and makes Hannibal Lector look positively cuddly.
Howard has some good, nasty fun weaving elements of supernatural horror throughout the film, and the unforgiving, anything-goes terrain of America's 19th-century frontier provides a surprisingly effective setting for it all. At the same time, The Missing remains a Western, first and foremost, with everything from James Horner's musical score to Salvatore Totino's exquisite cinematography evoking the form. That endless American landscape is pure John Ford meets Ansel Adams, both stark and majestic, and Jones' creased and cratered face seems like just one more natural extension of it.
Probably the most exciting addition to Madstone's opening slate is Gus Van Sant's Elephant, a brilliant film that will also surely divide audiences down the middle. Like Steven Soderbergh, Van Sant is a filmmaker currently experiencing something of a creative rebirth, and one who has proven himself adept at working both sides of the cinematic fence. He's certainly comfortable enough grazing on the mainstream side (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester), although his heart really seems to reside on the side without a name (My Own Private Idaho, the improvisational, nearly abstract Gerry, and now Elephant). That makes Van Sant a natural for Madstone.
Elephant is Van Sant's very personal reaction to Columbine and the rash of high school shooting sprees that devastated America in the late '90s. The film was shot in a real high school (a recently decommissioned school in Portland), and features an ensemble of ordinary teenagers with no previous acting experience, almost all of whom seem more or less to be playing versions of their real-life selves. Elephant was shot in 20 days, with Van Sant collaborating closely with his nonprofessional cast, and making use of documentary and improvisational techniques rather than an actual script. The results are remarkable.
The bulk of the film unfolds as a series of seemingly inconsequential and random moments, as the camera follows various high school students through the events (mostly nonevents, really) of their day. A bunch of kids throw footballs and run laps, a boy snaps photos of a couple holding hands, a geeky girl is embarrassed to wear shorts in gym class, a group of friends tease each other in the cafeteria. The camera executes a series of long, ingeniously choreographed (and therefore invisible) tracking shots, elegantly gliding through the halls and grounds of the school, eavesdropping on conversations, observing as a willowy girl plants a discrete kiss on the cheek of a boy standing by himself and crying.
The lush strains of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata play over most of this, emphasizing the eloquence and poignancy of even the most banal and awkward of these events. It becomes clear that what we're watching are moments inexplicably frozen in time, and that the film itself is nothing less than an elegy for lives lived in ways large and (mostly) small, and about to be lost.
The elephant of the title refers to the looming shape of violence, of course, the 500-ton presence in the room that just can't be ignored, though we all do our best to do just that. The storm clouds in Elephant figuratively and literally begin rolling in at about the midpoint, as the movie shows us the kids who are also the killers, and begins doubling-back on itself, replaying certain moments from alternate angles, offering different perspectives. The bloody apocalypse we're expecting does finally materialize, in spades, and our accumulated intimacy with the victims and victimizers alike makes it all the more horrifying.
Preaching is the last thing on Van Sant's mind, but Elephant does provide a few clues as far as connecting the dots here. At one point, we see the young killers glued to a documentary on Nazi propaganda, while another sequence shows one of the kids cutting short a stint at the piano (he's playing Beethoven, naturally) in order to focus on a video game with a particularly bloody body count. Scariest of all, though, is the ease and banality of the transaction as the doorbell rings and the boys sign off for their newly arrived UPS parcel containing a shiny, brand new rifle. The camera simply stands to the side and observes as the happy youngsters take their new toys out to the garage for a little target practice/playtime, and the moment says more than all the movies Michael Moore will ever make in his life.
Some, like myself, will see Van Sant's film as a thought-provoking and almost unbearably lyrical meditation on violence in general, and the young eating the young in specific. Others will undoubtedly be bored to tears by the movie's untraditional and rigorously understated approach to such monumental events ("Nothing happened until the last 20 minutes," I can already hear the crybabies whining).
In any event, it's a film that demands to be seen and demands to be talked about. And maybe we should all offer a little silent prayer this week to the gods of cinema, that there's now a place like Madstone that allows us to do just that.
Contact Film Critic Lance Goldenberg at 813-248-8888, ext. 157, or lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com.
This article appears in Nov 27 – Dec 3, 2003.