It's been a real cinema-rama lately. Last night I took PLC and his brother to see Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" with Daniel Day Lewis in the title role. There is hardly a soul on the planet that doesn't realize what a fantastic actor Day-Lewis is and he lives up to all expectation by making the role of arguably the most iconic of all Americans his own. One critic implied that this is as close to anything we've seen portrayed as the "real" Lincoln that it's possible to experience short of having access to a time machine.
Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln
There are good performances all around with Tommy Lee Jones as the Abolitionist congressman Thaddeus Stevens, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and David Straithorne as Secratary of State William Seward. One critic mentioned his feeling that Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Lincoln's oldest surviving son, Robert, was given little to do in view of his own virtuosity as an actor. I can understand that notion but the film is from a script by Tony Kushner most famous, justifiably, for his play "Angels in America" and the film has used only about 10% or so of the original 500 page script. The other prominent source material for the screenplay in turn derives from historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's tome about Lincoln and his administration, "Team of Rivals". This is hours and hours of superb quality material from which to condense into a mere two-and-a-half hour film. By any standard the film is long enough to be considered worthy of an intermission in the old days- you know when I was young. Films like "Lawrence of Arabia", "Ben Hur", "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story" were routinely two-and-a-half-plus to three-hour affairs and they all had a midpoint intermission. "Lincoln" didn't seem to have any drag to me as a film but I read that The Progressive magazine's editor said it put him and his family asleep due to it's length and subject. This makes me more concerned about The Progressive- a very good magazine- than the film. Maybe I should just skip their film reviews.
"Lincoln"'s events are orchestrated toward the end of the Civil War and around the passage of the Thirteenth amendment to the United States constitution which banned slavery. PLC and I found it fascinating, filled with wonderful detail which flowed very naturally and believably with subtle touches and hints throughout. But we never, ever found the film dull or deadening.
Raymond Massey and Henry Fonda both had played Lincoln decades ago and each of them gave a lasting vision in the popular imagination about "Honest Abe", but I can state without qualification that Daniel Day-Lewis seems to give creedence to the myth that "the third time's the charm". The prior ones were good performances- hagiographic but still very good and a reflection of that era in America- but this one is great.
In a somewhat presaging bit of fortune, we watched about half of "Capote" on Netflix the day before - and the second half hours before- we went to see "Lincoln". Of course "Capote" has been out several years but neither PLC or I had seen Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Oscar-winning performance as Truman Capote. To tell the truth just looking at the dvd jacket in years past I kept finding it hard to believe the subject would arrest my attention. Well here is another rather astonishing channelling of a personality by a brilliant actor. In this case what could have been a mimicry- indeed Truman Capote's celebrity image almost seems pre-fabricated to suit that type of facile rendering- Hoffman convincingly fills out a portrait that manages to give deep insight to Capote's effort in creating a new template for literature in documenting four horrific murders while still leaving the man a mystery in a manner that seems somehow true to the facts. Capote's resulting book was "In Cold Blood". Again I have to plead that I have only my ignorance directly and an understanding by inference about Capote's non-fiction masterwork- I have never read it. I have a feeling I will make time for that now.
Catherine Keener is very interesting as Capote's friend and fellow author Harper Lee. In the film she is helping Capote interview people around the Kansas murder as well as the two young men accused of the crime of whom a subtle homoerotic component seems to be implied.
Clifton Collins Jr. as Perry Smith is also excellent. Smith was the brighter of the two convicted of the murders. The tension of unease and compassion between Capote and Smith is a key focal point of the film and of Capote's want to understand this man who appears as a negative mirror image of the adaptations Capote evidently felt he'd suffered. As Capote put's it in the film Smith seems to have gone out the back door while he went out the front door from the same cursed house.
A day before this we went to see the new James Bond film "Skyfall". Bond films ran out some time ago of the original 12 novels. I read them all as a young teenager. What most fascinated me about Bond was the depth of knowledge he had about a wide variety of subjects and his sophistication in dealing with all things worldly. My Mom was actaully a bit concerned about me when she'd noticed that I'd basically read all of the novels quickly in serial order when I was somewhere between 12 and 15. I now forget exactly when my Bond obsession transpired chronologically. I pictured Bond as vaguely olive completed though Caucasian, wiry but not thin, muscular but not showily so and handsome but in a cypher-like, quiet way that might almost be unnoticed in a public setting. Bond succeeded by outhinking a step or several ahead of all but the most gifted of his diabolical adversaries. The image Sean Connery cut as Bond was very diferent than the book Bond- of course he was great in the role even so. Of all the Bonds I always thought Pierce Brosnan and to a slightly lesser extent Timothy Dalton fit the image of Bond best. Certainly Roger Moore did not. But even less likely is the current Bond, Daniel Craig, who nonetheless may be in one of the very best Bond films in "Skyfall". Craig is a wonderful actor and while physically miscast to my, and many others', eyes he fits the bill better because of his chameleon abilities as an actor. After all an undercover operator IS an actor. All the better if one does not draw undue attention to oneself."Skyfall" has a great opening sequence along with the requisite title sequence that helps to set a tone to this one of the best-directed and acted of any Bond film. It probably is the best in those categories. Javier Bardem of "No Country For Old Men" and "Before Night Falls" among a compact but sterling group of quality films with his quality performance anchoring them is the evil adversary in this one. He's simply smashing in the role and might be the best monstrous villain since Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman film "The Dark Knight". Craig's Bond is surreally vigilant and resourceful as any Bond must be but he also conveys the widest emotional palette in doing so. Judi Dench abley supports as Bond's boss "M".
Leaving the theater I asked PLC if he thought this was the best Bond film and he said yes. I tend to agree with him, though "Goldfinger" and "From Russia With love" with Sean Connery may be the gold standards for the early films that established this sub-genre.
Then the night before that we'd gone to watch Denzel Washington's role as an alcoholic pilot in "Flight". "Flight" is both effectively exhilarating and depressing. Robert Zemeckis is the director and I've never been a particular fan of his somewhat overbroad brand of filmmaking. But Washington's riveting performance and Zemeckis' avoidance of his more sentimental tendencies serve this film well. Along with the star performance the script manages to keep suspense and surprise in play throughout.
Lerman, Miller, Watson in "Wallflower"
And, finally a week earlier we'd gone to see "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" mostly because of the buzz the young actor, Ezra Miller, playing an eccentric gay teenager in a trio of friends in a Pittsburg area high school was generating.
"Harry Potter's" Emma Watson plays his step sister and fellow senior with a "loose" rep among the boys and Paul Rudd plays a caring teacher. But somewhat unheralded is Logan Lerman who plays the thrid spoke in this wheel of friendship as a transferring freshman with deep problems in his immediate past. This young actor is really wonderful in the film.
We were both reminded of Michael Chabon's first novel "The Mysteries of Pittsburg" with it's gay themes within a somewhat similar age group of a decade earlier than early 1990s "Wallflower" is based.
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