We're Not So Different As You Might Think.

Philip Seymour Hoffman festival! After Synecdoche, New York and Happiness, I thought it time to check out his biggest role. A few years back he pulled a Mo'Nique and won pretty much everything going (only in the leading categories) for his portrayal of writer Truman Capote in Bennett Miller's biopic Capote.

Capote is based around the events contained within Capote's last completed major work, In Cold Blood. In Kansas, a family of four, the Clutters, are found brutally murdered in their homes, apparently (wait for it...) in cold blood. No one can understand why this is. Capote reads about the murders in the newspaper and decides that they are what he wants to write about, convincing his editor at the New Yorker to send him off to Kansas to start talking to the townsfolk, family and friends of the victims, taking with him his dear friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener - Catherine Keener festival!) to act as research assistant and 'bodyguard.'


Capote's flamboyant New York personality and style initially jars with the residents, but shortly they warm to him, especially as they begin to understand who he is. Whilst he is in town two people are apprehended for committing the crime, and Capote begins to talk to them, trying to get their side of the story. He keeps talking to them and talking to them, cajoling them and pleading with them, trying to understand what the motivation behind this heinous crime was, but to no avail. His own obsession, despite having not written a word, keeps him returning to the town, keeps him in contact with these killers, seems to be turning him a little crazy. Eventually they are both put to death without Capote having discovered their reasons, and it becomes clear that these people were never his friends - Capote was using them for his own egotistical means.


Hoffman's performance is extraordinary. Playing a very famously gay character, he does camp it up, but it is with little affectations rather than a whole-hearted embrace, and that is what makes the performance so extraordinary. Rather than acting like a drag queen in civvies, Hoffman's Capote is in the hands holding a newspaper, in not moving his face much when he laughs (stops the wrinkles!), in a slight stiffening of the back when he sits in a pretense of good posture. Tiny little things, sometimes written all over his face as a conscious action, much as they are in real life, gave this performance a quality that very few performers can achieve, especially as a straight man playing a gay man (or even a gay man playing a gay man - too much stereotype and too much to prove.) Very subtle, and very beautiful. Keener, similarly, played the reclusive Lee very well, just keeping her head down and doing what she needed to do. Supporting Capote at the same time as she kept him at a distance - his friend, but always seeming to be a little cautious of the power of his ego. Chris Cooper, as the detective in charge of the case, rounds out the major cast with a solid performance, achieving all that his character could, considering there is very little room to move in his development over the film.


A good film with a great performance. 4 stars.

I Know How To Do It Now.

Oh, my love affair with Charlie Kaufman has been long and pleasurable. Not nearly long enough, actually, but pleasurable, where further pleasure could only be derived from further watchings of his existing films or by the release of new ones. Starting with Being John Malkovich, moving through Adaptation and ending up at Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (which I swear gets better and better, closer and closer to perfection every time I see it) (and I know I'm skipping Human Nature here - I've never seen it, one day I will, but from what I've heard it's not his best by far.) 

Which of course leads to his directorial debut, last year's Synecdoche, New York. The story revolves around theatre director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), married to artist Adele (Catherine Keener) with one young daughter. Living in Schenectady, he has just directed a version of Death Of A Salesman to rapturous acclaim. Adele, meanwhile, who has an exhibition opening shortly in Berlin, announces that she thinks it will do their marriage good if she goes to Berlin alone with daughter Olive, leaving Caden alone to flirt with Hazel (Samantha Morton), who works the box office at his theatre. Time passes and Caden hears nothing from Adele, and it becomes apparent that she has left him, finding incredible fame in Europe. Caden receives a fellowship grant, and with it decides to stage something big and important. This masterwork is his synecdoche.


Caden creates a miniature New York City within a warehouse in New York City. Within it he has an enormous cast of actors, working in the space simultaneously on their own stories, a piece of installation art on a mammoth scale, all directed by him. Years of rehearsals pass and the warehouse gets bigger and bigger, completely isolated from the real world outside. Cast members come and keep coming, Caden casts someone to play himself, and indeed replaces himself with someone else. He tries to find his wife and daughter and repeatedly fails, throwing himself back into the project with incredible dedication, expanding it and making it more and more complex, more and more real. It gets to a point where his play is the real world, there is no world outside it, after twenty years of rehearsals, the rehearsals have become reality.


It is a monumental vision with an incredible cast. Emily Watson features. Dianne Wiest features. Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Kaufman, well recognised as being a master at creating places and times and stories entrenched in reality at the same time as they take an enormous leap away from it, takes the world and builds it within itself with Synecdoche, New York. And it is so real, even as it is so false.


But beyond the grand scale, it has been a long time since a film has elicited such a vocal response from me. I laughed out loud, I gasped, I stated my disbelief on more than one occasion. I was so swept up in the two hours of cinema that I was totally lost within it. The performances were astonishing across the board, Hoffman was mindbogglingly good, and I even thoroughly enjoyed Morton, whereas normally I'm quite content tolerating her. A beautiful theatrical score from Eternal Sunshine's Jon Brion highlighted the heightened emotional state, but it was Kaufman's script that kept on giving. Little random things, his trademark, dotted through a screenplay that, without them, would have been exceptional regardless, gave the characters a little more strange depth. Made them a little more individual within what otherwise could have been a homogenised and stale repetitive rehearsal process. I say could have been, meaning in the hands of a lesser writer.


And as a director, Kaufman acquits himself more than adequately. He pulls it all together, the obscene grandiosity of it all, while keeping it essentially very human. We stay within Caden even as the warehouse expands outwards. As incredible as it all is on the outside, it is the inside of his character that we cling to and emote with throughout.


5 stars.

Let The Wild Rumpus Start.

This is easily my most anticipated film of this year. Easily. I've been waiting for this film, literally, for years. I think the last time I was so desperate to see a film was Brokeback Mountain, which I'd similarly been following for years. Yesterday, I dragged myself to see Where The Wild Things Are, trying to damp down my expectations, because they were so sky-high that anything other than a cinematic masterwork may have left me shivering in a corner, crying that it was so cold, begging for my mother to hold me as I tried to keep my hands away from that oh-so-sharp razorblade begging me to use it.

That being said, I now don't know where to start with a review of the film. After viewing it, I deliberately held back from immediately posting on it because I knew that I had to let the film settle, after suffering from such anticipation (and I don't use the word 'suffering' lightly - I view the last year as an ordeal, waiting for the film.)

For those who don't know the book (which seems to be the entire UK - how? Every single Australian I know, pretty much, grew up with the book. How did the UK not? We're not so different that NO ONE in this country knows it), it's a children's book consisting of something like nine sentences, seventeen lines. And it's a 100 minute film. An impressive adaption, to say the least. And it does hold up to the book. It is quite obviously an adaptation. To bring Brokeback back into the conversation, that was another film adapted from a much smaller book. Brokeback was almost word for word in its adaptation (it was also a novella, rather than a really, really, really short story), but WTWTA follows the same lines, taking the mood and tone and idea and turning that into the film.

Max (Max Records) is a kid whose parents have split (the mother is played by Catherine Keener - we never see the father.) He has an older sister in her late-ish teens, and his mother has started seeing someone else (very briefly, Mark Ruffalo.) Max is struggling with the separation, and with the introduction of this new male figure, particularly with the lack of attention being showered on him at a time when he needs it the most. As such, he runs away to this invented world of the Wild Things, giant, furry, man-eating monsters. He is raised as their king, and proceeds to try and make everything good and real - good and real as a child would see it.

It's a pretty scary film, for kids. I would argue it is more of an adult film than a kids film, especially with its themes of abandonment and perceived neglect. Max's idea of ruling is precisely that of a child - he doesn't realise the politics of leading, nor the complex emotions of adults. In leading the wild things, he is leading a bunch of fully-formed, adult monsters, and they have similar intellectual makeups of humans. Like humans, they like to play around and act like children when given the opportunity and the blessing of their ruler, but like human adults, they have inter-personal relationships that come into play, something Max doesn't understand. As such, Max's overly simplistic plans for the world seem good at the outset, but are impossible to implement along those lines. The wild things suffer and grow disillusioned with him, rebel, and ultimately Max realises that his home is where he belongs, not running a kingdom he doesn't understand.

Records is incredible as Max. There is a brief moment at the end where, in an otherwise silent shot, he briefly raises eyebrows to convey his emotion, and it speaks depth far belying his age. Keener is stunning as the mother, all to briefly on screen, in the 'real-world' scenes. In fact, the 'real-world' scenes and storyline is pretty much faultless. It is so emotive and beautifully portrayed.

The 'monster-world' looks incredible. The vocal work from the likes of James Gandolfini, Lauren Ambrose, Paul Dano, Catherine O'Hara, Forest Whitaker and Chris Cooper is terrific. The CGI is, quite simply, stunning. Their faces are so, so real, as real as you could hope. Impeccable work. The sets look terrific, the songs complementing the visuals (by Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) have a childish simplicity mixed with the complexity you need for adult drama that truly pays off, and the cinematography pushes the drama without overpowering it, something that quite easily could have happened considering the splenour of some of the locations.

Where it falls over is in its reliance on childish naivety, and the tendency to rest happily on sentiment. Scenes of young playfulness are perfect to watch, but the lulls in between without really any drama to fuel the movement between these scenes hit hard. It becomes a little repetitive in the notion that Max doesn't understand what makes the real world (as opposed to the 'real-world') tick. We get that - give me another story-arc or else I'm going to think it should have been a fifty-minute feature. Maybe nine sentences is too little to bank on for a feature film. Maybe it's going a little too far.

Maybe a more experienced screenwriter might have helped this along. Dave Eggers was largely responsible for the script. His novel A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (aside: incredible title for a book) suffered, I think, from this same problem. By about two thirds of the way through, I got that his life was hard and kept throwing up obstacles, and I just wanted another narrative arc to come into play. Times are tough, yes, but there are only so many times I can hear about before I get bored with it. Same goes here.

I wasn't bored, though, to clarify. But I was ultimately disappointed. I think it could have been an incredible piece of cinema, I really do. I think expectations were built up by the stories about the troubled production (and I should mention here Spike Jonze, who directed it, and did a very good job under the circumstances - I think he's an amazing director, but I'm pining to see him make a film consisting of the 'real-world' elements on display here), and it didn't live up to them. I don't think it ever had ambition to live up to them, either. It was meant to be a simple story, modestly told, that was over-hyped by budgets, studios and a hugely long production timeline, and that means it was almost doomed to not live up to those lofty heights.

It's a good film, I'll give it that. It's not a great film, and that's what hurts. 3.5 stars. As much for the excellent individual elements. Without any one of them, it would be 3.