Month: November 2009

It’s been a good year for has-beens and celebrities who just won’t
go away. Grizzled old Brett Favre returned to pro football yet again,
whaling on the Green Bay Packers twice in a month while playing for his
old team’s biggest rival and looking as good as he has in 13 years. Now
Michael Jackson, whose bizarre personal behavior and substance abuse
reached its inevitable end with his sudden death last June, has risen
from the grave and slide-stepped into the limelight once more. But
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is not just a morbid attempt to
cash in on a dead pop star’s fame. Instead, director and show
choreographer Kenny Ortega’s hi-definition video diary of Jackson’s
last tour rehearsals is the year’s most tantalizing and invigorating
documentary.

Culled from hours of rehearsal footage, This Is It’s
trajectory is dully straightforward: song, commentary from
crew/musician/dancer, choreographer, production meeting, song,
commentary, etc. But what separates This Is It from hundreds of
how’d-he-do-that movies and TV shows is its subject. This is Michael
Jackson, after all, the last undisputed ruler of a pop landscape too
diffuse and specialized to need, much less conjure up, such a figure
again. Alas, his tenure as “The King of Pop” seems to have taken its
toll. Jackson looks ill and alien throughout the film. Pasty and
emaciated in odd-fitting jackets and high pants, he looks like an
R&B Lear — a cross between The Nightmare Before
Christmas’ Jack Skellington and Marvin Gaye at the 1983 NBA
All-Star Game.

But as he sings and dances — tentatively at first, testing out
his 50-year-old legs and throat — he grows freer and more
confident until he hardly seems earthbound. His footwork remains
unimpeachable, and the speed and precision of the arm snaps and ankle
shakes that punctuate “Human Nature” and “Smooth Criminal” are nearly
otherworldly, as if he were trying to catch the sounds he hears from
the air around him. Rehearsal footage with his band shows just how
uncannily attuned Jackson was to the nuances and pacing of his songs
and grooves; not even James Brown in his heyday approached Jackson’s
genius for the way sound and movement intertwine.

The gap between the power of the half-complete performances
collected here, his dancers’ awe at Jackson’s expressive genius, and
the performer’s casual self-assessment is often astonishing. After a
dazzling, turn-back-the-clock run-through of “Billie Jean,” complete
with moonwalk, Jackson shrugs and says, “Well, at least we have a
little bit of a feel for it,” while his dancers and crew cheer wildly.
During a vocal improvisation near the end of “I Just Can’t Stop Loving
You,” he tests out his falsetto chops and then sheepishly declares that
he shouldn’t perform that way because he’s trying to save his lungs.
The muse moved through him whether or not he wanted it to.

The power and resourcefulness of such a confounding creator is never
in doubt during This Is It. And after years of wondering, I
finally see what his mock-crucifixion pose is about; it’s an offering
of grace to his fans. Accept it.

The experience of watching most movie biopics is like being told
about a dream an acquaintance had: It’s rarely as interesting as it was
to the person who had it. When biographical films have been successful
recently, it’s because they’ve leavened the inherent genre negatives by
basing the film on a lesser-known subject (Milk), by focusing on
the person behind the persona (Ali), or by benefiting from a
great performance (Ray) or the participation of a masterful
filmmaker (The Aviator).

The new biopic Coco Before Chanel, about the celebrated
20th-century fashion designer, gets the benefit of a little bit of each
of these. Chanel is an icon for what she produced (and the effect it
had), but I suspect her life story is new information to the majority
of viewers, even excluding those like me: males born after she died who
know the name and nothing else.

Audrey Tautou (Amélie, Dirty Pretty Things)
stars as Coco. Her performance is excellent in a naturalistic way,
eschewing the sentiment of the character’s inevitable greatness and
embracing the boundaries of the film’s title (excepting one gorgeous
scene at the end of the film).

We first meet Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel as she’s installed at an
orphanage in 1893 along with her sister, Adrienne (played in adulthood
by Marie Gillain), abandoned by their father. Fifteen years later, Coco
is performing duets with her sister in a saloon — her nickname
comes from a song they sing about a dog. Coco’s bored by the charms of
wealthy, vapid playboys visiting the bar, and she fends off their
advances with frowns and lines such as, “A woman in love is helpless
like a begging dog.”

Coco envisions a future as a stage performer in a nice club in Paris
— sewing is her day job, as a seamstress at a tailor shop, but at
first it’s more menial labor than a prospect for her fortunes. When her
sister escapes the life by becoming the paramour of an affluent man,
Coco follows suit and aggressively chases the attention of the
aristocrat Balsan (Benoît Poelvoorde).

As she progresses in society, her instincts for clothing design and
alterations catch the eye of increasingly influential people. She also
meets the love of her life, Arthur “Boy” Capel (Alessandro Nivola), a
rich English polo player who acts as muse and financier to her budding
fashion inclinations. In the main, what sets Coco apart is her
modernizing changes to the fashion of the day — literally
liberating women from their corsets — and the ways she can take
out a bit here, snip off a little there, and transform traditional into
progressive. Coco is a dress whisperer.

Coco Before Chanel is written and directed by Anne Fontaine,
an unknown to me but someone worth exploring the filmography of.
Fontaine infuses the film with an energy that is hard to pin down and
classify but evident from the first images (the movie begins with
burlap). It recalls the blood-veined vitality of Elizabeth and
the textured reality of Julie & Julia.

Federico Fellini’s best films have a rambling, improvisatory feel
about them, as though the director were thinking out loud and letting
his camera roam, sniffing out truth in body language, evening lighting,
and improbably evocative reverse tracking shots. (No one bids farewell
to an image quite like Fellini.) In works like 8 ½,
Fellini Roma, and I Vitelloni, he filled his frames with
freaks, geeks, and tiny vignettes of varying tones and expressive
impact while his talents as a cinematic memoirist refined and redefined
ideas about personal cinema.

What’s strange about Fellini is that two of his most well-known
works, La Dolce Vita and La Strada, are two of his worst.
La Strada in particular is altogether too schematic, obvious,
and dull to rank among Fellini’s supplest work. It’s a road movie about
a traveling strong man (grunting, growling Anthony Quinn) who buys a
female sidekick (Giulietta Masina) to accompany him on his travels
throughout post-WWII Italy, but it’s also about such dubious ideas as
the healing power of laughter and the cosmic significance of a
pebble.

Masina’s, um, enthusiastic performance is usually cited as
Chaplinesque, but anyone who admires the Little Tramp will struggle to
see any connection between Chaplin and the rubber-faced, asexual idiocy
on display here. Something surfaces now and then about brutes who lack
compassion and the simpletons who love them, but even an admirer like
Martin Scorsese has checked his praise, saying of La Strada‘s
life-is-a-carnival mood, “I don’t like the circus. I have problems with
it.”