Category: Film Features

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas takes us back to Germany at
the outset of World War II. Its protagonist is Bruno (Asa Butterfield),
an 8-year-old boy who’s smart, brave, and adventurous but mostly
confused by what’s going on in the world and at home. His father (David
Thewlis), a high-ranking SS officer, has taken a promotion that
relocates the family away from Berlin, to the countryside.

Bruno’s bored in his new setting, especially because his mother
(Vera Farmiga) forbids him from exploring the woods behind the home.
Bruno can see a strange sort of farm through the trees, where the
farmers wear striped pajamas. Bruno’s emotions are a swarm of
conflicts, and what truths he’s told by his parents, tutor, and sister
don’t align with what he’s seeing with his own eyes. That the lies come
from his own father and that his mother is increasingly upset compound
his predicament.

Opens Friday, November 21st,

Ridgeway Four

Since making his film debut as the oddball brain behind Being
John Malkovich roughly a decade ago, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
has established himself as one of the movie medium’s singular and most
brilliant creative forces.

His films — he also wrote Adaptation, Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Confessions of a Dangerous
Mind — may be a genre unto themselves, but they aren’t
without precedence: There’s a bit of Woody Allen in his flustered,
neurotic protagonists. There’s some David Lynch in his
through-the-looking-glass surrealism. And the tendency to fictionalize
real lives has long been a postmodern practice.

All of these elements are in place for Synecdoche, New York,
Kaufman’s directorial debut, which feels like his most personal film
despite having made himself the lead character in
Adaptation.

Synecdoche, New York follows the format familiar from
Kaufman’s other scripts, in which initially realistic situations
unravel and at some point drop through a rabbit hole into outright
meta-ness and surrealism. The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as
regional theater director Caden Cotard, who is married, unhappily, to
artist Adele (Catherine Keener), with whom he shares a shabby two-story
house in Schenectady and a 4-year-old daughter, Olive.

As the film opens, Caden is staging an ambitious production of
Death of a Salesman while Adele is finishing up a set of
paintings for a show in Berlin. His wife’s departure — with
Olive, without him, and, to his surprise, for good — and a bit of
accidental head trauma throw the movie for a loop, speeding up time and
tearing at the fabric of the real.

Desperate and adrift, Caden gets a MacArthur “genius” grant and
decides to use the opportunity to stage a grand, autobiographical
theater piece about the mundane and tragic nature of the human
condition. He hires an actor to play him and has his new wife (Michelle
Williams) play herself on a life-size New York City set forever under
construction in a limitlessly huge warehouse. He hires actors and
writes them individual notes each day to inform their improvisations,
stuff like: “You were raped last night” and “You keep biting your
tongue.”

Reality and fiction — life and theater — begin to merge,
and the piece is never finished, of course — at least not
until death. It’s about the process of creation as the final product, a
process that replicates and begins to replace real life.

There are some tough, touching elements here, most of them involving
Caden’s estrangement from his daughter. But the unrelenting grimness
ultimately feels more maudlin and self-absorbed than perceptive.

Truthfully, I’ve never enjoyed Kaufman’s clever, anxious comedies as
much as I’m supposed to — with the sole exception of
Adaptation, which I do think is the best film anyone’s made
about the writing process — and so it is with Synecdoche,
New York. The film is ambitious, personal, accomplished, and quite
daring. And I kept waiting for it to end.

Synecdoche, New York

Opening Friday, November 21st

Ridgeway Four

Because it’s an enjoyable way to make a living — and because
freelance film criticism can’t quite pay the bills — I teach high
school. So while I was watching Mike Leigh’s new film,
Happy-Go-Lucky, about 30-year-old primary-school teacher Pauline
“Poppy” Cross (Sally Hawkins) and her life’s little ups and downs, I
kept thinking about a girl in one of my classes. Although I like her a
great deal, I’ll bet she’s a huge nuisance to insecure, bitter,
draconian instructors. For one thing, she likes to talk; once she
talked 35 times during a 65-minute class period. Seventy percent of the
time, she offered relevant commentary; the other 30 percent, she said
more or less whatever was on her mind: a joke, a personal anecdote, a
story that stressed her irrational fear of “John McCain’s short arms.”
But she always brings great intelligence, wit, curiosity, and energy to
my classroom, and I try never to say or do anything to dampen her
joyful spirits. She’ll need them to face the “real world” soon
enough.

Well, what if my student could resist adult despair and maintain her
high hopes? What might her life be like? What might life in general be
like? Through his look at Poppy and her friends, Mike Leigh’s film
provides some answers. In doing so, he has made the year’s best
film.

Happy-Go-Lucky is organized as a series of informal
assessments that test Poppy’s cheery, fully engaged approach to life.
The possibility of a potentially explosive clash of worldviews is most
explicit in the scenes between Poppy and Scott (a superb Eddie Marsan),
her terse, alienated driving instructor. Poppy and Scott’s encounters
are funny and fraught with peril because the contrasts in their
characters are almost too great: Scott is an unsmiling authoritarian
with a head full of apocalyptic incunabula, while Poppy’s absurdist
viewpoint is expressed through constant wordplay and unconscious
flirtation. But the film isn’t all conflict and clash. Her flat-mate
Zoe (Alexis Zegerman, perfect) deals with Poppy best by indulging her
eccentricities and providing some emotional grounding.

Leigh’s approach to filmmaking is as radical as his film’s treatment
of human happiness. Happy-Go-Lucky’s numerous pleasures come
from a nuanced, character-driven realist aesthetic that ignores
goal-oriented plots and story arcs. Partially due to his intensely
collaborative working methods, most of his films ultimately focus on
characters trying to co-exist. As Ray Carney and Leonard Quart say in
their book Embracing the World, “Leigh’s figures are placed in
situations in which their ways of feeling and thinking are compared.
… You see, feel, and understand life in one way; I see, feel, and
understand it in another.”

Thus, several scenes work on multiple emotional levels. The scene
between Poppy, social worker Tim (Samuel Roukin), and a sullen little
bully is a marvel of text and subtext. It’s tender because of the
respectful and cautious way the adults draw information from the kid,
but it’s also incongruently romantic because of the way Poppy and Tim
look at each other over the kid’s bowed head. There are other
precious moments in Happy-Go-Lucky, too; the sad tilt of Poppy’s
head as she sighs “Scott” near the end of the film; the closing of a
yellow door as Poppy and Tim kiss; the scene on the lake as Poppy and
Zoe sit in a rowboat and wonder when they will reach adulthood,
punctuated nicely by Zoe’s deadpan, “Are we there yet?” As the camera
cranes up and back, the broad and generous scope of this little film is
discreetly revealed. The result is breathtaking.

Happy-Go-Lucky

Opening Friday, November 21st

Ridgeway Four