Tag: Jennifer Jason Leigh

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Annihilation

As University of Memphis Film Professor Marina Levina likes to say, all horror is rooted in body horror. From the bloody dismemberment of slasher films to vile mutations of David Cronenberg, the entire genre rests on a bedrock of biological revulsion. The principle extends all the way back to the work where sci fi and horror first converged. The star of Frankenstein was a monster stitched together out of discarded body parts. Feminist critics have pointed out that, at the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she had recently had a miscarriage. The darkest fears of humanity are rooted in the squirmy realities of our reproduction.

Annihilation, the new film from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, begins with a bit of biology. Lena (Natalie Portman) is lecturing her class at Johns Hopkins University over video of dividing cells. All life, she says, has its origins in this simple event, before revealing that the cells on the screen are cancer.

Lena met her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) while they were both in the Army. She got out, but he stayed and became an elite special forces fighter. A year ago, he left for a secret mission and was never seen again. Lena never got any word from the government on what happened to him, and had given him up for dead — until he suddenly shows up at their house with very little memory of what has transpired. But Lena’s emphatic questioning is interrupted when Kane has a seizure. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance is intercepted by government vehicles, and soon Lena wakes up in a mysterious hospital room with no recollection of how she got there.

This won’t be the first time Lena wakes up disoriented in this creepy, slow burn thriller. Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a government psychologist, reveals to her that Kane’s mission was to Area X, a spot on the swampy Gulf Coast that is surrounded by a mysterious shimmer, some kind of visible force field that appears like a giant soap bubble. The shimmer first appeared three years ago, and it has been steadily growing in size. No one who has gone in has ever come out — except Kane, and the authorities are unsure how he got from the Gulf Coast to Baltimore without anyone noticing. As Kane clings to life, Lena is recruited on a desperate mission to get to the lighthouse at the center of Area X. What the team of four women finds will be crucial to preserving the future of life on earth.

Natalie Portman stars in Annihilation, Alex Garland’s new sci-fi/horror film.

Annihilation is adapted from the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, but its concept has deep roots in H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 “The Colour Out of Space,” where a meteorite brings a strange chromatic plague to the swamps of New England, and Roadside Picnic, a 1971 Russian science-fiction novel where teams of dragooned men must brave a zone where the laws of physics break down in order to recover alien artifacts. Garland’s pacing and staging take inspiration from Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaption of Roadside Picnic. Inside Area X, Lena and her crew find both wonders and horror, with rainbow-colored plants and half-human monsters.

Portman is the focus of the picture, and she carries the weight of the production with the same kind of calm professionalism her “warrior scientist” exudes when being presented with mind-bending sights and concepts. Jason Leigh, the secretive leader of the expedition, is uncharacteristically wooden in the first half, but loosens up as the going gets weirder and more paranoid. Isaac’s role is barely there in this female-driven story, but in a series of cleverly constructed flashbacks, his charisma provides relief from the horror slog through the psychedelic swamps.

But the acting, while serviceable, is not really the point. Lena and Kane’s relationship drama feels like a distraction from Garland’s mixture of horror beats and big think concepts. Even as it relies on horror tropes for shape (why do a group of trained scientists and soldiers insist on splitting up like they’re in the Blair Witch Project?) Annihilation‘s mission is to plumb the depths of Lovecraftian existential fear. The universe is a big and scary place that cares nothing about the problems of two little people, or even one little planet.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Anomolisa

I’m a fan of awkward sex scenes. I’m not talking about the blue-backlit, Tom Cruise/Kelly McGillis sex scene set to “Take My Breath Away” in Top Gun, or the Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman mirror sex scene in Eyes Wide Shut. Sure, I like watching Tom Cruise have sex as much as the next guy, but I prefer fumbling, awkward, embarrassing sex scenes. One of my favorites is in the otherwise unremarkable 1986 film The Big Easy, where Dennis Quaid struggles with his clothes, and Ellen Barkin exclaims, “I’m not very good at this!” Not only do those kinds of scenes feel more realistic (Have you ever had Berlin and a blue backlight on a first date?), but they also reveal more character than boobs. Would you believe that the best sex scene of the Oscar season is in a film nominated for Best Animated Feature?

It’s not hentai. It’s Anomalisa, written and co-directed by Charlie Kaufman, who won a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award for 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Anomalisa was created using stop-motion animation of the type more usually associated with late ’60s Rankin/Bass holiday specials or Robot Chicken. Instead of Frosty the Snowman or pop culture-riffing slapstick, Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson have pushed the medium somewhere new.

You might forget you’re watching an animated film in Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa.

Based on an experimental play Kaufman wrote in 2005, Anomalisa‘s closest filmic companion is probably Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is an author and customer service management consultant who is traveling from Los Angeles to Cincinnati to deliver a lecture. After an awkward exchange with his seat mate on the plane (voiced by Tom Noonan) and an excruciatingly long cab ride with a talkative cabby (also voiced by Tom Noonan), he settles into his fancy hotel room with a call to his wife (Tom Noonan) and son Henry (Tom Noonan).

You may be sensing a pattern in casting by now.

The only other character in the film not voiced by Tom Noonan is Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a woman from Akron who has traveled to Cincinnati to see Michael speak. By the time the two meet, Michael is in the midst of a full-blown existential crisis of the sort that, in films, always seem to occur in a luxury hotel. The two share a brief encounter (this is where the awkward sex happens) before Michael must give his speech the next day and decide whether or not to return to his wife.

Anomalisa‘s often funny script full of quiet yearning would have been quite easy to film in a conventional manner — indeed, there are countless indie films in the last decade that use the premise of the chance encounter that fills unmet needs in lonely lovers’ lives precisely because it’s an easy scenario to film. But by taking the story and lovingly creating everything in miniature — from the cotton-ball clouds the tiny model airplane flies through to the dingy Cincinnati cab to the anonymous luxury hotel suite — Kaufman and Johnson have conjured a great technical achievement. By the time the close-up of a martini glass stem in the hotel lobby bar happens, you might have forgotten you’re watching an animated film. But don’t worry, Kaufman will remind you with a dream sequence where he deconstructs everything, right down to the stop-motion puppets themselves.

Anomalisa is a worthy addition to Kaufman’s formidable filmography, which includes not only his collaborations with Spike Jonez, such as Being John Malkovich, but also Synecdoche, New York, which no less a critical mind than Roger Ebert called the best film of the 2000s. This is Kaufman’s first film in seven years, which is a big shame. When you hear the lament that superhero-sized blockbusters are pushing out more worthy mid- and small-budget movies, consider that little bits of genius such as Anomalisa is the sort of creative, serious work we’re missing out on. It’s not just the artists who are suffering.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

The Hateful Eight

In 1977, an ad touted the Heroes album with: “There’s Old Wave, there’s New Wave, and there’s David Bowie”. Like the Thin White Duke, Quentin Tarantino has become a genre unto himself. There are thrillers, there are mysteries, and there are Tarantino movies.

The buzz going into The Hateful Eight was characteristically bizarre: a Western shot on 70MM film in the age of digital. For the cinephile, anything that starts with the Cinerama logo raises expectations of wide-open vistas, such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. After the opening overture, The Hateful Eight seems like it’s going to deliver on that promise with a series of shots of a stagecoach plowing through Montana’s snowy vastness. But then the stage is stopped by a lone black figure: Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), a former Union calvary major-turned-bounty hunter, sitting atop a pile of dead bodies. The horseless man asks the coach’s charter John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) for a ride so he can escape the coming blizzard. Ruth is reluctant to help, because he is transporting his own bounty to Red Rocks, a woman named Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and she’s extremely valuable. But Warren is very convincing, and since they once had dinner together in Chattanooga long ago, Ruth agrees. Then, the action shifts to a long conversation inside the stagecoach, and we’ve seen the last of the beautiful western landscapes. After picking up another hitchhiker, racist sheriff Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), the stage arrives at Minnie’s Haberdashery, a frontier tavern where the inhabitants hope to hunker down to avoid the snow. Needless to say, things go spectacularly wrong.

Kurt Russell and Samuel L. Jackson

From there, The Hateful Eight resembles Reservoir Dogs more than How the West Was Won. The motley crew trapped in the blizzard slowly circle each other spouting stupendously flowery dialogue as they look for an opening for murder. If there’s one thing QT is good at, it’s writing a menacing speech leading up to mayhem, and his language machine is cranking double time. Jackson and Russell provide ideal vessels for the profane wordsmith, but from Tim Roth to Bruce Dern to Michael Madsen, there really are no weak links here. Lies are told, identities shift, Pynchonesque names are checked, and poison surreptitiously administered. Tarantino uses the fantastically expensive and obsolete camera technology not to open up spaces, but to present the whole of the interior of Minnie’s as a single stage set where he can move his crack actors around like a theater director.

SLJ. ’Nuff said.

There are a hundred reasons why a three-hour widescreen epic that devolves into an Agatha Christie play shouldn’t work, and yet, at least after the first viewing, The Hateful Eight comes off as more satisfying than Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained. It’s the critic’s job to explain this stuff, but Tarantino creates alchemy that defies easy description. Sometimes things just work.