Tag: Malco Ridgeway Four

Lisa See has done it again. And depending on your taste for the sentimental, this could be delightful or torturous.

Snowflower and the Secret Fan — adapted from See’s novel — is the story of four women: Snowflower (Gianna Jun) and Lily (Bingbing Li) live in 19th-century China; Sophia and Nina (also played by Jun and Li) live in present-day Shanghai.

Director Wayne Wang (The Joy Luck Club) wastes no time getting into the thick of the melodrama. Sophia falls into a coma after a nasty cycling accident and the tragedy brings her recent falling-out with lifelong friend Nina to the fore. From there, we are led through the development of Nina and Sophia’s relationship, braided with the similarly fraught story of Snowflower and Lily.

The double casting of Jun and Li links the stories from past and present. “It’s about the old days,” says Sophia about the Snowflower and Lily saga, “but I think it’s really about us.” After simultaneous foot binding ceremonies, Snowflower and Lily are matched up as laotong, symbolic sisters united for eternity. In perfect symmetry, Nina and Sophia are also determined to be laotong and share this sacred bond, which even comes with its own secret language, nushu or “women’s script.” Snowflower and Lily pass news of their tumultuous lives, written between the folds of a traditional Chinese fan.

Both laotong pairs experience a range of joys and sorrows together. Marriage, pregnancy, death, and divorce are set against the backdrop of their undying affection, butting up against one another with the cumulative effect of a Lifetime movie. Foot binding, ever-present throughout the film, is never engaged in a meaningful way. Instead, it’s hung out as a grim ornament lending more empty drama to the story.

The bond of laotong is also strangely off-putting. It comes across as an overly possessive friendship. It transcends marriage. Biological sisterhood has the gravitas of pen pals by comparison.

But it also works perfectly within the schema of See’s mawkish pseudo-feminist best-sellers. Without much of interest or substance to back up these lifelong friendships, the women are more in love with the idea of sisterhood than anything else. Their laotong bond becomes an exercise in developing hyper-significant relationships. Predictably, their friendship only falters for all-too-perfect reasons — when one of the women selflessly lets go as she feels she is too much of a burden on her sister.

The film is nicely shot, with two cleanly interwoven storylines, and is by no means difficult to look at. And while See’s romanticized indulgence in the ultra-feminine is tiresome, her track record of best-sellers is impressive.

Snowflower was manufactured to jerk the tears out of you, and, evidently, enough people are looking for a good reason to cry these days. If you like doing your crying in the dark and you aren’t too picky about the plot, I’ve got a movie ticket to sell you.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Opening Friday, August 5th
Ridgeway Four

The documentary Buck, a portrait of horse trainer Buck Brannaman, who inspired Nicholas Evans’ 1995 novel The Horse Whisperer and served as a consultant on Robert Redford’s film version, might be the most surprising film I’ve seen this year.

An appreciative profile of a “horse whisperer” was not something I was excited to see, but first-time director Cindy Meehl’s film, which won the audience award for docs at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, takes on the no-nonsense personality of its subject, a soft-spoken man who dismisses any mystical import others might apply to his skills: “A lot of people want it all to be fuzzy and warm and cosmic,” Brannaman says. “But it’s no different with a horse than with a kid.”

Brannaman is full of folksy wisdom. Stuff like: “A lot of times rather than helping people with horse problems, I’m helping horses with people problems.” But he backs it up with a patient approach to horse training that eschews the concept of “breaking” the animals and the violence that term suggests.

Buck is filled with admiring testimonials from ranchers and other trainers, along with Redford, who describes how Brannaman became a bigger part of his film than he had intended. But Meehl finds the real story rooted in Brannaman’s past as a childhood rope-trick performer with a violently abusive backstage father. As a small child, he confesses, he was so terrified of his father that he would beg his mother not to leave for work.

Meehl withholds this biographical information for a while and finally incorporates it in pieces, the film deriving much of its meaning from the contrast and connection between Brannaman’s rough childhood and his unusually gentle training style. You see why Brannaman takes the way people treat the horses they own or are training as a revelation of their own character and why he seems to identify so much with an animal often trained through aggressive, physical tactics.

And while he isn’t demonstrative about it, Brannaman is willing to make the connection explicit, comparing his own fearful reticence as a child meeting a foster parent for the first time to his approach with horses: “It’s like a colt that’s had some trouble. You don’t have to do much to make them suspicious. Just even move a little bit in a way they don’t understand and — that quick — they think they need to save themselves.”

Meehl’s delicate hand at using this material makes Buck deeply affecting without straining too hard. Its lessons about patience and compassion feel legitimate.

And Meehl smartly — or, perhaps, luckily — steers the film to a tough final act, where Brannaman encounters a troubled colt — “a problem child … you can’t hold it against him for how his life has been” — that might be unreachable.

Buck

Opening Friday, July 1st

Ridgeway Four

Much like Adam Sandler in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Will Ferrell’s performance in the new indie drama Everything Must Go isn’t a case of playing against type as much as tweaking it.

Adapted from the Raymond Carver short story “Why Don’t You Dance,” this first feature from writer-director Dan Rush casts Ferrell in a role that might the realistic flipside to his over-the-top Old School character, the drunk Frank the Tank.

Here Ferrell is Nick Halsey, a relapsing alcoholic who returns home after getting fired from his corporate job to find his belongings on the front lawn, the locks changed, and his wife gone. Soon he finds the couple’s joint banking and credit card accounts cancelled too.

Nick takes up residence in the front lawn, sitting in an easy chair, working his way through six packs, and odd sight that catches the sympathetic but cautious eye of a new neighbor, a pregnant woman (played by Rebecca Hall) awaiting the delayed arrival of her husband.

Before long, Nick decides to turn his eviction into a yard sale, a high-concept gambit that provides the film’s title and literalizes the notion of “taking inventory” of one’s life. One item that pops up is an old high-school yearbook, which contains a now-poignant inscription from a former female classmate that provokes Nick to track her down. The woman, now a struggling single mom, is played, beautifully, by Laura Dern in a striking cameo doesn’t go quite where most viewers will expect it to.

The Dern cameo fits a muted, effective drama nailed in place by a couple of subtle character revelation depth charges that arrive late and reorient the viewer’s perspective on Nick and the film.

Ferrell finds a perfect balance here between letting his comedic bent tease out the absurdity of the situation while still playing the role straight.

Everything Must Go

Opening Friday, May 13th

Ridgeway Four