’Tis the Season

As the annual push for year-end awards and accolades arrives, more than a dozen movies will flood Nashville theaters over the holiday season. Through bloodshot eyes, Scene writers Donna Bowman, Noel Murray, Jim Ridley and Joshua Rothkopf take a look.

Cold Mountain Antiwar ideologues who’ve had it with the implicit call to arms of Master and Commander and The Lord of the Rings should really go for writer-director Anthony Minghella’s movie adaptation of the Charles Frazier novel. Minghella is drawn to stories like this (or The English Patient, or Truly, Madly, Deeply) in which one-to-one relationships transcend nationalism, class and even death. Cold Mountain’s story of a Confederate soldier (played by Jude Law) abandoning the Civil War so that he can march home to his sweetheart (Nicole Kidman) well conveys the mayhem that surrounds a country at war with itself. Minghella, like Frazier, uses American history to create a kind of homegrown mythology, imbuing even base motivations like lust with a sense of larger-than-life importance.

A cast of well-knowns including Natalie Portman and Philip Seymour Hoffman give heft and clarity to the complex, episodic narrative, and Renee Zellweger’s passionately quirky turn as Kidman’s impromptu farming partner is scenery-chewing in the grandest tradition. Cold Mountain is choppy at times, and Minghella botches some of the lighter interludes, but otherwise this is a superior model of polished literary cinema—more British than Hollywood. Resist its romantic sweep and you’re in for a long day at the movies, but go with it and you’re likely to be humming along.

—Noel Murray

Elephant The year’s most welcome career reinvention was doubtless that of director Gus Van Sant, who after nearly a decade of making Hollywood mush emerged as a cryptic chronicler of Gen-Y detachment, first with his po-faced Gerry and now this fascinatingly oblique (and potentially enraging) picture of high school violence. Of its many light touches, none has stayed with me more than Van Sant’s evocative use of solo piano works from the young person’s playbook, including the arpeggiating “Moonlight Sonata” and a halting version of “Für Elise,” both of which capture an intentionally banal sense of free-floating despair when counterpoised against football fields and suburban rec rooms.

Elephant is also about a horrifying act of armed invasion—and by extension, the killings at Columbine—leading many viewers to reject its inexorable camera glides down locker-lined hallways as a disrespectful form of Shining-style portentousness. And except for a single shot—a serious misstep—Van Sant steadfastly refuses to ascribe any kind of easy rationale to his rampagers’ motivations: no troubled monologues here, nor any gestures toward victim sympathy. I’m reminded of the disarming response from shock-rocker Marilyn Manson in Bowling for Columbine when asked what he might say to the students of Columbine. Without a beat, Manson replies that he would only listen, because no one else had seen fit to do as much. Elephant, in its observational acuity, listens very closely. It has no answers, but neither does anyone, truthfully.

—Joshua Rothkopf

The Last Samurai Kurosawa it ain’t. But Edward Zwick’s culture-clash epic, while overstuffed and unforgivably histrionic, ain’t half bad either. Tom Cruise plays broken-down Civil War hero Nathan Algren, driven to drink by his participation in the massacre of an Indian village. He’s recruited by Billy Connelly (playing against type as one of the most restrained elements in the movie) to train the newly formed Japanese army for use against the samurai, who have rebelled against the Meiji emperor’s program of westernization. Algren is captured by the samurai in their first battle, and after spending a winter in their village training camp, nursed by the wife of one of the samurai he killed, he joins their rebellion.

There are at least three good reasons to see The Last Samurai, despite its many flaws. John Toll’s cinematography is beautifully pitched—sharp but slightly subdued and diffused, counterbalancing the fetid ripeness of the melodrama. Zwick stages the battle scenes with unmatched clarity and pacing; they rank among the best in a decade. And finally, one line from Tony Goldwyn, playing Algren’s former commander, who berates him for switching sides: “Why do you hate your own people so much?” It’s a question that goes unanswered and unresolved, and it pierces the historical veil around this story, echoing toward our present-day clash of civilizations.

—Donna Bowman

Mona Lisa Smile/Something’s Gotta Give It might be possible to enjoy Mona Lisa Smile as a kind of crisply photographed fashion show, or as a combined teacher-feature/chick-flick genre exercise where the pat lessons and emotional manipulation take on the quality of liturgy. But while Julia Roberts is refreshingly restrained as a bohemian art teacher shaking up the lives of hidebound New England college girls in 1953, director Mike Newell can’t do much with a script by committee that mires the movie in a fogbank of subplots. The film betrays its own obnoxiously simpleminded gender politics by taking cursory potshots at Roberts’ character late in the game. And despite early hints that Newell might dare to draw out the lesbian subtext to all the sensual dormitory horseplay, it doesn’t take long before Mona Lisa Smile starts passing out love interests like holiday hams. The best that can be said for the movie is that, as Wellesley’s finest, Kirsten Dunst, Julia Stiles, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Giniffer Goodwin beautifully model their clothes and hair.