Film
GREAT WORLD OF SOUND Set partially (and inevitably) in Nashville, Craig Zobel’s stinging comedy-drama delves into the underbelly of the music biz, where hustlers thrive on an endless supply of starry-eyed, talent-impaired suckers. Two song-sharking salesmen—one a rudderless young idealist (Pat Healy), the other a garrulous aging cut-up (Kene Holliday)—roam the South signing up singers and musicians for a shady “label” that pockets the dreamers’ cash. The movie is a tour of seedy hotels turned makeshift studios, shot Borat-style with non-professionals in scenes that make us constantly uneasy about how much the people onscreen know. (For the record: at this year’s Nashville Film Festival, Zobel said that the performers who showed up for their “auditions” were told what was going on as the project proceeded; for anyone who’s heard real song-sharking records, the people here may seem almost implausibly talented.) Healy, a gifted character actor who can also be seen this week in The Assassination of Jesse James, and Holliday (from the ‘70s sitcom Carter Country) make a terrific team as they bicker, banter and riff, playing decent guys as susceptible to get-ahead schemes as the rubes they fleece. The movie’s observation of their slippery pitches is as keen as its sympathy is deep—especially for all would-be artists who cling to their craft in the face of indifference, or worse. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)
INTO THE WILD For almost an entire movie, screenwriter-director Sean Penn sustains the big-sky-country lyricism of Easy Rider’s opening credits—no small feat for a film about someone who found the romance of nature brutally unrequited. But in his haunting study of a young outdoorsman’s fatal venture into the Alaskan wilderness, Penn captures the pull of wide-open spaces with a passion that, like the hero’s, is no less grand for being borderline crazy. (He just might be the guy to adapt On the Road.) If all of literature can be said to follow two basic plots—either “I took a trip” or “A stranger came to town”—Penn, working from Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction account, evocatively interweaves the former with the latter to examine a fundamentally American hunger and desolation. For Chris McCandless, an Emory grad who ditched his savings and worldly goods and rechristened himself Alexander Supertramp to roam the country, the journey was a picaresque, a dotted line of vignettes. At the same time, McCandless was an enigma who breezed in and out of people’s lives, captivating them without letting anyone get too close. Apart from the questionable handling of McCandless’ parents, who are almost reduced to a Psych 101 motivation for his wanderlust, Penn dramatizes the people and events with sensitivity. Emile Hirsch’s beatific performance carries a hint of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, an elusive arrogance that explains how his hubris in confronting the wild led to starvation and a grueling slow fade. Penn surrounds him with performances firmly tethered in the here and now: Catherine Keener, Kristen Stewart and a remarkable first-timer named Brian Dierker as off-the-map hippies; Vince Vaughn as a wisely skeptical foreman; and the marvelous Hal Holbrook as a surrogate dad whose yearning could melt the sternest resolve…but didn’t. Their inevitable disappearance from the film leaves a pang every time, even if McCandless may not have felt it himself. Gathering force from Eddie Vedder’s stirring songs and Eric Gautier’s poetically apt widescreen camerawork, the ending turns McCandless’ holy foolishness into genuine transcendence, granting his evident wish to vanish into the sky. —Jim Ridley (Opens Friday)
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|