If the Scene’s year-end Top 10 movie lists draw one persistent gripe from readers, it’s that several of the films we list haven’t played in Nashville theaters. The point is valid. When we highlight movies that most Nashvillians haven’t gotten to see—movies we’ve usually seen only because of a deluge of year-end screenings or screener tapes—we’re taking advantage of a privilege audiences don’t get. You could even argue that we’re taking on a role that’s closer to promoting than reviewing, especially now that Top 10 lists across the country mean less and less individually. These days they’re tallied and tabulated, like grosses.
But in Nashville, there’s a very practical reason for including missing-in-action films such as Boys Don’t Cry, Felicia’s Journey, and Rosetta on a year-end list—it might actually spur local theaters to book them. I run into people all the time who want to see these and other outstanding ”smaller“ movies that haven’t played Nashville’s ’plexes. Yet there’s no guarantee any of these films will show up, thanks to major-studio logjamming and indifferent booking at local theaters. Going to the movies in Nashville can be like eating every meal at Denny’s.
I feel no shame, therefore, about cheerleading for the likes of Rosetta, a brilliant Belgian drama that’s more powerful than any movie I saw last year—if it means you’ll get a chance to see it on a big screen and make up your own mind. And this spring, you’ll actually get a chance to see Rosetta—and Boys Don’t Cry, and Felicia’s Journey, and eight other movies that made our year-end lists for 1999. And you’ll also get to see several movies that local chains wouldn’t touch because they were too controversial.
For this you must thank Vanderbilt’s Sarratt Cinema. Stepping into the void left by last year’s closing of the Belcourt—which should reopen as a remodeled arthouse this June under Belcourt YES!’s auspices—Sarratt has responded with its strongest semester of programming in several years. (Full disclosure: I was one of many people the theater asked for suggestions.) Even the weekend shows of studio blockbusters are better than usual: The Matrix (Jan. 20-23), American Beauty (Jan. 27-30), and The Straight Story (Feb. 10-13) typify the lineup. Don’t bother circling a few dates on the schedule—with the debatable exception of Dogma, there’s not a movie at Sarratt this spring that isn’t worth seeing.
The most exciting development is Nashville Premieres, a group founded by Belcourt YES! board members Scott Manzler and F. Clark Williams. With Nashville Premieres’ sponsorship, Sarratt is screening five of the most lauded films of recent years that never played local theaters. The first is one of 1998’s best, Wong Kar-wai’s dazzling Hong Kong hit-man reverie Fallen Angels; it shows Jan. 25 and 26. (More on it next week.) It’s followed by Samira Mahkmalbaf’s The Apple (Feb. 8-9), the local premiere of Rosetta (Mar. 23-26), and The Young Girls of Rochefort (Apr. 18-19), Jacques Demy’s sequel to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, starring Catherine Deneuve and Gene Kelly.
Nashville Premieres also scored a major coup by landing an all-but-unreleased film that ended up on several lists of the decade’s best: Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son. A brooding 1997 drama that’s said to be as intensely visual as landscape painting, Mother and Son has excited and infuriated viewers on both sides of the Atlantic: Director Sokurov has been hailed and denounced with equal fervor for his dreamlike depiction of the bonds of maternal love. Recognizing that part of the fun of moviegoing is talking about the experience afterward, especially over a few beers, Nashville Premieres is hosting discussions after each film in Sarratt’s Overcup Oak. Expect some intense arguments after Mother and Son Feb. 29 and Mar. 1.
Sarratt has managed to score other premieres on its own, including Atom Egoyan’s eerie Felicia’s Journey (Feb. 17-20), a pick of Bill Myers’ long-running Nashville Film Society. Most remarkable of all, Sarratt is taking a risk with Catherine Breillat’s arthouse smash Romance. Last month, the Scene’s Noel Murray chastised gutless local theaters for not showing the unrated French drama, which features perhaps the most explicit sex seen on American arthouse screens since 1975’s In the Realm of the Senses. Not only has Sarratt booked Romance Feb. 24-27, it has impishly paired the scandalous film with a midnight shocker: Bob Guccione’s notorious 1980 hardcore epic Caligula (Feb. 26-27).
Indeed, the midnight movies have been programmed as carefully as the rest of the schedule—witness this weekend’s inspired match-up of David Fincher’s Fight Club and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, or February’s David O. Russell double feature of Three Kings and Spanking the Monkey. Best of all is the must-see pairing of Boys Don’t Cry (Mar. 16-19) and The Brandon Teena Story (Mar. 17-18), the documentary that tells the story fictionalized in Kimberly Peirce’s terrific drama. And for pure late-night silliness, there’s The Mighty Peking Man (Apr. 21-22), an unforgettably absurd King Kong knock-off built around the kind of ape-suit ”special effects“ Ed Wood would’ve scrapped.
For a year since the Belcourt’s closing, local audiences have complained about the scattershot booking of arthouse fare. Sarratt has now given us a near-perfect calendar of art movies, cool recent hits, and enticing oddities; the question now remains whether anyone will attend. An encouraging sign was the surprisingly large turnout last semester for After Life, The Dreamlife of Angels, and the documentary Zapatista. And at $4 general admission, Sarratt remains one of the best movie deals in town. Sarratt’s Michelle Douglas and student programming chiefs Carina Kak and Drew Shirley deserve a lot of thanks for giving Nashville a real art theater once again. You can express your gratitude in the ticket line.
—Jim Ridley
Robert Bresson, 1901-1999
There’s no better argument for shrugging off conventional wisdom and relying on firsthand experience than encountering the work of Robert Bresson, the great French director who died Dec. 18 at age 98. The rap I’d heard since high school about Bresson’s movies, frankly, was that they were boring and lifeless and hell to sit through. I’d read variations on this theme so many times over the years—especially the years when his movies were scarcely available—that in the back of my mind it had ossified from opinion into fact. His movies sounded so forbidding I almost feared them.
What a shock, then, when I saw four Bresson films in a row a few months ago—not in the amazing retrospective that just toured the country, unfortunately, but on video while recovering from a car wreck. Far from being dull, few movies seem so alive—so intensely focused on each moment, so stripped of deadwood and meaningless detail.
Bresson made only 13 films in a career that spanned five decades. Yet the earliest film I’ve seen, his 1945 drama Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, still has the vitality of something newly minted. The emphasis on faces and offscreen action would become hallmarks of his later films, in which he often used nonprofessional actors for their lack of mannerisms. But his sense of precision and economy were already established, as well as a moral intensity that can only be described as passion. There’s a single shot—of a fallen but virtuous woman’s face being obliterated by the shadow of her vindictive ”benefactor“—that says more about the presence of good and evil in the world than most directors accomplish in an entire film.
Individual shots may not mean much today, in a cinema ruled by music-video montage; a director like Oliver Stone uses them by the bushelful, as percussion. But by the time of 1974’s Lancelot du Lac, a gripping and thoroughly deromanticized retelling of the fall of Camelot, Bresson could use basic camera set-ups coupled with a remarkable use of offscreen sound to evoke an entire field of warfare, and the world containing it. In 1956’s harrowing POW study A Man Escaped, which drew upon Bresson’s own imprisonment in a German camp during World War II, the struggle that ends a man’s life takes place entirely offscreen; the existential dilemma of the man who takes it is conveyed without a word of dialogue.
I write this only to encourage you to seek out Robert Bresson’s movies for yourself, as I’ve only just started to do. Don’t take my word for their worth. Writing about movies should be the start of a search, the start of a discussion, never the end. It’s never a substitute for the movies themselves. Especially these movies.
—Jim Ridley
Blooming wonder
I’m sorry I don’t have more room to write about Paul Thomas Anderson’s dazzling Magnolia, which cuts with remarkable ease and dexterity among several interlocking sets of characters on a single cataclysmic day in the San Fernando Valley. As Noel Murray notes, it’s an amazing director indeed who can fuse Martin Scorsese’s speed-freak virtuosity and Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic character studies into a whole new hybrid. Yet Anderson’s work here seems vastly superior to its main reference point, Altman’s Short Cuts—even though Anderson is the one who has taken lumps for linking his characters through a spectacularly unhinged third-act catastrophe.
Magnolia expands upon the already imposing crazy-quilt structure of Anderson’s Boogie Nights, a movie I underrated when it first came out. In fact, you could describe Magnolia as Boogie Nights times two, given its doubling of every main character and incident. The rhyming plots—two delinquent fathers, two betrayed adult children, two game-show victims, two desperate lovesick loners—would seem excessive, if they didn’t reinforce Anderson’s expansive and deeply humane notion that no one is truly alone, whether s/he knows it or not.
The combination of that peculiarly innocent sentiment and Anderson’s hyperbolic bustle produces effects that are doubly moving for being so unguarded. The litmus test for the audience’s patience is a lip-synching scene set to an Aimee Mann song, to which every character voices his unspoken despair in unison. Either you’ll howl at the goofiness of the contrivance, or you’ll marvel at the director’s fearless humanism. If you’ve ever been dumbfounded by the fateful significance of a song on the radio, my guess is you’ll give in.
Among an enormous and enormously talented cast, John C. Reilly stands out as a sweet-natured cop, as does Melora Walters as an anguished addict, Julianne Moore as a guilt-stricken wife, William H. Macy as a former quiz kid, Philip Seymour Hoffman as a tender caregiver—there are too many others to mention. Except for Tom Cruise, who redefines his career with a ferocious turn as a voracious cable-TV sex guru. Spouting pre-coital sloganeering (”Respect the cock!“) with Tony Robbinsian fervor, Cruise lampoons his cocksure Top Gun persona to lacerating comic effect. Even so, he and Anderson refuse to let us overlook the humanity in his overblown boob—or the other aching souls caught in the story’s trajectory. Magnolia is a hothouse flower, all right, but its perfume is close to intoxicating.
—Jim Ridley
Fruitful
Director Lasse Hallstrom’s thoughtful adaptation of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules has been accused of being ”pro-choice,“ and if the accusers are talking about the right to safe and legal abortion, then Hallstrom’s film is guilty as charged. But abortion (as an alternative to unwanted children) is only one theme that Hallstrom illuminates from Irving’s rich text. The Cider House Rules could be more rightly described as a film about the pain of choice—about what we’re supposed to do with all our free will.
Tobey Maguire stars as Homer Wells, a passive, cheerful adult orphan who learns obstetrics and gynecology from his institutional guardian Dr. Larch (played by Michael Caine). Troubled by the doctor’s constant rule-bending and law-breaking (including serving as an abortionist), Homer leaves the orphanage to work at an orchard, following a whim and a glimpse of a lovely apple-picker named Candy (Charlize Theron). At the apple orchard—no small biblical symbolism there—Homer learns that his fear of making bad moral choices has led him to do nothing in the face of evil. And inaction is itself a choice.
Hallstrom—who made two of the best sleepers of the ’90s, Once Around and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?—worked from Irving’s own script, and it’s hard to imagine who could’ve done a better job. Hallstrom’s understated naturalism combines with stellar performances across the board, especially by the amiable Maguire, and by Delroy Lindo as the troubled (and troubling) boss of a migrant worker team. The film is so sunny and soft that it’s not until after the closing credits—while the viewer tries to make sense of a too-ambiguous ending—that the deft layering of potent religious metaphors begins to weigh heavily.
What holds The Cider House Rules back is the virtual impossibility of filming Irving’s quirky plot twists. A couple of whopper revelations late in the story shatter the mood, no matter how hard Hallstrom and his cast fight to sustain it. (The same problem plagued George Roy Hill’s otherwise fine adaptation of Irving’s The World According to Garp).
But despite the rough road, the film’s breathtaking demonstrations of how theoretical problems resonate in the real world are never less than invigorating. Hallstrom and Irving bite to the core of our sins; as the creed says, it’s about what we have done, and what we have left undone.
—Noel Murray
