Werth: Hi, Wise!
Wise: Hi, Werth!
Werth: Are you excited for the old classic that's returning to movie theaters this weekend?
Wise: Are you referring to The Evil Dead?
Werth: Yes... and Robert Redford's in a new movie too.
Wise: Oh, The Company You Keep, Redford's latest directorial effort where he plays a former sixties radical with a new identity who goes on the run when reporter Shia Labeouf begins sniffing around his past.
Werth: Redford's been pretty picky about what film projects he'll do of late. His last trip to the big screen was 2005's stinker Lions for Lambs.
Wise: He also kept himself busy off-screen directing a film about the assassination of Lincoln.
Werth: One of Redford's films was assassinated in 1974. Directed by Jack Clayton and adapted by Francis Ford Coppola, the third film version of F. Scoot Fitzgerald's Jazz Age bible The Great Gatsby stars Redford as wealthy entrepreneur/con man Jay Gatsby and Mia Farrow as his long-lost love Daisy Buchanan. Going over the plot feels silly, since I know everyone had to read the book in high school, so instead I'll gab about how the film is as disappointing as a glass of bad bathtub gin.
Wise: There's no such thing as bad bathtub gin, just bad mixer.
Werth: I'm going to Charleston around the great books vs. movies debate by saying movies based on iconic literature can be successful if they either nail the visuals that the book evokes or re-imagine them. Gatsby does neither of these things.
The parties and the people in Fitzgerald's novel are so vivid, that it's shocking to see that cinematographer Douglas Slocombe shot everything with a bland, fuzzy wash that makes the entire picture look like a Seventies Olan Mills family portrait. Perhaps Slocombe was going for the idea that Fitzgerald's world was dreamlike, but what he winds-up with is a film that lacks visual depth.
The party scenes shot on the finest lawns of Newport, Rhode Island, in particular, lack color and energy and evoke forced fun rather than a decade that is burning itself up with the ecstasy of champagne and short skirts.
Floating about in designs by Ralph Lauren and Oscar-winner Theoni V. Aldredge, Redford and Farrow use their best assets to bring Gatsby and Daisy to life, but their screen personae get in the way of fully realizing Fitzgerald's doomed lovers. Farrow captures the child-like, dreamy quality of Daisy, but she doesn't bring the necessary mercenary flapper mentality to the screen.
Redford looks the part of an unbelievably handsome man searching for something he lost, but Redford's frank, earthy qualities that made him a superstar in the late Sixties and Seventies clash with the calculating, dishonest enigma that is supposed to be Gatsby.
Wise: Gatsby's no Sundance Kid.
Werth: The film does have some bright spots. Lois Chiles as Jordan Baker is sultry and sensuous, like a frosty temptress who might melt you, but never herself. And Karen Black is perfect as Myrtle Wilson, her imperfect beauty and innate cheapness making this gas station mistress as tragic a figure as she should be.
Clayton gets the visuals right for the Valley of Ashes and the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckelberg, capturing elements of the fantastic that exist in the minds of Fitzgerald's readers. But the green light at the end of Daisy's dock isn't bright enough to make this film the definitive depiction of The Great Gatsby. We'll see how Baz Luhrmann does with it.
Wise: Redford had better luck directing and playing the title role in The Horse Whisperer (1998). As Tom Booker, a strong, silent type with a penchant for healing traumatized equines, he's called upon by Annie MacLean (Kristin Scott Thomas), a New York editor who believes that his methods are the only chance her daughter Grace (a young Scarlett Johansson) has to recover from a serious riding accident.
Annie and Grace move to Montana with Grace's troubled horse Pilgrim and embark on a journey of self-discovery. Along the way and with Annie's help, Tom begins to address his own past traumas .
Werth: Did he not get the pony he always wanted when he was a little boy?
Wise: The film never quite finds the correct balance between Tom's cowboy stoicism and the more emotional drama of Annie and Grace. Still, there are some great performances, particularly by Redford who epitomizes male tortured beauty.
Kristin Scott Tomas is fantastic in whatever she does, although she's hampered here by an unfortunate, although period appropriate haircut, that in retrospect makes her look less like hard-edged career woman and more like a Wilson Phillips superfan.
Werth: Hold on for one more day, Kristin.
Wise: Chris Cooper and Dianne Wiest have small, yet pivotal roles in the film as part of Tom's extended family. Scarlett Johansson doesn't have much to do besides look sullen and haunted which she does adequately, but whenever the script calls for more emotion, she begins to perform something more like a Theda Bara impersonator, although without the subtlety.
The main reasons to see the film are Redford and Scott Thomas's performances, plus the gorgeous cinematography by Robert Richardson who captures both the harsh angularity of New York as well as the gorgeous yet forbidding Montana landscape. The Horse Whisperer isn't one of Redford's best, but it does have an addictive quality to it that makes it a familiar pleasure to return to.
Werth: Kind of like returning each week for a brand new Film Gab.
Wise: Wild horses couldn't keep me away, although too much Scarlett Johanssen might.
Werth: A very Presidential day to you, Wise.
Wise: A very Presidential day to you, Werth. It feels so good to have all this election mess behind us.
Werth: And if a Presidential election wasn't enough, Steven Speilberg is releasing his opus to Lincoln today.
Wise: An emancipator and vampire hunter.
Werth: Presidential movies could almost be a genre unto themselves. One in particular that stuck with me was Oliver Stone's mother-of-all conspiracies flick, JFK (1991). Riding high from critical and box office successes like Platoon (1986), Wall Street (1987) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Stone decided to tackle the story of New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison who in 1966, attempted to uncover the hidden details of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy by trying local businessman Clay Shaw for his supposed involvement in the shooting.
What starts off like a documentary complete with Martin Sheen voice-over quickly becomes an involved murder-mystery with Kevin Costner as New Orleans' answer to Jessica Fletcher.
Wise: Does he ride a bike with a basket?
Werth: Soon the web of criminal lowlifes, gay hustlers, mafioso, Cuban militants, CIA, FBI and Pentagon Black Ops operatives ensnares Garrison and his crack team of investigators, revealing a confusing jumble of possible motives and participants in what was arguably one of the most significant events in modern American history.
Stone is fully invested in this tale that he's telling—and I am calling it a tale, because much of it is either unverifiable or has been disputed by various sources. On the one hand, this makes Stone look like a late-night public access television nutjob, but his cinematic exposé is so skillfully directed that it cannot be brushed-off so easily.
Stone cannily mixes documentary footage, traditional cinematic camerawork, and vérité-style recreations to give the appearance of visual truth to what he's saying. The flashbacks are dream-like—handheld camera and fast-cuts that make us feel as if we are remembering these fragments. It is a very smart technique that mixes the "truth" into what we are seeing, making us leave the theater with the feeling that we've discovered what really happened.
Wise: I'll bet it wasn't Colonel Mustard in the parlor with the third gunman.
Werth: The film takes itself very seriously for over three hours. Costner's final "coup d'etat"-filled, patriotic appeal to the jury is painful—like a root canal performed by a civics teacher. But within this ode to paranoia and the essence of America is a veritable who's-who of the best film actors from the Nineties.
The melange of Southern performances includes Sissy Spacek as Garrison's long-suffering wife; Joe Pesci as what is best described as a foul-mouthed grandmother with an ill-fitting wig and Joan Crawford scarebrows; Gary Oldman as marble-mouthed Lee Harvey Oswald; and
Best Supporting Actor nominee Tommy Lee Jones in a double-role as Shaw who is sanctimoniously butch while he is questioned, but an effete dandy in flashbacks where he paws Kevin Bacon and smokes a cigarette like Quentin Crisp.
Wise: Are you sure it was cigarettes that he was smoking?
Werth: JFK netted 8 Oscar noms including Best Picture and Best Director, but for Stone this marked the last time he has been seriously considered for either statuette. And if Stone has been haunted by this ill-fated president, so has Hollywood. 1992 saw the release of the Michelle Pfeiffer starrer Love Field about an unhappy Texas housewife who travels to the President's funeral,
Forrest Gump memorably (and digitally) met J.F.K. in 1994's Forrest Gump, and Jonathan Demme has been reported to be involved in the screen adaptation of Stephen King's 11/22/63 about a man who travels back in time to try and stop the assassination.
Wise: Presidential assassinations must be irresistible to filmmakers because the crime unearths so much legal, political and personal drama. In The Conspirator (2010), Robert Redford dramatizes the trial of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) who was accused of being part of the plot to assassinate Lincoln. Defending her is young lawyer and Union Army veteran Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) who only takes the case at the insistence of his mentor U.S. Senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson delivering the requisite moonlight and magnolia as well as a certain noble porkiness)
At first reluctant to take the case, Aiken is eventually convinced that a government plot is afoot to railroad Surratt to the gallows.
Werth: Because every assassination movie requires a crusading lawyer.
Wise: Despite a ragged beard and floppy bangs, McAvoy feels a bit anachronistic, particularly because of the obvious parallels the film makes to Abu Ghraib and and the prosecution of the current War on Terror. The prisoners are shrouded by hoods, kept in dank cells, and denied a civilian trial.
Kevin Kline plays sinister Secretary of War Edwin Stanton who manipulates events behind the scenes all in the name of providing stability in the face of national terror. Director Robert Redford, who is almost as famous for his politics as for his storied film career, pays equal attention to both his historical and allegorical subjects, but has some trouble effectively weaving the two together.
Werth: Speaking of weave, have you seem Redford's hair lately?
Wise: The best part of the film is Robin Wright's Surratt. In addition to both looking and acting believably as a 19th Century woman, she also creates a stirring portrait of a mother who would rather face down an undeserved death than condemn her son to the noose.
The rest of the cast is more or less successful: Evan Rachel Wood and Alexis Bledel have a few nice moments as Surratt's daughter and Aiken's fiancée, respectively, although Justin Long as one of Aiken's war buddies feels out of place despite his charms in other roles.
Werth: It's hard to be a Mac Guy in the late 1800's.
Wise: Despite the title, the film never fully achieves the conspiracy-mindedness that can make this type of movie so satisfying. Perhaps Redford tried to shoehorn too much nobility into the project and never allowed the secret dealings of either side to become truly unsettling. Which is unfortunate because by neutering the plotters of their machinations, he robs the heroes of their virtue.
Werth: Wise, I hope post-election exhaustion isn't going to rob me of your presence next week.
Wise: I cannot tell a lie, nothing could ever keep me away from Film Gab.
Werth: One, two, three, four, five—
Wise: Are you practicing for your advanced math classes, Werth?
Werth: No, I'm counting the number of out-of-work action stars who are making a comeback in The Expendables 2.
Wise: You'll need an abacus for that.
Werth: While I'm not a huge fan of the mindless action genre, I think it's great that actors like Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger can put their golf clubs down and show up for hair and makeup.
Wise: The ones who still have hair.
Werth: That kind of comeback reminds me of my favorite star resurgence flick, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962).
Wise: Speaking of wigs and makeup.
Werth: When Robert Aldrich started pitching his cinematic take on Henry Farrell's novel, the studios were not biting. Not helping matters was the fact that the two stars of the film were stars in memory only. Neither Joan Crawford nor Bette Davis had much caché left at the box office after glorious careers as marquee headliners.
These famous leading ladies had been relegated to playing old baglady mothers (Davis as Apple Annie in Pocketful of Miracles (1961)) and ball-breaking bitch bosses (Crawford as Amanda Farrow in The Best of Everything (1959)). But after slashing the budget, Aldrich was able to convince Jack Warner to distribute the film, even if, as Warner was accused of saying, "I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for those two old broads."
Wise: I guess he was busy plugging other broads.
Werth: Baby Jane opens in 1917 in a vaudeville hall where the "Diminutive Dancing Duse from Duluth," Baby Jane Hudson (a sickeningly perky Julie Allred), taps and sings her way through her juvenile number, "I've Written a Letter to Daddy." An offstage tantrum reveals a rift between her and her older, un-famous sister Blanche (Gina Gillespie).
Fast forward to a screening room in 1935 where studio execs are screening the grown-up Jane in her latest flop (the footage is actually of Davis from 1933's Parachute Jumper) and wondering why they have to work with this hopeless has-been. The reason? Her hugely successful, movie star sister Blanche's contract requires that Jane get work too.
Wise: The drab older sister also rises.
Werth: But those tables turn again as a cinematically edited accident leaves us with the idea that the spoiled Jane has run over her sister with a car. The film then jumps again in time to the early 1960's where we find Blanche (Crawford) regally sitting in her wheelchair watching one of her old movies on TV (real footage from her hit Sadie McKee (1934)). Jane (Davis) tromps into the room looking like Mrs. Haversham after a mime class and the bitch-fest begins.
The great fun of this movie has always, and will always be the amazing chemistry between these two actresses. The sparks don't fly, they explode as Jane abuses Blanche and Blanche struggles to survive. Much was made in the press of how much Crawford and Davis hated each other, and perhaps that PR agent creation has colored our modern viewing of the film.
No one would be silly enough to say that these two titans of the silver screen liked each other, but by most reputable accounts they were nothing but professional on set. So that leaves us with two amazing actresses who were able to not only create unique opposing characters, but a complicated and emotionally engaging screen relationship with each other.
Wise: Which can't be said for those limp dishrags from Twilight.
Werth: Baby Jane is fascinating in that not only do we see a conflict between Davis/Jane and Crawford/Blanche, but Aldrich also seems torn between worshipping these old movie stars and degrading them. On the one hand we know their mythic reputations and get glimpses of their old work, but on the other, Davis transforms into a painful-to-look-at pyschotic harridan and Crawford is physically brutalized.
While neither actress came out of this movie "looking" good, Davis was nominated for an Oscar and both stars had a resurgence in their careers—even if it was made up of more horror schlock like Davis' Dead Ringer (1964) and The Nanny (1965) and Crawford's dalliances with William Castle in Strait-Jacket (1964) and I Saw What You Did (1965). Still, Baby Jane was a wonderful opportunity to remind the world that these two stars still had plenty of shine in them.
Wise: Even stars who haven't been eclipsed by the next generation sometimes need a career re-invention. After two decades of being America's TV sweetheart, Mary Tyler Moore left behind the quirky world of sitcoms for Robert Redford's directorial debut Ordinary People (1980). In it, she plays Beth Jarrett, a perfect suburban mother gone brittle and cold after the death of one son and the suicide attempt of the other.
Werth: That is definitely not a plotline for The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Wise: Based on the novel by Judith Guest, the film focuses on Beth's depressed son Conrad (Oscar-winning Timothy Hutton) and his attempts to return to normalcy despite the guilt he feels for not being able to save his brother in a boating accident. Helping him along the way is psychiatrist Dr. Berger (Judd Hirsch gently stepping away from his smarmier Taxi persona) and his father Calvin (Donald Sutherland) who nobly, although fruitlessly, attempts to reconcile mother and son.
Werth: He should have just called in Lou Grant to take care of it.
Wise: Moore is terrifying in the role. After years of playing appealing gals with spunk, she makes Beth utterly unapproachable—all jutting elbows, strained throat, pursed lips. But unlike a lot of other actors' attempts at image reboots, Moore's past success actually enhances her work here.
The warmth of her sitcom performaces throws her portrayal of Beth into greater relief, allowing her to make Beth colder and more vicious than just about any other actor could. The audience longs for—along with her damaged, hurting son—the warmth of the person beneath this icy façade.
Werth: Icy façade or plastic surgery?
Wise: Redford's direction, aside from displaying great sensitivity to the subject, is very clever about the way he uses his actors. After all, he was in the midst of transforming himself from matinee idol to auteur, and cannily plays with audience expectations.
Among other things, Ordinary People is about a golden boy who doesn't survive, and the scrappier, more emotionally messy sibling who does. Redford uses that model for himself and his actors—especially Moore—escaping the gilded perfections of the past for a more complicated vision of the present.
Werth: Well faithful readers, make sure your complicated vision is focused on next week's Film Gab!
