Cinema: Against the Tide

Ah, magical realism.  What a wonderful literary device.  On celluloid it’s quite another story.  Dozens of filmmakers have tried, with varying degrees of success, to capture that elusive mix of matter-of-fact naturalism and whimsical flights of fancy that have turned Latin American novels like Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate into enduring works of fiction. Of the movie adaptations that ensued, only Alfonso Arau got it right when he brought Esquivel’s surreal tale of unrequited love from to the screen.

This weekend, two major holiday releases attempt to incorporate elements of magical realism into their narratives, and two others take a more conventional approach.  All four of them showcase well-known stars flexing their acting muscle by tackling roles with which we wouldn’t normally associate them.  Call it the opening salvo of Awards Season 2010.

We begin in Cabo Blanco, a village on the northern coast of Peru and the setting for Undertow, a coming-out weepie involving a closeted fisherman, his pregnant wife, and the young hottie he sleeps with on the down low.  The god-fearing folks of this fishing town pretend to look the other way when Miguel Salas (Cristian Mercado) goes out to “fix the nets.”  What he’s really up to, naturally, are sun-baked trysts on the sand with handsome painter Santiago La Rosa (Colombian heartthrob Manolo Cardona).  Hot sex is followed by stale, overly earnest bickering between the male lovers that ends with Santiago skulking away in a huff.  He’s serious about their affair; he even has a nickname for Miguel’s penis (psst…it’s Panchito).  Miguel, on the other hand, likes things just the way they are.  At home, Micaela (Tatiana Astengo) wonders why her husband turns into a cold fish whenever a chance for some fun between the sheets comes up.  As we eventually see, the feisty homemaker is nobody’s fool.

The morning after the fight he had with Santiago, Miguel wakes up and becomes apoplectic when he discovers the aspiring artist inside his home.  My heart sank when I realized that what Miguel was seeing was not his hunky playmate, but – wait for it – his ghost.  Writer-director Javier Fuentes-León can’t seem to trust the bare essentials of his story, so he adds a supernatural twist that, for me, had the adverse effect of creating more distance between Santiago and the viewer.  Cardona’s perfectly dreamy in the role, but the character amounts to little more than a walking metaphor with smoldering blue eyes.  The high-concept tightrope Fuentes-León walks here reminded me, not so much of other romantic ghost stories like Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands or Anthony Minghella’s pre-English Patient dramedy Truly, Madly, Deeply, but of that cutesy 2005 Reese Witherspoon vehicle Just Like Heaven, in which her character appears in spectral form to her apartment’s new tenant, an architect played by Mark Ruffalo.

“Come outside already,” Santiago says to assure Miguel they can walk down the street safely hand in hand, and we get the message.  It’s amusing to see the dead-lover shtick applied to a bisexual love triangle, and the earthy sensuality Cardona and Mercado exude in their scenes together makes Undertow‘s tired, twelve-steps-of-coming-out nature fairly easy to take.  Coming on the heels of Haim Tabakman’s similarly themed – and far superior – Eyes Wide Open, though, Fuentes-León’s film, Peru’s entry for this year’s Foreign Language Oscar, feels even more like recycled goods.  Undertow‘s best asset by far is its local flavor, captured by cinematographer Mauricio Vidal and art director Diana Trujillo with such an eye for detail that it made me wish the film had relegated its main storyline to the back burner and focused more on portraying the leisurely lifestyles of Cabo Blanco’s other residents.  Politically I’m all for Undertow.  It’s bound to open up dialogue about its subject matter in places where the issues it covers are still verboten.  I just feel there was a better film in here begging to come out.

I wish Fuentes-León had dealt with his film’s supernatural elements with the chutzpah and delirious abandon Darren Aronofsky displays to the nth degree  in his nutso spellbinder Black Swan.  This intense psychological thriller pulls out all the stops to tell the story of Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman, on fire), a gifted ballerina longing to play the lead in her New York-based company’s production of Swan Lake.  Her domineering mother (Barbara Hershey), an artist and retired dancer, couldn’t be prouder when Nina tells her that Thomas, her director (Vincent Cassel), has decided to go with her as the Swan Queen.  Never mind the strange rash that starts appearing on her back, or the fact that her rigorous dance technique, as tightly wound as the bun in which she ties her hair, prevents her from tapping into the dark sensuality her dual starring role demands.  Enter Lily (Extract ‘s Mila Kunis), a San Francisco transplant who tries to befriend our leading lady but who might have (cue ominous music) ulterior motives.

The grueling rehearsals begin taking their toll.  (It doesn’t help that Thomas’s unorthodox teaching methods include impulsive French kissing.  “Go home and touch yourself, he instructs.  The perv.)  As Nina slowly unravels, the film, which comes across as a cross between Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and David Cronenberg’s The Fly, goes off the deep end along with its heroine.  Down the rabbit hole.  Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.  Nina starts seeing what appears to be her doppelganger everywhere she looks.  Aronofsky accentuates these scenes with some truly unsettling sound effects.  He places you inside the mind of this delusional ingenue so that when she’s performing, we’re literally placed right next to her.  (Kudos to Matthew Libatique for his visceral camerawork.) Aronofsky fuses the naturalistic style of The Wrestler, his previous film, with the baroque visuals of his misbegotten love story The Fountain.  (How silly was that film?  During the climax it had Hugh Jackman sprouting tree leaves from his mouth!)

I kept waiting for Black Swan to take a chill pill, especially towards the end.  Kunis provides what little levity the movie has, and it could used a lot more.  There’s also a frustrating lack of spontaneity in the way Aronofsky constructs a parallel between his story and Tchaikovsky’s ballet.  Once we realize what’s really going on, the pieces fall too neatly into place, and the resolution becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Holding this wild ride together by the skin of her teeth is Portman, who surrenders herself to the part with unhinged ardor.  She gleans order out of Aronofsky’s chaos, and turns Black Swan into a wickedly sensuous fairy tale for grown-ups.

Portman’s likely awards companion, Christian Bale, does a nifty disappearing act of his own opposite Mark Wahlberg in the gritty boxing drama The Fighter.  As real-life Boston-based trainer Dicky Eklund, the Dark Knight star sheds his inhibitions along with the pounds to deliver a galvanizing portrait of a crack addict whose former glory has fallen by the wayside.  The story pivots on Dicky’s baby brother Micky Ward (Wahlberg), a welterweight who suddenly finds himself on the comeback trail.

Director David O. Russell (Three Kings) opts for a vérité approach, and as long as the film delves on the cutthroat politics of the boxing world, The Fighter rocks.  Unfortunately, the filmmaker devotes way too much screen time to Micky’s domestic troubles.  The clichés pile up fast and furious  as Micky contends with Dicky and his mother/manager Alice (Frozen River‘s Melissa Leo, channeling Edie Falco) over which trajectory his career should take.  For much of its running time, the film feels like something Billy Walsh, the temperamental auteur from HBO’s Entourage, would direct, minus that show’s self-referential satirical edge. Despite an abundance of eye-rolling moments, though, Bale’s phenomenal work leads to a rousing climax that provides just enough of a payoff for The Fighter to merit your attention.  The audience at the preview screening I attended cheered heartily at the end.   I was left wanting to see more sparring, less kitchen-table squabbling.

Noisy as they often are, The Fighter‘s shouting matches are vastly preferable to this month’s critics’ punching bag: The Tourist.  With a $17 million dollar gross over the weekend, the Hollywood debut of German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2006 Foreign Language Oscar winner The Lives of Others) is currently the nation’s second highest grossing release.  It’s number two, all right, a rancid slice of Eurocheese with all the momentum of a funeral procession.

All the elements are in place for a frothy spy caper.  Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie’s considerable star wattage? Check.  Lush photography and exquisite Venice locales? Secured.  A screenplay worked on by three Oscar winners? Call the Academy.  So why does the damn thing feel dead on arrival? Blame Henckel von Donnersmarck, who shows zero flair for creating suspense.  The story of mild mannered college math teacher Frank Tupelo (Depp), an American tourist vacationing in Europe, and Elise (Jolie), the mysterious lady on the train who seizes an opportunity to pass this putz off as a wanted thief to Interpol, must have seemed like a foolproof idea on paper.  But I put my stethoscope on this movie’s chest, and I did not detect a pulse.  Depp’s milquetoast routine wears out its welcome within the first 15 minutes, Jolie’s stiff as a mannequin as she models some classy attire, and the film features a plot twist so ludicrous that it made me want to throw a brick at the screen.  Don’t waste your time on this lifeless slog, but feel free make fun of it all you want.  It does the heart good.

As if this weren’t enough for South Florida moviegoers, this weekend marks the South Florida debut of Olivier Assayas’s Carlos, the Summer Hours director’s biopic of Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, aka Carlos the Jackal.  The uncut five-and-a-half-hour version, originally made for French TV, screens this weekend only at the Bill Cosford Cinema.  Those of you who can’t be bothered with such a marathon may opt to wait until the two-and-a-half hour Cliffs Notes edition screens next weekend, also at the Bill Cosford Cinema.  For more information go to cosfordcinema.com. My review of Carlos will run next month, when it’s slated to screen at the Miami Beach Cinematheque.

Undertow starts this Friday at the Coral Gables Art Cinema.  Manolo Cardona is scheduled to attend Friday’s showings and will be available for Q & A sessions following each screening.  For more information go to www.coralgablescinemateque.org.  Black Swan and The Fighter also start Friday at area theaters.  Should I begin taking bets as to how long it takes for The Tourist to exit theaters? On that note, happy holidays!

Category: CINEMA