Cinema: She Loves Me, She Loves Me Not
It’s been a month since I saw Derek Cianfrance’s bruising breakup romance Blue Valentine, and there’s a particular scene that keeps playing in my head like a broken record. It involves Dean, an underachieving mover played by Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson) with trademark intensity, showing a soft spot for the war veteran whose belongings he’s been assigned to transport to a retirement home. The care he displays decorating the elderly man’s cramped room endeared me to the character, and it made the emotionally draining scenes that follow that much easier to take.
The scene ends with Dean standing by the door, looking straight at the camera. Someone has caught his eye, and that smitten look is just about the most effective instance of love at first sight I’ve seen at the movies in years. The object of his googly-eyed stare is Cindy (Michelle Williams), a shy, soft-spoken college girl visiting Grandma at the old folks home. If Blue Valentine, one of three movies I’m reviewing this week, is starting to sound like another Amerindie copycat of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Before Sunset films, rest assured Cianfrance has more than a chance rendezvous on his mind.
Blue Valentine, which polarized audiences at Sundance and Cannes last year with its Bergman-by-way-of-Cassavettes aesthetic, is actually two films in one. Cianfrance begins by showing Dean and Cindy a few years later, unhappily married and raising a daughter, and then he continues to cut back and forth between this time frame and those heady days when they first met. What he’s going for here is to explore how the seeds of marital discord were already apparent during the couple’s courtship. Cindy, who’s been kind of seeing one of her classmates, is wary about Dean’s enthusiastic advances, but she connects with the handsome high school dropout despite that little voice in her head telling her he’s just not good enough for her. She tells him about her plans to become a doctor and, in a lovely sequence, starts dancing for him when he asks her if she has any hidden talents. The big elephant in the room, of course, is Dean’s lack of career ambition.
Cut to the present, with Dean, eking out a living painting houses, making one last-ditch attempt to rekindle the flame by, get this, booking the “future suite” at this cheesy motel with themed rooms. The disastrous night that follows, in which Dean aggressively makes the moves on Cindy when she’s not really into it, originally got the film slapped with an NC-17 rating, which has since been downgraded to an R after the Weinstein brothers, whose company is releasing the film, appealed to the MPAA. What the ratings board was responding to, I think, was the painful degree of intimacy that Cianfrance was able to coax out of his two stars. Their lived-in portrayals are a thing of beauty; their organic body language effortlessly takes the viewer up close and personal into this marital meltdown. (Indeed, one wonders why the Weinsteins opted not to make photos from the present-day portion of the film readily available to the press; Gosling’s way hotter with the receding hairline and scruffy facial hair.)
The film’s piercing depiction of a crumbling marriage makes Cianfrance’s insistence to open up his narrative all the more superfluous. Events come to a boil at the OB-GYN office where Cindy works as an assistant (nope, didn’t quite make it to that PhD). Dean storms in the morning after she decides to use a call to come into work as an excuse to abandon him at the “future room.” The scene is explosive and well performed by everyone involved (Angels in America’s Ben Shenkman, in particular, is quite effective as the doctor who has the hots for Cindy), but it feels contrived and unnecessary when compared with the raw naturalism in the scenes, past and present, that precede it. Even when Cianfrance bites off more than he can chew story-wise, though, Blue Valentine is a keeper, thanks in large part to Gosling and Williams. Their heartrending work here give you the sense these talented actors, both 30, are just warming up. Scary.
Think Blue Valentine sounds like too much of a downer? Trust me, it’s far preferable to the alternative. The South African comedy of errors White Wedding, a word-of-mouth festival hit opening this weekend for a limited run at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, is a stinker, further proof that lousy, flavorless rom-coms can come from anywhere. Think Our Family Wedding with an anti-Apartheid message; yep, there’s even a goat in this one, too.
The story kicks into gear when Elvis, the perennially grinning groom-to-be (Kenneth Nkosi), agrees to drive down with best friend/best man Tumi (Rapulana Seiphemo) to Cape Town, where his fiancée Ayanda (Zandile Msutwana), is waiting for him. A series of mishaps (i.e. Tumi’s jealous girlfriend, a recently dumped English stowaway) threatens the men’s chances at getting to the wedding on time. Tony, Ayanda’s wealthy, cheating ex-boyfriend (Mbulelo Grootboom) takes advantage of Elvis’s absence to sweet-talk the future bride into getting back with him, to the delight of Ayanda’s mom (Sylvia Mngxekeza), who deems Tony, with his sizable income and sharp-dressed style, the better suitor. “He’s a real man, and he’s circumcised,” she tells Ayanda, who dreams of subdued, tastefully Westernized nuptials. Not while she’s breathing, counters Mom, who recruits her girlfriends to help her cook a banquet for the entire village.
The refusal of Ayanda’s mother to give in to her daughter’s wishes hints at the movie White Wedding could have been, but first-time director Jann Turner spends the bulk of the film following Elvis and Tumi’s on-the-road shenanigans, which include some Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner-style bonding with the rowdy, cheerfully bigoted Afrikaner regulars at a small-town pub. I was hoping to see some of the broad slapstick that made the better-known African import The Gods Must Be Crazy such a hoot, but Turner’s awkwardly staged culture clash leeches all the fun out of the movie. For White Wedding to have worked, it was essential for us to want these two leads to be together, but the relationship is too thinly drawn for us to buy it. All we’re left with is a meandering road movie that goes endlessly in circles as it gets to its telegraphed-far-in-advance happily-ever-after. Feel-good my ass.
If Blue Valentine is a portrait of marital meltdown and White Wedding provides a sunnier look at the gestation of a marriage, George Hickenlooper’s Casino Jack, a seriocomic look at disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, is about a man’s love affair with himself. Kevin Spacey’s umpteenth Oscar bid (he’s up for a Golden Globe Award this Sunday) nails Abramoff’s mannerisms but doesn’t quite capture his slimy sex appeal. Ditto the movie, which strives for snide satire but falls somewhere between tongue-in-cheek biopic and cautionary docudrama. Spacey’s no stranger to this fact-based politically minded fare; in the far superior Recount, he played Al Gore’s Chief of Staff Ron Klain in the aftermath of the 2000 general elections.
Hickenlooper, whose credits include Hearts of Darkness, the phenomenal documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, died in his sleep at age 47 on October 30, just before he was scheduled to fly in to introduce the film at last year’s Fort Lauderdale Film Festival. He had the right idea to play Abramoff’s troubles for laughs (he actually met with his real-life subject several times in jail while preparing for this film), but unfortunately, he lacked the chops to pull it off. Let’s try to remember him for his best work, not this awards-season also-ran, which could have used more of Jon Lovitz’s sleazy abandon. The former Subway spokesperson’s inspired turn as SunCruz Casinos owner Adam Kidan is annoying – and right on the money – in ways this noble failure was too timid to be.
Casino Jack is currently playing at Regal South Beach Cinemas and Frank Theaters’ Intracoastal 8. Blue Valentine starts Friday at Regal South Beach Cinemas and AMC Theaters Aventura and Sunset Place multiplexes. For showtimes of White Wedding go to gablescinema.com.
Category: CINEMA
