Cinema: Oscar’s Margins

We all have people like Mary in our lives. The boozy, self-destructive woman at the heart of Mike Leigh’s poignant kitchen sink drama Another Year is the kind of acquaintance who shows up at your doorstep and, a few drinks later, wails to you about all her troubles before passing out in the guest bedroom. You’re left scratching your head as to why you’ve remained friends for so long.

The film, one of five new releases I’m reviewing this week, is one of this year’s Oscar nominees for Original Screenplay, and it’s easy to see why. Contrary to most filmmakers, Leigh (Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy) instructs his actors to create their characters, and it’s out of that collaboration that a script emerges. The end product this time around turns what could have been a contrived, everyone-is-connected-in-the-most-clichéd-way-possible ensemble piece into a vibrant, painfully observant look at friendship and commitment.

The bulk of Another Year is told from the perspective of Tom and Gerri (yes, they’ve heard all the jokes), a married couple in their late fifties played with effortless charm by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen (both of them Leigh regulars). She’s a therapist at a London hospital who truly feels fulfilled in helping out her patients sort out their problems. He’s an engineering geologist whose job consists of inspecting the ground underneath prospective construction sites. (His definition: “I dig holes.”) Their harmonious domestic life is a thing of beauty; it’s also a refreshing change from the marital malaise to which we’ve become accustomed in the slice-of-life genre.

Tom and Gerri’s generosity of spirit even extends to putting up with Mary, Gerri’s longtime work colleague. They’ve already memorized her life story: She married young, then after her divorce started seeing a married man who eventually put an end to the affair. “I blame my big heart. Why do I always get it wrong?” she laments to her hosts, who nod patiently. The character’s a self-pitying bundle of quirks and neuroses, but what’s truly accomplished about Lesley Manville’s raw, revelatory performance is that she earns our empathy precisely because she lays herself so bare. It’s an outrage she’s not among this year’s nominees.

Mary’s cringe-worthy behavior finally crosses the line from embarrassing to inappropriate when she starts displaying a creepy fixation on Tom and Gerri’s 30-year-old son, an unmarried immigration attorney appealingly played by Oliver Maltman. To say that Gerri’s maternal instinct kicks into gear is an understatement, but Leigh, who has divided the film into four acts (one for each season), wisely underplays the simmering tension between the characters, and that makes the conflict that develops all the more resonant.  He’s so intent in capturing the ebb and flow of a long-term relationship that he saddles the film with a few too many characters (Tom’s older brother and nephew figure prominently in the final act), but his all-encompassing humanism can’t help but make us care for these deeply flawed people. Another Year is a joy to behold.

Leigh shows us the right way to dramatize dysfunctional relations with loved ones. Southern District (Zona sur), which screened at last year’s Miami International Film Festival, gives us an insufferably navel-gazing alternative. The film’s title refers to its setting: a chic bourgeois residence in La Paz’s well-to-do neighborhood. Carola (Ninón Del Castillo) is a bossy divorcée who runs a strangely progressive household, astonishingly permissive about older son Patricio (Juan Pablo Koria) – a sex-starved trouble magnet – and more typically disapproving of her tomboyish daughter Bernarda’s in-your-face lesbianism. Rounding out the clan is little Andrés, a precocious tyke who has whole conversations with imaginary friend “Spielberg” (as in Steven) and likes to hang out from the roof and pretend he can fly. Writer-director Juan Carlos Valdivia likes to indulge in deafening metaphors, you see.

Valdivia’s got the ingredients for a biting satire, but his show-offy camerawork undermines Southern District every step of the way. The film consists of a series of elaborate, 360-degree pans intended to immerse the viewer into this hermetic world but are instead far more successful at calling attention to themselves. Carola’s codependent relationship with her servant Wilson, for instance, is often engaging, but Valdivia’s stylistic flourishes never failed to distract me from getting into the film. Chalk it up to ambitious overreaching.

Movies that try too hard seem to be trending this week. Biutiful is the latest opus from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who wowed me back in 2000 with his feature debut Amores perros. In the first of three collaborations with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (21 Grams and Babel round out the unofficial trilogy), he masterfully interwove three riveting tales of people connected by a violent car crash. With each subsequent film, though, I started to get the feeling his narratives didn’t benefit all that much from their fractured structure.  González Iñárritu ended his working relationship with Arriaga following a reportedly volatile Babel shoot.

One would think that without Arriaga’s input, González Iñárritu would try to go in a different direction, but Biutiful, named after a Spanish grade-schooler’s misspelling, finds the filmmaker’s penchant for overly deterministic nihilism completely unchecked by anything resembling levity or storytelling drive. The movie, one of this year’s nominees for Foreign Language Film, is an unremittingly grim portrait of Uxbal (Javier Bardem, another of this year’s nominees). I was going to describe his character as down-on-this-luck, but no, that doesn’t begin to do justice to the personal crises González Iñárritu piles on him. Let’s see. There’s the fact that his not-exactly-legal operation involving the sale of fake designer items by immigrants on the streets of Barcelona faces the threat of a police crackdown. There’s the strained relationship he has with his ex-wife (Maricel Álvarez, quite affecting), an alcoholic with bipolar disorder and the stress it places on their two kids.  There’s the added bonus of psychic abilities: Uxbal earns some money on the side by helping recently departed souls cross over to the other side at funerals.

Had enough? I almost forgot the best part. Early on in the movie, Uxbal’s doctor tells him he’s got terminal cancer and has only several months left to live. González Iñárritu takes enough misery to fuel five melodramas and, aided by terrific handheld camerawork from regular cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (Brokeback Mountain), subjects the viewer to two and a half hours of calamity porn. Masochists rejoice! The rest of you might be lured by Bardem who, admittedly, is sensational.  But there’s no payoff here.  Biutiful amounts to one long, self-important wallow in misery. No, gracias.

The uplifting antidote to González Iñárritu’s pessimistic worldview comes in the shape of garbage, the literal kind. In Waste Land, one of this year’s Documentary Feature Oscar nominees, director Lucy Walker (Countdown to Zero) chronicles Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s journey to create an exhibit with found objects from Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest landfill. His subject? The catadores, those hard-working souls who make a living out of picking recyclable materials from the mountains of garbage captured by cameramen Ernesto Herrmann and Dudu Miranda with a poet’s eye.

As Walker’s main subject, Muniz has the charisma and sex appeal of the young Ruben Blades but isn’t very forthcoming about his creative process. Responding to what he perceives as the “restrictive” nature of contemporary fine arts, he  intends to come up with socially conscious art that’s not propaganda. He begins by taking photographs of the catadores, which he then blows up on the floor and, with the pickers” assistance, recreates on a grand scale using materials from the landfill. The finished works are quite impressive, but I would have liked to see more behind-the-scenes footage of the assembly of these giant-sized pieces.

Waste Land

Waste Land actually works better as a human-interest story about Brazil’s poor. Walker is able to create indelible portraits of catadores such as Tião, president of Jardim Gramacho’s workers association who came upon a copy of Machiavelli’s The Prince while sorting through garbage and turned him, he claims, into a better leader. Female pickers like Isis regard her job as the “honest” alternative to turning tricks in Copacabana.

Walker is a little too adulatory of Muniz, something that most definitely wasn’t the case in the similarly themed  look at the artistic impulse, graffiti artist Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, a fellow nonfiction nominee. To Walker’s credit, though, she includes the conversation Muniz has with his creative team about the fact that, following his collaboration with the catadores, they will probably have to go back to picking garbage. At the beginning of the film, Muniz asks himself whether art can change people’s quality of life. Waste Land answers that question with a resounding yes.

To wrap up this crowded movie weekend, let’s return to the 14th Miami Jewish Film Festival, which I covered in last week’s column. The eight-day event will finish this Sunday with the Florida premiere of The Human Resources Manager, Israel’s submission to the 2011 Foreign Language Oscars. While the film didn’t make the cut as one of the final five nominees (whereas Biutiful did; go figure), believe me when I say Festival Director Ellen Wedner has saved the best for last. The latest film from director Eran Riklis (Lemon Tree), a big winner at last year’s Israeli Academy Awards, places its title character (played by Mark Ivanir, whose mercurial gravity recalls Daniel Craig) in problem-fixing mode after a paycheck from the bakery where he works is discovered on the body of a former employee who became the victim of a bombing in Jerusalem circa 2002. His boss suggests escorting the woman’s body back to her hometown in Russia, thus setting in motion an absorbing road movie when the woman’s rebellious son asks our protagonist to retrieve his grandmother to claim the body. Riklis tells a corker of a story, one that transcends community-festival-fare trappings to become an absorbing meditation on loss and personal responsibility. It’s a grabber.

The Human Resources Manager screens Sunday at 8:30 pm at Frank Theaters Intracoastal Mall Cinemas. For more information go to www.miamijewishfilmfestival.com. Waste Land premieres Thursday night at 7:30 pm at the Bill Cosford Cinema. A Q & A with the audience featuring University of Miami professors and special guest follows the screening, and the documentary will also be showing throughout this weekend only. For more information go to cosfordcinema.com. Southern District begins its exclusive U.S. theatrical run at the Coral Gables Art Cinema on Friday. Tickets to that evening’s screenings include a complimentary opening night reception; for details go to www.gablescinema.com. Biutiful begins its South Florida run on Friday at Regal South Beach Cinemas, as well as AMC Theaters Aventura and Sunset Place cinemas.  Another Year, by far the best of the bunch, starts Friday at AMC Aventura and Regal South Beach. Time to play Oscar catchup, readers.

Category: CINEMA