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The Wasteland By John Pavlus With due apologies to Mr. Eliot, every filmgoer in the country knows exactly what that phrase is really describing, and it's got nothing to do with English Lit. It refers to that horrid dumping ground, stretching across late winter and early spring, where the film industry's collected detritus is unceremoniously littered. Sure, garbage washes up on the screens year-round, but there's no denying that the tide of crap is at its greatest ebb within the post-holiday dead zone. Supernova, Down to You, Eye of the Beholder--you don't need me to tell you these flicks suck. So, in the meantime, here are some worthier films that missed the Buzzsaw treatment in '99. As for me, I'll be hibernating until after the Oscars. Any Given Sunday Directed by Oliver Stone Sports are on a continuum. On one side is golf; on the other are jock sports. Of that latter category, football is the ultimate--and to exploit the commonly associated stereotype, Any Given Sunday is a jock movie. It's brawny and muscular, loud and obnoxious, crass and inelegant. It bludgeons you for attention and then far overstays its welcome. I hate stereotypical jocks, and I hated this film. That said, I will admit that Oliver Stone's gridiron guignol does contain some fantastic moments. Embattled coach Tony D'Amato (Al Pacino), roaring mid game in extreme closeup, his rugged cheeks quivering with volcanic passion; a horde of dark-visored players marching to the line in slow motion like a rolling thunderhead; a quarterback savagely sacked, his helmet blasted off by the impact. Seeing a pattern yet? The sad truth: Anything not included in the two-minute trailer is dead weight, and the film is nearly three hours long. The mathematics are damning, to say the least. Oddly, the movie has the Frankensteinian appearance of an abomination wrought from decent raw materials. The near-future setting, with its fictional teams and invented politics, is intriguing, but whatever compelling coherency may have dwelled within John Logan's original script has been Stone-ized out. The overloaded cast of characters (Jamie Foxx's upstart QB excepted) has neither the time nor the space to evolve beyond a collection of one-dimensional sketches, and although the actors are accomplished, distinguishing true performances is difficult because of the film's cuisinart style editing. The games, characters, and relationships all look like they were once whole and effective, then slashed to shreds and reassembled scattershot. This is the same director who made an hour-long courtroom scene seem dynamic in JFK, but you'd never know it from watching this overbearing, overlong, overedited mess. The NFL reportedly fumed at Stone's thinly veiled portrait, but why? In comparison, the real thing has never looked so good. Felicia's Journey Directed by Atom Egoyan Felicia's Journey, as its title implies, is a film more about connections and transitions than individual images. Not that the Canadian writer-director can't produce powerful visuals--the haunting sight of an entire schoolbus sinking into a frozen lake like a small toy in The Sweet Hereafter is testament to that. But in this newer, smaller film, the eerie resonance Egoyan is known for resides more in the space between scenes, the infinitesimal gaps separating moments in time. Hereafter displayed his skill at exploiting such cinematic synapses for narrative purposes; with Felicia's Journey he's keenly aware of their depth as well, of how the nuances of character can accumulate there, slowly accreting into forms that surprise and unnerve while still seeming somehow inevitable. So when, 20 minutes into the film, you start to feel the prickly stirrings of dread but can't quite place why, rest assured: You're not imagining things. And all will become chillingly clear in time. Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), a pretty Irish lass with guileless eyes and a bashful smile, is above all things, naive. Naive to think that Johnny, the boy who got her pregnant, really loves her. Naive to believe him when he says he's leaving to "work in a lawnmower factory" but doesn't give her his address. And naive in the extreme to embark alone on a trip to England to find him, with nothing in her pockets but a few pounds borrowed from her ailing grandmother. Unsurprisingly, her quest meets with little success, and she's only too happy to accept the helpful advances of a kind stranger, Mr. Hilditch (Bob Hoskins). Hilditch, the catering manager of one of the factories Felicia wanders into, is a rotund, sensitive man who hand-delivers hot samples of his daily entrees to workers on the floor. He offers Felicia directions, a lift to a nearby manufacturing plant, and consolation when she fails to find her lover there. A fastidiously generous soul, Hilditch just wants to help as much as he can--so he's a bit thrown when, upon offering the girl a free room for the night, a guarded look crosses her face and she takes off running. Still, Hilditch isn't too worried; he's already taken steps to make sure their paths will cross again soon, whether Felicia likes it or not. What could have been a perfectly adequate suspense thriller turns out to be a superlatively rendered double portrait instead. The intricately patterned characterizations of Felicia and Hilditch are revealed with tantalizing deliberation, like oriental rugs unfurling in tandem. Wandering the streets with her schoolyard backpack and insensible shoes, Felicia is the quintessence of oblivious innocence, and Cassidy's understated performance poignantly captures her wounded bewilderment at the rude awakenings she receives. Hoskins's work, however, dominates the film. As Hilditch, he mixes quirkiness, sensitivity, and just the right amount of creepy obsessiveness in a way that continually and empathically reinvents the character. As he softly croons a lullabye to an unconscious Felicia, he manages to be both undeniably menacing and heartbreakingly tender--a magnificent feat. Egoyan lavishes so much attention on Hilditch that the casual viewer might come away thinking the film was mistitled. It's not. On this journey, the traveler simply has the most to learn from her guide along the way. Magnolia Directed by P.T. Anderson Magnolia represents what all young filmmakers should strive to achieve. I'm not talking about the film itself--bizarre, unwieldy behemoth that it is, often teetering on the precipice of outright self-indulgence--but rather the fact that the suits at New Line heard Anderson's pitch and nodded their heads in approval instead of tossing him out on his ass. That someone this young and relatively inexperienced (29 years old, only 2 features under his belt) was allowed to make such a brazenly idiosyncratic juggernaut on a studio's dime, and then not be drawn and quartered for it, is nothing short of a miracle. The film itself, though, is a mixed bag. The opening sequence, which sets up the film's hazy thesis about the significance of coincidence and fate, nicely embodies Anderson's proven strengths: It's brisk, dynamic, and clever. But then the "real" story starts, and suddenly some mad Anderson-doppelganger seems to have taken control as the film's ten-odd characters are projectile-vomited onscreen in a froth of overdriven pacing, gratuitous camerabatics, and obnoxious music. Things thankfully slow down soon after, but save for a jaw-droppingly brilliant surprise climax, the adrenalized virtuosity that crackled throughout Boogie Nights never quite seems to materialize here. The three-hour length seems daunting, but because there's no real arc to be completed and then OVERKILLED (a common criticism of Boogie Nights), Magnolia rarely drags. The characters are everything, and Anderson offers up quite a smorgasbord: A coke slut, a trophy wife, a dying TV producer, his doting male nurse and jilted son, a righteous cop, a game-show host, and two child prodigies (one young and impressionable, the other adult and atrophied). Tom "jilted son" Cruise, brash and seething as a professional mysoginist, undeniably owns the screen--when he's not there, you want him back fast- but John "righteous cop" Reilly and Phillip "doting nurse" Hoffman are just as stirring in their quieter roles. The tale of kid genius/game-show slave Stanley Berry is another standout, but Anderson regrettably sidelines it, favoring the histrionic scenery-chewing of Melora "coke slut" Walters and Julianne "trophy wife" Moore. And William H. Macy as Quiz Kid Donnie Smith--skulking about like a pathetic ghost of Stanley's future, spouting cryptic platitudes like "I have so much love to give"--is all but wasted. Still, Magnolia is definitely worth seeing, if only for its sheer cinematic audacity. Though less so than the opening sequence would imply, the tangentially--crossing strands do form a compelling web. Anderson's no slouch--he juggles his disparate narratives with surer hands than most. But don't be surprised when, in the end, a good portion of the balls still wind up the floor. John Pavlus is a senior film production major at Ithaca College. |
