Capsule Reviews: A Perfect Getaway, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Marnie

A Perfect Getaway (David Twohy, 2009)

David Twohy's A Perfect Getaway is a lean, juicy thriller with a twist so good that not even an hour's worth of teasing it saps its effect. "Nothing bad ever happens in Hawaii, right?" says one character during the film's placid opening, though even then his voice betrays doubt, and Twohy's sweeping panoramas of lush forests and beaches communicate remoteness and isolation as much as postcard-ready beauty. Steady long takes let the murmurs of a double murder on a neighboring island sink into the frame visually, casting shadows on its small but dynamic cast of newlyweds and lovers who come to fear for their safety. The actors do their part too, with Steve Zahn's nervously darting eyes suggesting first humorous discomfort, then mounting dread, and Milla Jovovich getting the best opportunity outside one of her husband's films to show off her enigmatic poker face reactions. Perhaps best of all is Timothy Olyphant, almost endearingly arrogant as a "man in full" (as his girlfriend calls him) When the other shoe drops, Twohy's stately, patient direction obviously shifts into a higher gear, but this only shows off other facets of his skill. A chase through the forest is subtly propelled further by comic-panel-like screenwipes that elide over a few steps to give the sequence even more momentum. The final showdown manages to consolidate even the characters' relationships into its tense payoff. (A sidenote: stick with the streamlined theatrical version over the director's cut, which adds most of its extra time to a key flashback, nice and nasty in the original version but overlong in extended form).

The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The importance of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal cannot be overstated. It was not the first film to set off the art-house movement of the '50s (Rashomon did it at the turn of the decade seven years earlier), nor was it even the first of the European art films (the Italian neo-realist scene was already thriving). Nevertheless, it opened up the possibility of serious, philosophical work in cinema. The neo-realist films certainly lacked any melodrama, but their goal, like the Russian constructivist movement before them, stressed fact in their work. While films like Bicycle Thieves certainly contain themes that can applied to all or parts of mankind, The Seventh Seal dealt with philosophy and spirituality directly.

I watched The Seventh Seal about a year ago. The old Criterion copy was rough, with lines and scratches on the film and hisses in the audio. Recently, they used new digital technology to restore the damaged print, and the new Blu-Ray of the film is truly one of the few times I can say without irony that the result is like watching a different film. I couldn't spot a scratch anywhere, and the light hiss was replaced with a solemn quiet in the film's many moments of reflection. What had been a distracting copy was now transformed into the crisp, beautiful work of art it always was.

That is not to say, however, that the film is Bergman's defining masterpiece. Quite the contrary, it clearly displays the auteur's youth and inexperience. Themes are handled too explicitly, and Bergman's affirmation of God's existence seems a touch ironic when the knight Antonius renews his faith at his end when only Death comes to greet him. Nevertheless, it remains a masterpiece, not simply for its importance but because it survives the endless parody and the reams of critical and philosophical debate, and it feels every bit as affecting today as it must have been back then.

That opening scene, of Death coming to claim Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), remains one of the all-time great shots in cinema. Block is returning from the Crusades with his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand), and the atrocities of those wars has shattered Block's faith. He arrives on the shores of his native Sweden to find it covered in the plague. That Death should come in these circumstances is hardly surprising. Block tells the cloaked visage that his body is afraid to die, but he is not. Still, he wishes to see his wife, whom he hasn't seen in 10 years, so he challenges Death to a chess game to buy himself enough time to reach his castle.

Block's protracted game allows him to pass by a number of villages on his way home, all of which are devolving into mass panic from the wave of death sweeping through the country. Weeping men and women cry repents and flagellate themselves as they follow a group of monks. Jöns catches a robber attempting to rape a mute farm girl, only to discover that the man is the same theologian who convinced Block and him to join the Crusades in the first place. That might be the most unsettling implication in the film, though another scene, in which a girl condemned as a witch, who believes that she can see and converse with Satan, works herself into a silent terror at the stake not because of the flames, but because she sees, according to the atheistic and bitter Jöns, neither God nor Satan. She is alone in death, and that is far more terrifying that dying.

Block desperately looks for any sign of good in this terrible world, anything to prove that there is indeed a God, and that his life has not been a waste. If he finds only evil, then what was the point of fighting to spread Christianity? So, he fixates on a family of traveling actors (Nils Poppe and Bibi Andersson) and their newborn son, a picture of innocence in a world gone mad. Block requests that they accompany him to his castle, as much to give him a reminder that it's not all bad as it is to protect them from plague. When he at last does reach home, Death comes to claim everyone inside, and Block prays for help. The mute girl breaks her silence, and the next morning the actor family emerges alive to spot Death leading the knight and his followers in a solemn but slightly joyous dance of death.

For all its existentialist and religious struggles, however, I remain surprised at what a funny film this is. A cuckold finds the actor who stole his wife intent on revenge, but the two enter into nothing more than a shouting match, as Jöns feeds the simple farmer insults. Then it gets even funnier when the actor admits defeat and stabs himself with a prop knife; the farmer and his wife, unfamiliar with acting, believe him to be truly dead. "I was just starting to like him," the farmer moans. Later, that same actor climbs a tree, which Death casually saws down. "I have a performance," the actor feebly offers. "Canceled, on account of death."

That sense of humor and the undercurrent of creative passion make The Seventh Seal an enduring masterpiece even when Bergman went on to bigger and better things. Its affirmation of a God, compared to the almost imperceptible re-awakening of faith in The Silence, is too clunky and facile. Nevertheless, its renewal of faith comes via the realization of a man that some acts give life meaning, and they need not be grand gestures. That is a far better and more intuitive epiphany than a somewhat forced religious affirmation.

Still, the only other film to deal with a crisis of faith so effectively at the time is Carl Dreyer's (admittedly superior) Ordet, made two years earlier. It dealt with lad who appeared crazy because he believed himself to be Jesus, but in the end turned out to unsettle us only because he had true, unwavering faith, and that is frightening to those who don't have it. (Bergman's own Through a Glass Darkly veers closer to this plot than The Seventh Seal). Gunnar Fischer may not be Sven Nykvist, but his cinematography, at last appreciable thanks to Criterion's magnificent re-issue, sets the tone of the film as much as Bergman's contemplative dialogue and plotting. Even in these early stages, Bergman knew a great deal about camera placement and mise-en-scène, and it ensures that The Seventh Seal will live on forever as not just a leap forward in philosophical cinema but one of the most hauntingly beautiful films ever made.

Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957)

The more Bergman films I watch the more I find myself arriving at one conclusion: Ingmar Bergman makes psychoanalysis in film redundant. Anyone who even thinks of examining part or all of the human condition is at least indirectly ripping him off if not outright stealing (see: Woody Allen, though this isn't meant as a slight). Anyone who doesn't almost certainly made a terrible film. His films do not so much examine the existential quandaries of existence so much as dive head-first into the mind itself, and the results are often bleak. However, his 1957 masterpiece Wild Strawberries offers a rare and (unlike the tacked-on ending of Through a Glass Darkly) unforced nugget of hope.

Bergman uses the film to follow Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom, in a masterful performance) as he travels from Stockholm to Lund in order to receive an honorary degree from Lund University after 50 years of practicing medicine. At first he plans to take a plane, but at the start of the film suffers from a nightmarish vision of a driver-less wagon bearing his own coffin, and this prompts him to take a car instead. If this were made today we'd have to listen to the umpteenth joke about plane safety vs. car safety, but I can't say I blame him for being shaken.

Accompanying Isak is his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who drives the car as Isak slips in and out of remembrances, dreams, and nightmares. The two speak about life and Marianne's relationship with Isak's son. Not long after, Marianne admits that she does not care for Isak very much. This moment of frankness hurts the man, and it only furthers his feelings of life wasted and depression.

Bergman presents Borg's dreams in a then-unique manner: he offers no visual clues to distinguish between reality and hallucination. "What if you could make a film about this that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door," the director wondered, "and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives." Isak interacts with figures from his childhood, bringing to light old joys and great regret.

The most prominent of these figures from his past is his cousin Sara (Bibi Andersson). The symbol of his youthful passion and vigor, Sara ultimately becomes the turning point in Isak's life when she informs him that she's marrying Isak's brother. We see the old man relive this conversation with his vision, and the pain etched on Sjostrom's face is almost unbearable. Sara ends up in the car later with two friends, and she brings with her all the freshness and exuberance of youth back into Isak's life.

Bergman never lets his metaphors and philosophical musings get too dense to be examined, but he certainly never condescends to us. After Sara and her friends join the ride, Marianne picks up a married couple after they two parties are involved in a near-fatal accident. But their vicious bickering eventually becomes too much, and Marianne dumps them out on the roadside. Near the end of the film, Isak suffers his most disturbing nightmare: he finds himself in a medical cross-examination lead by the husband. Suddenly unable to remember anything about medicine -- he even diagnoses the husband's conscious wife as deceased -- Isak is found incompetent and the husband harangues him for being passionless and crippled by regret. Where Sara and co. brought back a touch of Isak's youth, this couple only reminded him of the failures and misery of his life and marriage after Sara married another man.

Some of you might be wondering when that "hope" I mentioned shines through here. Isak and Marianne finally arrive in Lund, and Isak has a sort of epiphany. He sighs "I am dead. Although, I am alive," a reconciliation of his bright youth with the regrets of his adulthood and the fears of his twilight. It's not exactly a Hollywood ending, but it gives Isak a sense of inner peace without invalidating the dark personal quest that brought him here. It offers a sense of hope for the man, which is lighter than we normally get from the director. Bergman even throws in a joke or two this time: when Isak finally makes it to Lund after all of his visions and nightmares, a woman says to him warmly, "A nice drive is relaxing, isn't it?"