Contagion (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)

For about 45-50 minutes, Contagion had me ready to run home, duct-tape the seals of my house and never come into contact with a human being again. Steven Soderbergh's detached, "so this is how the world ends" direction and and crisp, clinical cinematography effectively built fear through a steady profession of paranoia escalating from backdoor, classified whispers over vague data to full-on societal panic. Soderbergh's classical style makes even his transcontinental montage intelligible, and his experiments with asynchronous sound and image separates the aesthetic from the action even more, giving it a paradoxically compelling flatness that reminded me of the purportedly meek delivery Jonathan Edwards gave to the fiery words of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a mild intellectual remove that only makes the impact that much more powerful.

Then, cracks started to form. Contagion boasts the largest, most geographically disconnected cast of any of his films since Traffic, a film that shares more than a few stylistic and structural traits with Contagion and even seems the thematic inverse of this movie. But like Traffic, Contagion spreads itself too thin, across too many people and too many locations without being reliant upon any of them. The emotional distance of such incessant cross-cutting gives way to a belated, almost arbitrary stab at sentimentality that burdens Soderbergh's film with calculated schmaltz that clashes garishly with the studious, medical examiner feel of the rest of the movie. Funnily enough, this is the rare film that actually suffers for its attempts at humanity.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Love is a dangerous game. It's a nerve-wracking, devastating affair full of desperation, anger, regret, and a pain so indescribable that all the music in the world has never captured it all. At least, that's what love represents when you lose it. Breakups and unrequited love generally result in a sort of emotional fallout, the kind that leads a man to spill his secrets to the barkeep before drunkenly singing "their song" to a room full of increasingly uncomfortable patrons. The reminiscing doesn't come until later.

Joel Barish hasn't reached that stage yet. At the start of the film he's dealing with a nasty break-up with Clementine (Kate Winslet), a free spirit who conflicted greatly with his own withdrawn persona. Jim Carrey takes all that manic energy he usually forces upon the audience and buries it under layers of nervousness and an empathic sense of shame. Already reeling from the end of their relationship, Joel gets another sock in the gut when he learns that Clementine went to the experimental medical firm Lacuna, Inc., which specializes in memory deletion and reconstruction, to erase the relationship from her mind.

Dejected and enraged, Joel rushes in and demands that Dr. Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) perform the same procedure on him. That'll show her. Even though Lacuna is inundated for the Valentine's Day season, the doctor pencils him in and tells our hapless protagonist to go home and collect anything with a sentimental attachment to Clementine. He returns to the office, sits in a special chair, and Mierzwiak's assistants, Patrick and Stan (Elijah Wood and Mark Ruffalo), get to work.

And that's where any possibility of describing the plot in words ends. Director Michel Gondry has always been someone fascinated with the wavy line between dreams and reality, but that was before he partnered with modern legend Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman too deals with the bizarre and fascinating line between dreams and awareness, and the two prove to be a formidable team. The result is a film that continuously pulls the rug out from under you just as you managed to get back up after the last time.

As the process erases Joel's memories, we see his dream personification wander through each memory, constantly upended as the world literally crumbles around him. As the process whisks him into each subsequent scenario Joel finds himself forced to confront the memories he paid to have erased, and he slowly reaches an epiphany: eradicating Clem from his mind will erase the only happiness he ever knew. Eventually he manages to convince the Clementine from his memory of what's going on and the two essentially try to outrun the universe that caves in around them.

Then things just get weird. Joel, in an attempt to "protect" Clem (this is dream Clem, mind you), he runs into older memories, regressing into his childhood while Clementine stares on in bemusement. Editing isn't normally the filmmaking aspect one focuses on with a romantic comedy-drama, but Valdis Oskarsdottir had his work cut out for him when he made a film written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. Images jump, buzz, fade and warp like a hyperspeed music video, yet the style never gets in the way of the deep human understanding Kaufman and Gondry convey.

That understanding ultimately is what propels the film from being just an interesting experiment into one of the all-time best romantic films ever made, and certainly one of the ten best of the decade. Joel's not the only one with issues; the real Clementine must deal with the confusion left by suddenly removed memories, while a mysterious subplot involves Lacuna, Inc.'s secretary (Kirsten Dunst). Patrick's got something up his sleeve as well. Each of these stories adds levels of intrigue and depth to a story already overflowing with both, and it ensures that repeat viewings are rewarding.

Eternal Sunshine is one of those films I have trouble writing about, not only because I want everyone to experience it for themselves but because I worry that I'd only get lost in my platitudes. So perfect is every element -- the editing, the direction, the off-the-wall yet piercing script, the acting -- and so expertly and originally are they arranged that it stands on its own island. I can't imagine anyone having the balls to try to duplicate it, because it's so singular any attempt to build on it will immediately be seen as a ripoff. It boasts career-best performances from Carrey and Winslet, and at the very least all the other actors put in excellent work. Kaufman's script might lack the ambition of his later opus Synecdoche, New York and the wit of Adaptation, but he injects such a knowing sadness and hope into the film that he finally proves true the saying so many dismiss as pithy: 'twas better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.

The Reader

Can we all sign a petition barring Hollywood from making any further films about the Holocaust? Even “Schindler's List,” unquestionably the finest film on the subject ever put out by the mainstream, falters when Spielberg prevents us from feeling what we should in order to paint a flattering, romantic (though certainly interesting) portrait of Oskar Schindler. Likewise, Stephen Daldry's latest opus conjures the memory of the greatest tragedy in human existence only to use it as an emotional crutch to grab the audience without ever bothering to earn our attention.

“The Reader” concerns Michael Berg, a lad who had a summer-long affair with an older woman in his adolescence, only to find her in court tried for war crimes as an adult. Berg is played by David Kross in his youth and Ralph Fiennes in his adulthood, though Kross gets the most screen time. As a young teenager Michael collapses with scarlet fever on the streets, only to be escorted home by tram conductor Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet). After the boy regains some strength, he visits her home to express his gratitude, and she seduces him.

For the entire summer of Michael's "recovery," he goes to Hanna's house for some nookie and, as per her request, reads to her. He brings all of his schoolbooks, from Huckleberry Finn to The Odyssey, and she gazes in awe as he recites these classics. One can easily guess why she asks him to read to her, why she has that look of longing on her face as that timeless prose pours out of Michael's lips or why she needs to have certain words defined, but Daldry saves that for later, presumably as a "twist."

These scenes between Kross and Winslet work because of the skill of the two actors, but they never lead anywhere and they’re insufferably repetitive. The entire first hour is a nonstop cycle of Michael’s illicit activities, with almost no variation between them. After a time I began to wonder if I was watching a bad copy of the film with a looping reel or perhaps, like Billy Pilgrim before me, I had come unstuck in time.

Then the film moves forward to deal with Hanna’s trial, where she must face accusations that she and other guards allowed 300 Jewish women to die in a burning church during the war. As the trial plays out, we learn that Hanna accepts responsibility out of shame of that condition that we easily guessed at the start. I’m hesitant to provide spoilers, but the only way that the “big reveal” will shock you is if you fell asleep in the first hour which, upon reflection, wouldn’t be a surprise.

After waiting all this time for the film to go somewhere, I suddenly wished it had stayed in its rut. I’ve always wanted a film that really examined what made Germans complicit in the Holocaust, what drove so many to join the SS, but the explanation we receive here is enraging. Not only is it too absurd to dwell on, but it twist the Holocaust around into an unfortunate mark on Hanna’s past instead of being, you know, the HOLOCAUST. I won’t go so far to say it disrespects the six million Jews and five million others who died, but it certainly disrespects your intelligence.

Mixed with Daldry’s poor direction—his haphazard and pointless intercutting between timelines especially sticks out— “The Reader” boasts fine performances from Winslet and Kross but fails in every other respect. In some ways I understand Hollywood’s softening of the Holocaust; I don’t know if any normal person could really handle the full scale of its horror. I myself have had great difficulty working my way through “Shoah,” the expansive, 9-½ hour documentary on the subject, because it’s so brutal. Nevertheless, films like “The Reader” continue the mainstream’s tendency of using the Holocaust as a tool, a means to facile string-tugging, instead of treating it with a humbled reverence. Perhaps one day we’ll see Hollywood come out with a film that actually bothers to tell the story of all those who died solely for their heritage the way it should be told, but in the meantime we’ll have to continue putting up with this sort of nonsense.