The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, 2014)

Wes Anderson’s latest, The Grand Budapest Hotel, has bowed to reviews that link the occasionally staggering scale of its production design to the director’s meticulously ordered stop-motion film, The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Certainly the two stand as the most thoroughly crafted works in the oeuvre of a man whose trademark is his fussy attention to detail; in The Grand Budapest Hotel, hotel lobbies, prisons, even Alpine monasteries are created in such lavishly minute precision that the logistics of each impeccably straightened sign, every spotless carpet threaten to divert all attention away from the narrative at hand. In execution, however, the film belongs more with its immediate predecessor, Moonrise Kingdom, as both an unmistakable continuation of its maker’s singular style and an increasingly sophisticated breakdown of it.

From a narrative standpoint, no Wes Anderson film has ever been this convoluted. Typically, the director’s films spend more time merely introducing the characters and their strictly regimented habits than they do detailing what those people get up to. That is not to say that there is not conflict or drive in Anderson’s movies, but that said conflict typically arises from the intrusion of reality and lived, experienced wisdom upon the myopic headspace of stunted wunderkinder, a forceful denial and eventual acceptance of how ignorant these self-perceived geniuses truly are. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is the first of Anderson’s films in which the outside sources of awakening do not come as a natural course of maturation but from the direct imposition of actively hostile forces. Set primarily during WWII, the film presents a series of nested narratives involving characters whose pluck, intelligence and wit is slowly revealed to be utterly inadequate a defense against forces hellbent on eradicating the old way of things. Anderson routinely presents a sense of style and fashion far removed from the present; The Grand Budapest Hotel hones in on the last moment such modes were considered contemporary and proper before being violently stomped out.

4:44: The Last Day on Earth (Abel Ferrara, 2012)

The characters in Abel Ferrara's 4:44: The Last Day on Earth react to the world's impending doom with astonishing calm. Perhaps they, too, are burned out on all the apocalyptic fare at the cineplex, ranging from gargantuan, hollow spectacles like 2012 to arthouse features like The Turin Horse or Melancholia. Heck, even Terrence Malick's rapturous celebration of the humanity's connection to the universe in The Tree of Life featured a vision of its end, the sun expanding until scorching all life from the Earth before vaporizing the desiccated husk. As actor Cisco (Willem Dafoe) and painter Skye (Shanyn Leigh) go about their routines in their loft, initially displaying no indication that they are even upset, much less terrified with the prospect of a total extinction that has been calculated to the exact time (that of the film's title), one begins to wonder if Hollywood has managed to desensitize us not merely to intimate violence but our own doom.

But then, given how comfortable the couple's flat is, it is not such a stretch of the imagination that they should feel at least somewhat relaxed as they head to their deaths along with the rest of the human race. Production designer Frank De Curtis and composer Francis Kulpers previously teamed with Ferrara on his superb 2007 film Go-Go Tales, where they managed to make a wretched strip joint seem not claustrophobic and solipsistic but expansive and oddly warm. Their work here mirrors that incongruously big smallness, once again sidestepping the obvious aesthetic and tonal choice to allow Ferrara to take new directions with generic material. Indeed, 4:44, like Go-Go Tales, emerges as a film of unexpected gentleness and humanity, though perhaps this is all relative when speaking of a director who got his start with softcore porn and grisly exploitation fare.

Antichrist

Lars von Trier's Antichrist may be the one film that only solidifies in its vexing, frustrating, offensive effect after sleeping on it. Oh, movies often lose their sheen after a good night's sleep separates one from immediate reactions, sure, but never have I been faced with a film that has remained so firmly in the middle, so deeply entrenched in the netherworld of a shrug and a singsong grunting of "I dunno," as Antichrist. I suppose it makes sense: I've seen two other von Trier films, one of which (Breaking the Waves) I loved and the other (Dancer in the Dark) completely repulsed me even as I tried to admire his original and occasionally innovative work in the musical genre. How perfect, then, that I should be so unsure of what I've just seen.

Therefore, let's focus on identifiable reactions and see where it takes us: Antichrist is a beautiful movie, final proof that Von Trier's connection to the Dogme movement he helped found limited one of the most interesting visual stylists in contemporary cinema. Its opening sequence, shot in pristine, crisp black-and-white, depicts a married couple engaging in vigorous sex (there's even a shot that comes about as close as one can to penetration without becoming pornography; if shooting sex scenes are like guessing on the price is right, von Trier guessed within a cent) in slow-motion as their baby crawls from its crib and accidentally falls out of their apartment window to his death. Like a perfume commercial gone horribly wrong, the sequence juxtaposes the couple's steamy lovemaking with the product of fun times past falls to his death due to their negligence. It suggests that Antichrist will be an intensely dark comedy, a label I'm not entirely sure doesn't apply.

Naturally, the couple are devastated. Referred to in the credits only as He (Willem Dafoe) and She (Charlotte Gainsbourg), they attempt to sort out the immeasurable grief of losing a child. But She reacts stronger than most, collapsing in the funeral and waking up a month later in a hospital. He, a therapist, distrusts the psychiatric care the hospital provides and breaks some of the fundamental ethics of his profession by deciding to help a relative. Further lines are broken when She turns to aggressive sex for distraction and solace from the unrelenting pain. Making no breakthroughs with her, He decides to use exposure therapy, believing her reaction to be the product not only of her grief but her fears; thus he takes her to Eden, an eye-rollingly titled cabin deep in a forest where She took their son in a failed attempt to write a novel that now terrifies her.

At this stage, Anitchrist moves from a devastating portrait of inhuman suffering to a literal cabin-in-the-woods horror film, albeit filtered through the prism of arthouse pretension. At times, that intellectual drive serves von Trier, such as the constant tension of acorns raining on the cabins tin roof like gunfire; She discusses with He how the oak drops hundreds of acorns, and it lives so long that only one needs to survive and grow into another oak to ensure the continuation of the plant. Compared to She's own grief over her child, the constant rain of acorns does not simply serve to ratchet up tension but to remind her (and the audience) that each of those acorns is a baby, one that most likely won't bloom just like her own.

Slowly, however, things start to go wrong with the picture. We discover that She's planned book concerned the topic of gynocide, which she abandoned as her research, combined with what she felt was an evil presence in the woods of Eden, convinced her that, if nature was inherently evil, then women must be too. Now, the subject of von Trier's alleged misogyny has dogged him for much of his career; personally, I've found the dubious treatment of the women who suffer in his films less a reflection of a hatred of women than a reflection of his deep cynicism in general (though the injustices heaped upon Björk's character -- and Björk herself, according to reports -- in Dancer in the Dark threatened to turn me off the director forever). In other words, von Trier's unbridled contempt ran far too deeply to be confined by so narrowly defined a term as misogyny.

Here, however, he may finally have slipped off the ledge*. Von Trier uses gentle pans set to overbearing, howling music to manipulate the audience (the effect of this, of essentially filming the dark essence of the forest, plays like an artier version of the Raimi cam effects in the king of all cabin-in-the-woods franchises, the Evil Dead series), but any pretense at subtlety disappears in the final 20 minutes, in which She loses all grip on reality and engages in a series of actions I don't care to repeat; von Trier apparently buys his character's nonsense that women are evil, forcing the audience to endure a barrage of torture porn filth whose potential metaphorical and allegorical meaning becomes incidental to the onslaught.

So much graphic content hits the screen in the last act that it numbs the audience; Dancer had the air of sincerity of Breaking the Waves, which made its content so ultimately repulsive. Antichrist, on the other hand, edges into the realm of comedy which, as I said before, may be the point. Like A Serious Man, it ends with perhaps its boldest joke, in this case a dedication to the great cinematic spiritualist Andrei Tarkovsky, who might have beaten the Danish enfant terrible to death with his irradiated hands had he known what von Trier would attach his name to after he died. Yet any explanation that would call the film funny evidently does not care about its bold-faced misogyny, evidence clearly in its epilogue, which presents the film with a sort of happy ending that's as perverse as anything that came before it. If, as von Trier has said, Antichrist was the director's way of overcoming his depression, why has he tied that optimism to a story of gynocide and female insanity? Whatever else the film has to say about the empty pleasures of sex, the trauma of motherhood and the nihilistic proposition that "Chaos reigns," I cannot move myself to look beyond what is so glaringly ugly to me.

Again, though, the numbing quality of von Trier's exploitation film allows us to view it in perspective. Charlotte Gainsbourg absolutely redefines what it means to give a fearless performance and, frankly, no one else should ever have the qualifier attached to a role ever again on the basis of it. She's over-the-top without ever chewing scenery; her rail-thin, bird-like frame allows us to see every wired muscle react to grief and, later, rage, much the same way you could see every tic on De Niro's body back in his younger, slimmer days. Dafoe's work is far more reserved, but Gainsbourg's white-hot nova of a performance would not allow for another manic performance anyway (plus, it's always fun to see Dafoe in a less-explosive role). Too, von Trier's direction, coupled with Anthony Dod Mantle's stark, muted cinematography, makes the best case yet for the director's visual acumen. Who knows, maybe this really is one big joke; von Trier is certainly trying to provoke the audience into some sort of reaction. However, while I will likely check out his next project to see if he's expunged his demons, I doubt I'll return to this silly piece of art/grindhouse trash any time soon.


*After mulling over the film further, I've come to the conclusion that Antichrist ultimately doesn't represent a misogynistic attack, and actually it may be von Trier's most heartfelt work. He brought out something within himself that is within us all, and maybe that is what troubled so many critics, who frankly oversold the extremity of the film's violence. I still find myself surprised at how tepid and ambivalent my overall reaction to the film was, but I contend that I do not find its more contentious aspects quite so offensive anymore.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Wes Anderson is one of a handful of interesting, unique directors working in America today whose work is marginalized by that most useless of criticisms: that he is a "style over substance" filmmaker. I don't know when bringing something visual to the most visually stimulating of all media became something worthy of derision but, while sometimes the phrase is used appropriately, those who casually toss it out at any film that dares look interesting should be forced to sit through a Dogme 95 marathon so they can appreciate what aesthetic means to a film's enjoyment and how fucking terrible movies are without it. Having said that, I'm far from the world's biggest Wes Anderson fan, having previously loved on The Royal Tenenbaums and found the rest of his oeuvre, even Rushmore, to be excellent in places and spotty in others. His last two features, the soulless Life Aquatic and the on-the-nose Darjeeling Limited, were neither outright bad, but for all of Life Aquatic's insanity and Darjeeling's back-to-basics vibrancy, I found little in either worth remembering; neither was an exercise in style over substance, but the substance communicated through their styles held no interest for me.

It is with some trepidation, then, that I admit how much I enjoyed his latest work, Fantastic Mr. Fox, as it might seem that I'm choosing a simple kid's film over his more complex works. Well, yes, this is a kid's film, as straightforward as entries in the genre must be, but it also delves into the key theme of Anderson's corpus: a dysfunctional, emotionally distant family and the extent its members will go to for each other. He does not so much gut Roald Dahl's story as stuff every crevice with his own sensibilities, stretching Dahl's whimsical story into a post-ironic bit of family fun, appealing to your 5-year-old and your embittered hipster teenager.

His Mr. Fox (voiced by George Clooney) is an egotistical chicken thief, so full of himself that he even acknowledges it at one point. His wife Felicity (Meryl Streep), forces him to give up his trade when the two narrowly escape death in one engagement and she reveals her pregnancy. 12 fox-years later, Mr. Fox writes opinion columns for the local paper that no one reads and has an uneasy relationship with his son Ash (Jason Schwartzman), a barely held-together wad of fur and rage. Fox hates his gray flannel suit existence and longs for the fire of his youth, so he moves his family out of the ground and into a tree, ostensibly for the freedom of sunshine but in reality for the new home's proximity to three farms owned by Boggis, Bunce and Bean and their irresistible products within.

The world that Anderson and his animators created for Mr. Fox and the other characters to roam has a pop-up book quality, evidently something artificial yet something you want to reach out and feel anyway. When the camera moves, it typically does so sideways, moving through rooms and layers in the inventive underground world of the animals as if scanning the panels of a comic book. Each of these areas, and the characters who inhabit them, bursts with Anderson's visual acumen: overwhelmingly bright colors, right-angle arrangements, symmetry. Anderson is a director both praised and criticized for his meticulous compositions, so what better medium for him to explore than stop-motion animation, the most involving method of building and photographing a world from scratch?

I'm tip-toeing around discussing the film as, pound for pound, this is the funniest picture in Anderson's canon. It's always tricky when a filmmaker or actor moves from working primarily in the R-rated field to children's entertainment -- how cringeworthy it is when the subject of "making the kids proud of me" raises its serpentine head in interviews -- but Anderson tackles the shift with extra cheek; how many PG films (PG only because some of the characters, as they must in an Anderson movie, smoke) not only broach the subject of existentialism but say the word aloud? The director also replaces every possible swear word with the word "cuss," and I suspect that he wrote the script without children in mind and censored himself later, because the word is bandied about quite often, including as a part of combinations such as "clustercuss." I'd like to see this method used on TV instead of the annoying and useless bleeping that grates the ears.

The Darjeeling Limited had its moments of character insight, but Fantastic Mr. Fox gets Anderson back on firm emotional ground. Mr. Fox's ennui is deeply felt (and his comments on the non-readership of his column is a subtle commentary, perhaps, on our own failing papers), and the caustic relationship between Ash, who projects his insecurities and self-loathing outward, and essentially everyone else is as revealing of his inner concerns as it is blisteringly funny. His exchanges with cousin Kristofferson in particular are ripe for comedy, as Kristofferson is everything that Ash isn't: athletic, handsome and, it seems, well-liked by Mr. Fox. These meaty lead performances are bolstered by a manic cast of supporters voiced by the likes of Anderson alumni Owen Wilson and Bill Murray, all of whom find that usual balance between the goofier aspects of the directors characters and their reserved, ultra-dry style.

However, a few items stuck in my craw after leaving the theater, and I still can't get over some of Anderson's choices after sleeping on my thoughts. Mr. Fox, Ash, Kristofferson, the opossum Kylie, they're all so much fun; so why are all the female characters uptight and as flat as Anderson's storybook compositions? I understand that the director is evoking a bit of a '50s suburban feel with the layouts of the animals' houses, but why did he feel the need to port over the vision of the domesticated housewife as well? Felicity knows that her husband resumed thieving upon moving near the farms, she only offers a few words of stern caution to try to stop him. When Mr. Fox places the entire community in peril by angering the farmers, Felicity only gets to run through one of those "Oh, I love you but you can be so silly sometimes!" harsh speeches that isn't so harsh. Speaking of the farmers: why are all the humans voiced by British and Irish actors when all of the animals are voiced by American ones? Yes, the composition of the farms brings to mind the English countryside where Dahl set the story, but there's no explanation for the clear difference. Perhaps it's a further distinction between animals and humans, but considering that the two groups can understand and converse with one another, it just seems like a lazy excuse for Anderson to use some actors he liked. And I don't even know what the hell Willem Dafoe thought he was doing as an evil rat who sounds as though he came from New Orleans, though I admit I liked his mix of zaniness and menace.

Nevertheless, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a terrific return to form for Anderson, lacking the depth of his best work but making up for it with his first film to allow you to sit back and enjoy the visuals without having to worry about the story's complexity whacking you in the head every five minutes. And when I said that this was as much for the kids as the indie crowd, I meant it: yes, no child will catch the extended reference to The Third Man of a sequence in sewers, and they'll likely not catch the potential nod to Toy Story in the form of a milk (or apple, as the case may be) crate prison. But they'll have as much fun with its irreverence as adults, perhaps more so -- I was turned on to Monty Python at 10 and my parents still don't see its appeal, and they grew up in the proper time period for it. Anderson's humor may be smug, but he derives laughs directly from how smug the characters are, and nobody can spot a phony and laugh at him like a child.

1989 Rewind: Born on the Fourth of July

Oliver Stone may be traveling down the long slope to mediocrity -- W. was a surprising success, but even then only if your expectations have been worn down by such work as Alexander -- but there was a time when he was the most promising writer-director America had to offer. By the time Born on the Fourth of July was released in December 1989, he'd won an Oscar for his writing (Midnight Express) and damn near cleaned up with Platoon, his masterful depiction of his service in Vietnam. But Stone wasn't done with 'Nam, not by a long shot. Born on the Fourth of July, the second of three films that overtly concern the war, follows the war home, chronicling the traumatic re-adjustment of our wounded veterans.

As Stone establishes in the first half hour, Ron Kovic was the sort of young man that would make any parents proud and only seemed to confirm the American ideal of the '50s and '60s. Athletic, intelligent and a devout patriot, Ronnie wants nothing more than to serve his country like his father did in WWII. When Marine recruiters come to school and speak proudly of being the first called into an engagement, Kovic is inspired. The Marines say the war won't last long, he breathlessly informs his friends, "so if we don't sign up soon, we'll miss it." His mother is thrilled when he comes home and announces he's dropping out to enlist, believing her son to be doing God's work, but the veteran father is concerned.

Ronnie's tour of duty only occupies about 12 minutes of screen time, but Stone of course knows how to make them count. In the middle of a NVA ambush, Ronnie inadvertently shoots a fellow Marine; when he tries to confess to his XO, his superior officer simply brushes him off and assures the boy it's not his fault. In another skirmish, his platoon is surrounded, and Kovic is hit.

The attack sends him to a horrific VA hospital overrun with rats, drug use and uncaring doctors. I've heard that it's best to treat wounded soldiers as if they're still on the front lines and not to pamper them, but these men are treated with callous indifference. Ronnie, once a star athlete, must now hear the news that he's paralyzed from the mid-chest down and will never walk again.

So, he returns home, ashamed. At first, he continues to support the war on the basis of his loyalty to his country. He clashes with his younger brother Tommy (Josh Evans), now an anti-war activist, and must now face a once-proud mother who cannot bear the shame of having a disabled son. Slowly, Ron comes undone, disillusioned with the war and the military that doesn't care for him or anyone else maimed in Vietnam.

Tom Cruise may be known -- in acting terms, at least -- for his looks and his smile, but I maintain that he's a criminally underrated actor. His work in Jerry Maguire, Magnolia, A Few Good Men and a number of other films ranges from quite good to excellent, but nothing can compare to his performance as Kovic. His transitions from fresh-faced youth to terrified, confused soldier to broken vet to a figurehead of the anti-war movement never miss a beat, never feel rushed and never fail to convince. The only time you can even identify him as Tom Cruise the megastar is in the first hour when he's that handsome, innocent youth and the idealistic soldier; when he returns, he's as much a changed man as Kovic was. It's telling that the real Kovic gave Cruise his Bronze Star at the end of filming.

Through Kovic we see how Vietnam forever destroyed that postwar vision of the purity of the American family. Timmy represents those who rebelled against family and friends to protest the government, while Ron shows us how even those who fit the bill of that ideal were corrupted by the senseless conflict. You forget what a naïve kid Ron really is, until he loses his virginity to a prostitute. As he tearfully screams to his mother before leaving home, he lost the use of his penis before he "even learned how to use it." For this All-American to be reduced to awkward sex with a prostitute, which he misconstrues for true love, sheds harsh light on how he and many others who served and were wounded or killed had their futures ripped from them.

Stone's never been one for subtlety, and Born on the Fourth of July suffers at time from obvious dialogue when moments like his time with the prostitute conveys more than pithy statements. But he also knows how maintain your attention, either through the actions on-screen or the masterful way that he captures them. What makes Stone's early films so captivating is how he just never let up, hitting us with a barrage of images so quickly you didn't realize how revolutionary so many of his techniques were until the film ended and you could actually take a breath. His script conveys the outrage he feels over the mishandling of our veterans, a problem that exists to this day, but there are also flashes of pitch-black humor: while relaxing in a sort of disabled vet's paradise in Mexico, he gets into an argument with another wheelchair-bound veteran (Willem Dafoe) over whether they killed babies in 'Nam.

Stone won his second Best Director Oscar for the film, and it is richly deserved. Born on the Fourth of July, heavy-handed as it can be in spots, is one of his enduring masterpieces alongside Platoon and JFK. Cruise's performance is the finest of his career, yet we must not forget superb supporting turns from Kyra Sedgwick as Ron's high school sweetie turned college demonstrator, Dafoe's initially calm and genial Charlie and Raymond J. Barry as Ron's concerned, loving father. This is the second film from 1989 I've watched about the Vietnam War, and it's by far the best. I have a long way to go, but I'll be surprised if I find many films from the year I enjoy as much or more than this.

Mississippi Burning

I seem to forever be one movie behind when I review, always reviewing the film before the film I just finished. Well, I'm gonna play catch-up with this film, because it offers so very little. Mississippi Burning, the 1988 film concerning the actual murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, aims to offer up an intense look at race relations by way of a frightening look into our recent past, but instead plays like a Hollywood-ized thriller that only gets its "deeper" meaning out in chucks of stilted dialogue and tries to wow us for the other hour and half.

In the film, Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman play FBI agents who will stop at nothing to find and arrest the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the murders. Dafoe plays the role of Not-Racist White Guy, the stalwart young hero who sits in the segregated sections meant for blacks, openly speaks in the midst of Klan members about their bigotry. And what better foil for Not-Racist White Guy than Initially Racist White Man Who Overcomes Bigotry Just 'Cause (also known as the "John Wayne in The Searchers" award). Hackman, to his credit, plays the IRWMWOBJC to a T, but his character seems to turn against bigotry out of spite for the KKK members, and while I don't look a gift horse in the mouth it rings hollow.

Because this is Hollywood, our heroes cannot deal with racism in its subtle, insidious form. Oh no. Now, you probably know Mississippi to be one of the more violently racist states during the period, but what you probably didn't know is that Mississippi is officially the worst place ever in the history of racism. The KKK members, some of whom are cops, are so racist that they threaten the FBI officers' lives. Never mind the fact that such an admission alone is grounds for a federal case, Dafoe and Hackman decide instead to wait it out while more black people are killed, because ending a killing spree comes second to-hey, look at that explosion!!

Yes, just as cars exploded left and right in the misogynistic The Last Boy Scout, so too do houses explode in Mississippi Burning. I assumed the title alluded to broiling racial tensions spilling out into a heat wave of violence that threatened to consume the South, but actually they meant literal fire. Damn me and my fancy college-boy type brain; that's what I get for thinking.

Eventually the brave FBI agents, all of whom hate racism just as much as our NRWG because they wear suits and men in suits are simply too fancy to be racist, swoop into the town and capture the KKK members using terror tactics. So, let me get this straight: at the beginning the KKK admits to their crimes and makes death threats to the FBI to their faces, but that's not enough for a trial. However, using flagrantly illegal practices to ensnare targets who aren't even hiding in the first place will mean swift and harsh convictions for those pillow-headed twerps. I could use a KKK hood right now, as a matter of fact. So I could soak up the tears of rage.

The only thing that remotely redeems this film is Dafoe and Frances McDormand. Dafoe has to play a ridiculous, inaccurate and manipulative role, but he really gives a good go at it. McDormand however, is the saving grace of the film. The abused wife of one of the Klan members, she offers up the film's only bit of subtlety as she tackles both issues of racial prejudices and spousal abuse. McDormand was nominated for an Oscar for the film and it was richly deserved.

The rest of it, however, is a wash. It's typical Hollywood Big Issue stuff, in that it entirely skirts dealing with the issue in question to reap the rewards of cheap exploitation. I know it's hard to get racism in film right, but why do we have to sit through all of these Oscar-baiting masturbatory exercises in one that actually works?