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Reviews
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Add to the Canon of Great American Films
With so many excellent and insightful comments regarding "Brokeback Mountain," I feel no need to say a lot about the film's plot, acting, etc., except to say that having been fortunate enough to see an early press-screening of Ang Lee's film -- five days later, I remain emotionally devastated.
One of the songs written for the movie is titled "A Love that Will Never Grow Old," and for many, many film goers, this is a film that will "never grow old."
As the Chair of the Film Studies program at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, I teach a course titled "The Silver Screen and the American Dream" which regularly enrolls well over 300 "Red State" students. In that class we screen and study the "canon" of great American films that most show the power of film to impact the ever changing meaning of the "The American Dream" -- Chaplin's "Modern Times," "Casablanca," "Citizen Kane," "The Searchers," "Rebel Without a Cause," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, " on to "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider," "Midnight Cowboy," "The Godfather," etc. -- but the difficulty of finding post-1970s Hollywood films worthy of being included in this "canon" has proved to be depressingly obvious.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, out-of-nowhere, Ang Lee has given us the first film of the 21st Century to join the "canon" of GREAT American films that will be watched and beloved for decades to come. Like the truly 'canonical' American films of the past, "Brokeback Mountain" will be hitting new generations of film lovers in the gut and the heart in 2050 and 2100, as much as it does in 2005.
In this cynical age when our best film directors seem content to give us "postmodern deconstructions" of past Hollywood genres, that Ang Lee gives us a film so pure and direct in its emotional power -- with (to use Fassbinder's phrase) the "direct tenderness" of the films of Douglas Sirk -- and even more, to bring Sirk's "direct tenderness" into a rapprochement with the great, masculine Westerns of Ford and Hawks. That is what I call a a mind-blowing, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, film-making miracle.
Some great films can "blow one's mind," othes can "get you in the gut;" others can "break one's heart." Very few hit you in the brain, gut, and heart with one blow. The last 20-minutes of "Brokeback Mountain" delivers a K.O. to the brain, the gut, and the heart in one swift hit.
Drought (1998)
beautiful
I was lucky enough to see this film at the "Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee," where it won the top prize. It is a remarkable film. The expressionistic source, a prize-winning novella by Debra Di Blasi, who adapted her work into film's most effective screenplay, has been translated into a cinematic language that serves as a dreamscape provoking images of love and loss that will stay with you a
long, long time. Highly recommended for those who love the ability of cinema to translate the written word into visual images.
Eierdiebe (2003)
"Jewel" of a film
I had the good fortune of seeing the German comedy `Eierdiebe' (English title: `Family Jewels') at the 2003 Kansas City Film Fest. It was `good fortune' in more ways than one because I was fortunate to get one of the last seats in the theater before the house sold-out. I can't report how `Family Jewels' might `play in Peoria,' but Kansas City is damn near to Peoria, and I can tell you that it grabbed the packed-house from the get-go, and didn't let go until the end credits, when the audience gave it a rousing ovation.
The enthusiasm the audience displayed came as something of a surprise only because the storyline is not exactly an old-fashioned `Andy Hardy' comedy.
Imagine an Andy Hardy comedy (in German with subtitles, at that!) where Andy has his life-turned upside-down when he loses one of his gonads to testicular cancer, then undergoes Chemo, leading to a madcap chase through the nether world of a cancer ward to retrieve his lost `family jewel.' I'm not kidding, all that happens, and more!
Needless to say, `Family Jewels' is a `dark comedy' that goes where few, if any, films have dared to go! (Maybe that's not too surprising, since the filmmaker, Robert Schwentke, also made the critically praised `Tattoo' -- one of the darkest `noir killer-thrillers' around - "Tattoo" raised the stakes of `Seven' to eights and nines.)
With `Family Jewels,' Schwentke is in an equally dark place, but in a decidedly more light-hearted mood. Perhaps that's because (according to the program notes handed out at the Festival) the film is `semi-autobiographical -- Mr. Schwentke has indeed prevailed over testicular cancer.
In any event, a potentially `exploitive' subject that could have been played for crude laughs becomes an uproariously funny, but always life-affirming testament to the human spirit.
I think it was the film's affirmation of life that won over the Midwestern audience. In less capable hands, the story could have easily been an example of `gross-out' humor, but instead, it manages the nearly impossible task of looking death square in the eye, and letting go a big wad of spit!
In the Middle Ages, such `spiting in the face of death' was called `Easter Laughter" and I think that's what the Kansas City audience was cheering.
Yeah, they laughed a lot at the gallows humor, but even more, the film gave the audience the chance to join Schwentke's in his own `Easter Laugh' in the face of our common mortality without pandering to either Pollyanna optimism, or giving into a mean-spirited, bitter irony? In that, Schwentke is closer to Camus and Marcel, than to Sartre. (Since Schwentke is a German filmmaker, it's probably saying something that I was more reminded of the French existentialists than their Teutonic cohorts.)
With `Tattoo,' Schwentke proved he could make dark thrillers with the best of the `shock-meisters.' With `Family Jewels' he reveals himself to be even more in- tune to the humanist film tradition of Jean Renoir, DeSica, and Truffaut.
Well, it would be exaggerated praise to compare `Family Jewels' to, say, `Grand Illusion' or `Bicycle Thief' -- thought the film invites some comparisons to both. The cancer ward is not unlike a `prisoner-of-war' camp where categories such as race, class, and gender prove to be foolish "illusions." And the sense of loss of our hero's "family jewel," and his determination to recover that loss, did reminded me (however perversely) of `The Bicycle Thief" -- Schwentke's film is, most of all -- and in the profoundest sense -- a deeply felt film about `loss.'
If Schwentke's film brings to mind the great "humanist" filmmakers, it's in the small moments of the film, when he extends a scene a few seconds beyond the `usual' conclusion to add an unexpected `grace note' - as when a seemingly hard-as-nails doctor or nurse, who've appeared to be Nurse Ratched-like stock- characters, display (out-of-sight of their cancer patients) the grief-process they have come to hide, but always live with -- or in the extended camera time the filmmaker gives to the hero's hopelessly bourgeois mother and father who appears incapable of communicating any sense of the enormity of the situation. But then, Swekenke holds his camera steady a second longer than we expect, to capture their private, silent screams, and unvoiced prayers.
It's quite a remarkable movie. I hope you get to see it. It's a `jewel' to be treasured.