Reviews

The stop animation is over the top marvelous. The settings and color paint the scenes in alluring power. But the film has no center. Its themes are in conflict--rescue and becoming human in the context of a mild Fascism with Pinocchio's ability to be reborn, so what's the danger? The cutesy music and lyrics conflict with the dark themes and some of the images are grotesque--the sea serpent's butt exit? Ending with a quote from Mr. Rogers is sappy to say the least after what we have been shown of the world's cruelty. Something got lost in the extensive years it too to make this film, and it lost me.

It's amazing how dazzled one can be by so very little these days. There's very little here--a struggling unpleasant man who sings his heart out about standard "folk" catastrophes but can't take care of himself as he goes about damaging others, and animals as well. He's your 50's college roommate who cooks on a hot plate and sings about historic heroic starvations. The in- and-out mythic references are unfocused and a game for undergraduates. When the Coens go flat it's not even E flat. We're forced to watch this guy's face for an hour or so without a clue to his demons; he's just a jerk, a driven jerk but a jerk nonetheless.

Best part is the recreation of the early 60's in cars, atmospheres, but then John Goodman shows up from "Where art thou?" and spoils the realistic angst. Sorry, but the early folk scene wasn't this creepy and Bob Dylan didn't rescue it from oblivion or creepiness. Without a political or sexual agenda (it got you chicks) it did flounder, but it needed an audience for shifting values and social awareness. One's suffering couldn't just be for one's art, but had to have a social dimension that this guy can't see. A genius before his time? Hardly--a guy who can't take care of himself, or his friends or family or lovers--anything but "folk." The times they were a changin', but this guy's a talented pathetic scrounge and lacks the connections to others and society that might propel him to sing for the changing times.

This might be the ethos of the Coens and their films themselves--within society but not of it. Their characters struggle with their messy quirky lives but we see them as curiosities rather than representatives of anything important. There's a certain clown show aspect to their films, which creates their charm and fun but little else.

A manifestly arty film, it succeeds because it sees the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Anything artificial breeds illness and cruelty, while what is natural heals and elevates-- this is pure romantic doctrine. Andrew Marvel provides the poetic line of the story while Vermeer and Copley shape the visual. The film is essentially a fantasy about consciousness and design, with the uroboros snake a double symbol of infinity and self-destruction. Great scenes of building a "French" Garden in an English (Irish actually) countryside.The Garden turns out rather bleak and by magic gets its comeuppance. Everything about the film is artificial and that plays against its romantic/Shakespearean true love theme. Erotic frustrations under gird motives and Scacchi and Carmen Chaplin supply the juice for the happy tensions. Fine film, with time-shifted homages to restoration drama.

When their avant-guarde artist daughter threw herself out a window to her death at 22, her artist-parents had to reassess their lives. The Woodmans focuses on what Betty and George Woodman do to find expression for their grief and their creativity.

Francesca was a photographer in the vein of Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe, photographing herself in various levels of undress in both dehumanized and sensuous postures. To say she was precocious is to miss the point—like many artist-wunderkinder, she was self-absorbed, schooled very early on by her parents to be an artist.

When she kills herself, perhaps out of frustration with her own languishing career, her ceramacist mother and abstract painter father try to move on with their own art. Betty switches to fine art ceramics and her father begins photographing young female nudes!

What we soon discover is that the inner dynamic of this family consumed by art may be a deflection from engaging each other at the very personal level. Can art, which tries to engage us emotionally, psychologically and spiritually, distract us from discovering our true inner self and deflect us from self-awareness at the deepest levels?

With ample images from Francesca's work and voicing from her videos and from detailed looks at her parents' art and their extensive comments about it, we are left to decide ourselves what was really going on in the hearts and souls and imaginations of these three creative people.