Roman Polanski
Two nights, two movies back to back !
It was HYSTERICAL – CARNAGE (spoiler alert)
With the title CARNAGE, you don’t exactly expect to howl throughout the movie. However, that’s what happened as the audience roared, laughed, snickered and giggled all the way through to the credits. Roman Polanski‘s latest film is a not- quite-dark adaptation of a darkly humorous play. Actually, instead of the black farce is was meant to be, I found it to be more light gray.
Fifteen minutes into the movie, I thought I was watching a comedic version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe? . I’m not sure it was meant to be quite that funny but it was. I wondered if it was hysterical because the characters were more like caricatures? Maybe, but for that matter, Martha and George caricatures. No one laughed out loud watching Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton turn a social evening into a knock-down, drag-out verbal battle waged throughout the night.
Shot in the style of a Woody Allen film, four people are figuratively locked in the Brooklyn living room of Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael (John C. Reilly) Longstreet, the parents of Ethan. Presumably an amiable meeting is to take place between Nancy and Alan, the parents of Zachary who attacked Ethan and disfigured him by knocking out some teeth. These graphic descriptive accusations are sharp retorts from the horrified Penelope. She is just so shocked by the parenting skills or lack thereof of Nancy (Kate Winslet) and Alan (Christoph Waltz). Nancy and Alan just want to avoid a lawsuit and get the hell out of there! NOT an easy task ! Although they make it out the door a couple of times and even get as far as the elevator, they cannot leave. They are repeatedly pulled back into the web of guilt woven relentlessly by Penelope.
Jodie Foster was well-cast as the uptight, self-righteous, know-it-all Bohemian mother hen. She is so brittle, you’re sure she will crack and crumble the next time she tightly wraps her arms around herself. She was believable as Penelope up to a point. However, by the end of the movie, Jodie is shrieking like a banshee with her face contorted like an appopletic lunatic. I blame Mr. Polanski for this over-the-top performance. A shame, because prior to this melt-down, Penelope and her shoulds were amusing.
Kate Wynslet delivered a superb performance as the resigned wife of a rude, self-involved attorney a la Betty Draper (Mad Men), right up to the blonde French twist hair-do. The audience roared when the prim and properly groomed Nancy tosses her cookies onto the coffee table and all over Penny’s precious Oskar Kokoschka book – OH the horror of it all!!
The films best lines were all Alan’s, with his omnipresent cell phone. After the 15th annoying ring, I lost count. A rude, crude misogynist, bored with his wife, his life and certainly this ridiculous charade of meeting. The cobbler doesn’t do much to assuage his ennui, but the single malt scotch is right on.
Michael morphs from Mr. Nice Guy into a blustering insensitive boor who openly admits to freeing or murdering (depends on who’s speaking) his daughter’s hamster. I felt the transition was not clear or obvious, again this is the work of the director.
And the hamster lived happily ever after!
I was going to comment on It was Historical – A Dangerous Method but this post is already long and it’s after midnight, so check back in a day or two!
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It was Historical – A Dangerous Method
Posted in From My Point of View - Personal commentary on Movies and Books on October 28, 2011| Leave a Comment »
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
In the opening scene of A Dangerous Method , we see a young woman screaming and fighting, desperately trying to escape the restraints of two men. The carriage pulls up to a large building set in the beautiful landscape of Switzerland and she is dragged into the psychiatric hospital of Dr. Carl Jung.
As the movie unfolds, we are witness to both the evolution of a burgeoning science as well as the growing relationship between Jung and Freud and Jung and Sabina (Keira Knightly). At times, it was difficult to discern if the movie was a drama about an illicit love affair, the inner turmoil wrought on a physician who crossed a line or a historical pseudo-documentary about the struggle to get psychiatry recognized as a viable means to cure mental illness.
When a movie can’t decide which genre it is, it’s usually in the purgatory between the two. I didn’t love the movie: It was slow-moving, quiet, and fairly dry. It’s not that I wanted to see psychotic scenes such as there was in the movie, Quills. No fortunately we were spared the fascination with excrement and masturbation.
In my opinion, the best part of the movie was watching Keira Knightly portray a severely mentally disturbed woman. Sabina’s illness manifested itself in violent bodily contortions, grinding teeth, chin jutted out, eyes rolling wildly. There have been some reviewers who called her performance over-the-top, however, I think Keira was extremely compelling. And as her treatment progressed, she deftly portrayed a woman emerging from the depths of despair and depression to an articulate student of psychiatry, only to become a renowned psychiatrist in her own right years later.
Viggo Mortensen played a somewhat arrogant Freud, stubborn and rigid in his beliefs, very well. Michael Fassbender portrayed the elegant Carl Jung equally as well.
If you like period movies, this one is shot accurately and beautifully. As for historical facts, we are allowed to peek into the lives of the two greatest psychiatrists of the 20th Century. Perhaps to add some spice to the movie (sex sells anything, they say), you also get to be a bit of a voyeur as the affair between Jung and Sabina plays out. Unfortunately or fortunately, the spice is not so much in the sex but in S&M foreplay. Not quite titillating enough to be steamy but replete with historical facts, the movie, overall, is somewhat entertaining and adds another dimension in David Cronenberg’s exploration of the human mind.
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