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Colin Carman

~ Jane Austen Scholar & Culture Vulture

Colin Carman

Tag Archives: naomi watts

2012 Best Actress: Will it be Watts?

22 Tuesday Jan 2013

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

action, alvarez belons, best actress, disaster films, ewan mcgregor, indian ocean, juan antonio bayona, naomi watts, the impossible, tom holland, tsunami 2004

the-impossible-movie-review

“Water Works”

Grade: B

TWO ASPECTS OF Juan Antonio Bayona’s disaster film “The Impossible” will haunt you.  The first is the tsunami itself, which slammed into south-west Asia on the 26th of December, 2004, killing nearly a quarter-million people and leveling scores of luxury hotels.  “The Impossible” begins and ends with the Bennett family, Maria and husband Henry (Ewan McGregor), flying to and fro a high-end Thai resort where they open Christmas gifts and lounge poolside. The film’s first fifteen minutes are the lull before the storm and Bayona is even able to extract a frisson of terror out of something as quotidian as a red rubber ball that the Bennett boys – Lucas, Thomas, and Simon – bop around the pool area; they’ll soon find themselves floating out to sea like the ball itself.  Wilson!  A loose page is blown out of the book Maria is reading and gradually, the vacationers notice that something sinister is in the air.  One of the most terrifying images is of the palm trees just beyond the hotel walls being felled, one after another, as the Indian Ocean violently overruns the lazy sunbathers.  Bayona gives us numerous underwater shots in which we see a soup of twisted metal, palm trees, bodies, automobiles reduced to matchbox cars, even a drowned elephant.

The-Impossible-PosterBeyond such verisimilitude, which is agonizing indeed, there is also Naomi Watt’s performance as Maria, a doctor who has temporarily hung up her stethoscope to raise her three young sons while living abroad in Japan.  Bayona built the biggest water tank in Europe to simulate the disaster and, currently making the rounds on TV talk shows prior to Oscar night next month, Watts reports that she was strapped to a chair, submerged, and brought to the brink of drowning in order for the director to elicit true terror from her.  But Watts’s performance is a marvel not simply because of her lung-busting cries – she gave us plenty of those one decade ago in “The Ring” – but because of her relationship with Lucas (Tom Holland), the eldest of her sons. There’s that uncomfortable moment when Lucas is ashamed to see his mother’s mangled and exposed breast; there’s another when Maria insists on helping an abandoned boy whom she and Lucas hide in the treetops. Dehydrated, leg badly injured, Maria shares a soda can with the two boys and stares up at the younger one like he’s a cherub on high.  A good actor, like a good tennis partner, brings out the best in her scene-mate and Watts is able to elevate Holland so that he, too, becomes the emotional core of “The Impossible.”  You don’t doubt for a second that it’s her love for Lucas and the other family members that keep her fighting for her life.

The film’s title is trite, the family’s reunion never really in question, and Bayona (“The22003 Orphanage”) either forgot or simply didn’t feel the need to close the film with the official death toll or some kind of acknowledgment that most, if not all, the tsunami-victims weren’t as lucky as the upper-class Bennetts who had health insurance and private planes at their disposal.  It’s as if every other survivor is put there to either facilitate or frustrate the family’s predictable reunion. The Bennetts are actually an Anglicization of the real-life family that survived the disaster, the Alvarez Belóns of Spain, and it’s a shame that European actors were swapped out for blond-blue-eyed ones. Nevertheless, it’s Watts who powers “The Impossible.”  That’s her kilowatts.

Review: “J. Edgar”

14 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

a. mitchell palmer, angels in america, armie hammer, bryan burrough, charles lidnbergh, clint eastwood, clyde tolson, dustin lance black, eleanor roosevelt, F.B.I., geoff pierson, j. edgar, james cagney, joe mccarthy, judi dench, leonardo dicaprio, machine gun kelly, martin luther king, naomi watts, orson wells, shakespeare, tony kushner

d

“Secret Agent Man”

Review: “J. Edgar”

Grade: B+ (RENT IT)

“WHAT DETERMINES a man’s legacy is what isn’t seen.”  This from J. Edgar Hoover, studiously embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio, in Clint Eastwood’s new bio-pic, “J. Edgar,” a tragedy in which quite a lot of Hoover’s secrets are begrudgingly brought to light.  The secret files shredded by his lifelong secretary Helen Gandy (played by Naomi Watts) at the film’s conclusion serve as a potent symbol for Eastwood’s study more generally: the files may be history, but our fearful fascination with Hoover remains just as potent as it was back in 1963 when the head of the F.B.I. was busy wire-tapping Martin Luther King, Jr. and deriding Eleanor Roosevelt as “old horse face” and lesbian.

With “Milk,” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black turned to gay-lib crusader Harvey Milk for an open book of love, laughter and liberation.  Turning to a droll anti-radical like John Edgar Hoover, the very antithesis of Milk, was a bold way to balance two extremes in twentieth-century American culture.  Hoover’s public achievements, of course, are extremely well-known.  Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation (later the F.B.I.) in 1924, Hoover served eight presidents before his death in 1972.  Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” gives us the sense that, at the zenith of his Orwellian power, it was really Hoover’s Washington while everyone else, including the Kennedy brothers, were merely his special guests.  Jeffrey Donovan, as Robert F. Kennedy, has to remind Hoover that communism is no longer an internal but external threat to effectively beat back the bulldog.

Spanning that long career, from a librarian to a crime-fighter, “J. Edgar” begins with a bang, literally, as the Washington home of A. Mitchell Palmer (Geoff Pierson) is bombed by anarchists in 1919.  Determined to destroy the source of the attack, Palmer soon recruited a 24-year-old law school graduate named John Edgar Hoover to arrest and deport those suspected of anti-American activities.  But Hoover was no Joe McCarthy, a scourge dismissed by Hoover as an “opportunist.”

As the new acting director, Hoover fought the cancer of communism on American soil with the same ferocity he fought facial hair and bowties amongst his employees.  Hoover’s involvement in the so-called “Crime of the Century” – the fatal abduction of Charles Lindbergh’s infant son, Charles Jr., from the second story nursery of the aviator’s New Jersey home in 1932 – brought instant notoriety.  So, too, did Hoover’s pursuit of gangsters Machine Gun Kelly and Vi Mathias.  It was the age of the Tommy Gun and James Cagney and Hoover saw himself as the tireless watchman at the center of it all. And centralize he did: Hoover’s innovations included a fingerprint database and state-of-the-art forensics.  Bryan Burrough, author of Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, observes that “in late 1933, the FBI was still only a shadow of the professional crime-fighting organization it was to become” since “Hoover’s College Boys were long on energy but short on experience.”

Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” also turns to Hoover’s lack of experience when it came to the opposite sex and draws a rather reductive line between Hoover’s alleged homosexuality and his closeness to his mother Anna Marie (a puppet-master in petticoats played by Dame Judi Dench).  She lurks about the house they share, asking “Are you abandoning me again tonight?” on hearing her little Edgar has plans.  One harrowing scene features a forlorn DiCaprio standing before the mirror, mother over his shoulder, telling her through euphemism: “I don’t like to dance with women.”  It’s staggering to think that DiCaprio, who could have easily passed as one of the Fanning sisters in his “Romeo and Juliet” days now looks like a young Orson Wells.  What follows DiCaprio’s pained admission is Dench’s narrative about the suicide of a gay man she called “daffy” (for daffodil), adding: “I’d rather have a dead son than a daffy son.”  DiCaprio and Dench’s scenes together elevate the psychology of “J. Edgar” to something like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Volumnia, another oedipal duo in which a boy’s best friend, as Norman Bates put it, is his mother.  Cinematographer Tom Stern keeps the film half-lit to match an ambience of secrets and lies.

But the ambitious young man nicknamed “Speed” gets all tongue-tied upon meeting the handsome Clyde Tolson (played by Armie Hammer, the “Winklevi” twins in “The Social Network”).  Hoover and Tolson become fast friends and they remained so until the Director’s death, after which Tolson accepted the U.S. flag draped on his friend’s coffin and inherited Hoover’s half-a-million dollar estate.  Still, Black’s script is a work of historical revisionism, just as dependent on rumors and suspicions as Hoover’s own secret files.  No one knows for sure what Hoover and Tolson shared, but Black’s script, taking a cue from Tony Kushner’s treatment of Roy Cohn in “Angels in America,” casts the repression of Hoover’s own sexuality as the engine that drives his ruthless oppression of others.  It’s a bit simple but it forms the humanizing core of “J. Edgar,” a gay film from an unlikely source: cowboy auteur Clint Eastwood.

Eleven years before his death in 1975, Tolson suffered a stroke. Like an old married couple at the breakfast table, Hoover, every bit the control-freak, orders that Clyde better enunciate his words.  Tolson was later buried in the Congressional Cemetery only yards away from J. Edgar where perhaps the all-seeing Director could eternally keep an eye on him.  As Hoover’s secretary put it before every appointment, “The director will see you now.”

Review: “Dream House”

09 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by colincarman in Film Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

daniel craig, david louck, dream house, elias koteas, evil, freud, horror, james bond 007, jim sheridan, kubric, naomi watts, rachel weisz, stephen king, the shining, thriller, uncanny

“Burning Down the House”

Grade: F (SKIP IT)

For sale: three bedrooms, three full baths, garage, fully furnished, crown molding, stainless steel appliances, washer/dryer, storage.  House also includes poltergeists in the form of a murdered mother and her two dead daughters.  Any takers?

Only two: city-slickers Libby (played by Rachel Weisz) and Will, a publisher with pectorals played by Daniel Craig (a.k.a. 007 du jour), who move from town to country with bloody results.  The primary problem with “Dream House,” which is set in a New England town called New Ashford with Craig as an aspiring novelist, is that there’s not a shred of newness or novelty in this film (directed by the otherwise bright Irish film director, Jim Sheridan, of “In the Name of the Father” and “My Left Foot”).  As an anguished Libby tells Will, “There is something wrong with this house.”

Wrong, indeed. The less than dreamy house at the center of this turkey is already something of a suburban legend by the time Libby and Will start unpacking boxes.  Horror-queen Naomi Watts plays Anne, Will’s mysterious neighbor who keeps her distance, and won’t say what happened inside the Ward home five years ago.  After Will catches a gaggle of Goths holding a creepy séance in his cellar, and the ever-menacing Elias Koteas (of “Shutter Island,” a superior film built on the same concept of parallel plots) peering through his windows, he complains that he has an “infestation of teenagers in the basement.”  That’s the least of his problems.  Much to his disbelief, he comes to suspect that he is the house’s former occupant, a wife-killer named Peter Ward, and that Libby and his daughters are mere visions.  After paying a visit to Greenhaven Psychiatric Institute, Will comes to wonder: am I Ward?  Am I a widower or a wack-job?

Chances are you won’t stick around to find out and for good reason.  Screenwriter David Louck stuffs his script with laughable lines like “I’m not writing a book, I’m living in a fantasy!” and “Get me the chloroform now!” And when Will and Libby realize that the iniquity inside their walls cannot be suppressed, we get this: “You can’t paint over evil!”

Any smart spectator of this claptrap would be hard-pressed to find something intelligent to say about it, but if forced to lay a cerebral layer of paint over “Dream House,” Freud’s conceptualization of the “The Uncanny” (1919) comes to mind.  To prove that the uncanny relates to what he calls “themes of the double in all its grades and developments,” Freud describes being lost in an Italian piazza: “I suddenly found myself in the same street again [where] my swift departure resulted only in my ending up in the very same place, through a different detour, for the third time.  But then I was overcome by a feeling I can only describe as uncanny […] the unintended return of the same.”   The uncanny isn’t so much déjà vu but the compulsion to repeat and return over and over again.

“Dream House” not only repeats the central conceit of the King/Kubric classic, “The Shining,” in which murdered girls leave an infectious trace behind – come play with us, Danny! – but it goes in circles like the toilet bowl in which it belongs.  When a great conflagration eventually erupts in the final reel, you won’t feel the heat since, by that point, “Dream House” has already collapsed like a house of cards.

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