By Tom Stempel.

No Nuances Allowed Here.

Carol

(2015. Screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, based on the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. 118 minutes.)

Back in US #137, I told you that Brooklyn was wonderfully filled with nuances about character and themes. That, alas, is simply not true about Carol. It should be true. The story is a delicate one about a lesbian relationship in the early fifties, and nuances should be essential to its telling.

Carol is an older woman who seduces, and is seduced by, Therese, a shopgirl in an upscale New York City Department store. Unless you were expecting a way over the top, women-in-prison-in-the-shower melodrama, you want to get a sense of what these characters are going through, and more importantly, how they feel about it.

What they are doing is very transgressive for the time. Are they excited? Scared? Not worried at all (yes, there are ways to show that)?

Carol has had more experience (we meet a former lover of hers), but how does that affect how she behaves? My wife said that Cate Blanchett, who plays Carol, never changes her expression. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is not one of Banchett’s better performances. Rooney Mara plays Therese, and we get more expressions from her, but they don’t add up to much.

They are not the only two characters who don’t get reactions. At one point the two women go off on a road trip through middle America, and with the exception of a private investigator Carol’s husband has following them, we get no reactions from the people they meet. No horrified looks, no knowing smiles, nothing.

There is virtually none of that, or appears to be none of that, in Nagy’s script. I say appears to be because there may well have been stuff in the script that got flattened out in Todd Haynes’s direction. Haynes’s films are known for their emotional restraint, but in many of them the restraint is so severe you are not sure if the people are human.

Haynes’s 2002 film Far From Heaven was also about a transgressive romance set in the fifties (white woman, black man), but like Carol, it seems to exist in its own hermetically-sealed universe. In Far, Haynes throws in a clip from the 1957 The Three Faces of Eve that is so full of life it nearly ruins the basic concept of the restrained fifties. The fifties film clip here is from Sunset Boulevard (1950—although most of the film seems to take place in 1952-3), and at least does not do as much damage.

Haynes has always seemed to me more interested in style than in content (the interview with him in the December 2015 Sight & Sound is all about style and nothing about content), and Carol is loaded with style. You have not seen so many fifties cars since American Graffiti (1973), and the film is art-directed to within an inch of its life.

Haynes was willing to juggle Nagy’s script around a bit to emphasize his direction. In the script she had a scene late in the picture where a friend of Carol’s approaches her and Therese while they are having some drinks in a nightclub. Haynes remembered that Noel Coward and David Lean had a similar scene at the opening of their 1945 film Brief Encounter, where a talkative friend of Laura’s interrupts Laura and Alec having tea in a railroad station tea shop.

We can see that Laura and Alec are a little bothered, but we don’t know exactly why. So Haynes disrupted the chronology of Nagy’s script and put her scene in early. What he forgot was that the Brief Encounter scene is just the introduction to the flashback story. When Lean and Coward come back to the scene, we now know Laura and Alec are having their last conversation before Alec leaves. Coward’s script and especially Lean’s direction and editing give the second version much more emotional clarity and power. I think Haynes comes back to the same scene later, but it is so unmemorable that even though I saw the film a few days ago I can’t remember.

A Burt Reynolds Car-Crash Movie.

Sisters

(2015. Written by Paula Pell. 118 minutes.)

In the seventies, Burt Reynolds was one of the biggest stars in movies. From the mid-seventies on he was primarily known for movies that featured a lot of car crashes, such as the three Smokey and the Bandit (1977-80-83) movies and the two Cannonball Run (1981-84) films. After 1983’s Stroker Ace, his career went downhill. It was not just that audiences got tired of the car-crash movies, but they got fed up because those movies got worse and worse.

Reynolds seemed to believe that scripts were not all that crucial and all he had to do was show up, improv some dialogue, and make enough mistakes to go into the blooper reels that run under the credits.

Based on Sisters, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler seem to think they can do the same thing. Pell’s screenplay as it appears in the film (yeah, another one of those) is a mess.

The idea is not bad: two sisters in their early forties learn their parents are selling the home they grew up in. The sisters Maura (Poehler) and Kate (Fey) are appalled. They come back home, supposedly to clean their stuff out of the house, and discover their teenaged diaries.

The film’s diaries are inspired by Pell’s actual teenage diaries that she had amused friends and co-workers for years. (She wrote for Saturday Night Live for twenty years and was a producer/writer on 30 Rock; the background on Pell is from a Los Angeles Times interview you can read here).

The sisters decide to throw the big teenage party they never did when they were in high school. Kate, the wild one, agrees to be the sober “party mother,” while Maura, usually the straight one, wants to let her freak flag fly. Hijinks ensue.

So what went wrong? Not what you would expect, given Pell’s experience doing sketch comedy. Usually when sketch writers move into features, their plotting is a mess. Here the structure is reasonably sound.

What happens is that the scenes seem to fall apart. Notice I said the script “as it appears in the film” is a mess. Watching and hearing the scenes, the dialogue and action feels like it was mostly improvised. The scenes seem rather shapeless, avoiding getting to a point at all costs.

The one exception to that, and easily the best scene in the picture, has James, a hunk Maura is interested in, fall onto a dancing ballerina doll. Falling backwards. As in it goes up where the sun don’t shine. And it keeps turning and the music keeps playing. The scene and the acting is more restrained that anything else in the film, and all the funnier because of that.

Another problem with the film, and it may be from the script, is that there is very little characterization. Kate is the wild one, Maura the responsible one, James is just a hunk, and so on. The producers (who include Tina’n’Amy) have gathered a great cast, but the actors are all over the place (Bobby Moynihan) or given nothing to do (Kate McKinnon). And all the characters behave very arbitrarily because of the demands of the plot rather than with any internal consistency.

Disappointing, but Life is Disappointing.

Youth

(2015. Written by Paolo Sorrentino. 124 minutes.)

When Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty came out in 2013, for some reason I ended up not writing about it, even though I liked the film a lot. Sorrentino, a great fan of Fellini’s, had in Beauty taken an older version of Marcello, the writer in La Dolce Vita (1960), and watched him walking around Rome thinking about his life. He meets many people he knows and some he does not. It’s a beautiful film and a nice counterpoint to La Dolce Vita.

As several critics have pointed out Youth is obviously influenced by Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963). In Fellini’s film Guido, a middle-aged film director, goes to a spa to renew his creative energy. He is stalled on the film he is making, and we see flashbacks, dreams, and the real people at the spa as they impinge on Guido. He finally figures out how to make the film, essentially the one we have just seen.

Youth is also set at a spa, and we have two older artists. Fred Ballinger is a retired composer and conductor, and his friend Mick Boyle is a film director working with a crew of young screenwriters working on the script for his new film. They also see a lot of characters at the spa.

At the opening of Youth, an emissary from the Queen of England asks Fred to conduct a command performance of his most famous piece, “Simple Songs,” for the queen and Prince Philip. Fred turns him down, and only much later in the film explains that he wrote it for his wife who is now unable to sing it, and he does not want anybody else singing it.

Eventually of course he does do the command performance, complete with famous classical musicians Viktoria Mullova playing the violin and Sumi Jo singing one of the songs. It’s a long final sequence and is not helped by the fact the music is terrible. Yes, I know the song has been nominated for an Academy Award, but my wife, a pretty fair singer in her heyday, thought the music was even less memorable than I did.

For all its freewheeling structure, Fellini’s film is clearly building to his final realization. Here Fred’s continuing refusal to do the concert does not seem to play off the characters he meets, as does Guido’s search in his film. Worse, when he conducts the piece, we get no sense of what he feels about all of this.

Mike is closer to the Guido character, but we don’t see him paying attention to the other characters the way Guido does. We see him working with young writers, but watching writers write is very seldom interesting, and this is one of those times when it’s not.

And then the whole project collapses when Mike’s former muse Brenda shows up and tells him bluntly, in a very unpleasant scene, she’s not going to do his film, which means it won’t get financing. She’s going off to do television instead.

For Sorrentino that may be the ultimate sell-out, but in America, Brenda’s choice makes a lot more sense given the roles available for women of a certain age on television. Mike does get a nice scene later, inspired by the finale of 8 1/2, where he sees the characters in his previous films standing out in a field, saying lines from his pictures.

While most of the secondary and tertiary characters are woefully underdeveloped, there are a couple of supporting roles that are well written. Jimmy (Paul Dano) is a young actor who has come to the spa to work on developing a character he has been hired to play in a film. When he finally works out how to do it, we see him in the spa restaurant in the costume of the character, whom you will recognize immediately as a well-know person in history. Fred’s daughter and also his manager, Lena (Rachel Weisz), gets several great scenes, including a great payoff at the end.

Sorrentino, on the basis of Beauty and this film, seems fascinated by the elderly, even though he is only in his mid-forties. We get a lot more jokes about the difficulty of old men peeing than we need, but we also get some sense of the disappointments of life. I suppose if the film was better written, it might contradict Sorrentino’s message.

Since it is Only Half a Good Movie, Maybe They Should Have Shot it in 35mm rather than 70mm.

The Hateful Eight

(2015. Written by Quentin Tarantino. 187 minutes.)

So there is this snow. Lots of snow. Lots and lots of snow, which is perhaps why Tarantino made such a big deal out of shooting the film in Ultra Panavision 70mm. For the first hour we are riding along on a stagecoach on the way to Red Rock.

The first characters we meet on the stage are bounty hunter John Ruth, known as the hangman because he brings in fugitives alive rather than dead so he can watch them hang, and his prisoner Daisy Domergue (given Tarantino’s fascination with old movies, she is probably named after Faith Domergue, a minor B-picture actress of the fifties).

The stage is stopped by another bounty hunter, Major Marquis Warren (undoubtedly named after Charles Marquis Warren, a television and screen writer best known for developing the series Gunsmoke; Warren however was in the navy in World War II and rose to the rank of Commander). Warren is black, but he carries a letter from Abraham Lincoln that suggests they were, as one of the other characters anachronistically says, “pen pals.” This being a Tarantino script, you know somebody is going to call him the “N” word, and a lot of people do, in spite of the Lincoln letter.

Because of the snow—did I tell you there was a lot of snow?—they don’t make it to Red Rock, but have to hold up at a stage stop called Minnie’s Haberdashery, where they meet an interesting gallery of characters, some of whom may be who they say they are. And then we pretty much spend the next two hours inside the haberdashery. In glorious 70mm. I can see why Tarantino wanted 70mm, but it’s not that crucial for the interiors (although Robert Richardson shoots them brilliantly, including a clue of a single jelly bean on the floor—in glorious 70mm).

So we get to know all these characters, and Major Warren is suspicious of almost everyone and everything. Rightly so, as we come to find out in the rest of the first half of the film (in the roadshow engagements at least, there is an intermission about 100 minutes into the film).

Appearing on The Late Show, Samuel L. Jackson told Steven Colbert that the reason he appears in so many of Tarantino’s films is that Tarantino writes such great parts for him. This is one of them, and Tarantino serves all the actors well; nobody is collecting unemployment on this film, including a whole new collection of characters who show up in the second half. The first half is the better part of the movie, since it is all character and plot (including the jelly bean). One major character is killed right before the intermission.

Then the film goes downhill in the second half. Yes, the mystery unfolds, but mostly it is one person killing another for eighty minutes, and at least some we are really sorry to leave so soon. In most of his other movies, the violence is there to connect to the themes of the films, as in Django Unchained (2012), where, as I mentioned, the theme of the picture is to show you how brutal slavery was. Here it is just one killing after another, and it gets tiresome, especially since we are still inside Minnie’s.

A few months ago I saw a truly obscure 1951 Fox film The Secret of Convict Lake. It’s a terrific little film. Jim Canfield and several other prisoners escape and work their way to Convict Lake, where Canfield intends to kill the man who stole money and got Canfield put in prison for the robbery.

But the menfolk of the town are not there, and so the convicts are snowed in with the womenfolk. One of them is the bad guy’s fiancée, whom Canfield falls in love with. The bad guy and the other men show up in time for a very satisfying surprise ending.

As I was reading about The Hateful Eight, I kept thinking how similar it sounded to Convict Lake. As much as I like the first half of Tarantino’s film, Convict Lake is much better plotted. It only runs 83 minutes. And with the exception of a couple of early establishing shots, the whole thing was shot on the sounds stages of Fox. In black and white and, ahem, 35mm.

WWTL

The Revenant

(2015. Screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu, based in part on the novel The Revenant: A Novel of Revenge by Michael Punke. 156 minutes.)

After Alexander Mackendrick finished his directing career (The Man in the White Suit [1951] and The Sweet Smell of Success [1957]) he became Dean of the film program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1969. Several years later I heard him say that student films came in two lengths: Too Long and Way Too Long. Truer words were never spoken.

When I would sit in the end-of-semester screenings at LACC and make notes on the student films, I used abbreviations. One of the most used was TL. I also used WTL, for way too long. And several films earned many more Ws. The Revenant is a two W movie. The basic idea has about 90 minutes of material, which you could possibly expand to 105 minutes. Look at the running time above.

The story of the film, based on the real life of Hugh Glass, is relatively simple. In 1823 Glass was a fur trapper in the American West. On one expedition he was badly mauled by a bear. The army unit he was with assumed he would die. The commanding officer of the unit got two other trappers, Fitzgerald and Bridger, to stay with Glass until he died. Fitzgerald got frustrated and he and Bridger left Glass to die. Only Glass didn’t. He managed to survive and work his way back to the fort, bent on revenge against Fitzgerald, who had taken Glass’s best rifle. You can see where the story is going.

The film takes 40 minutes before Glass is mauled by the bear. The writers have added a subplot, not from history, involving Glass, his Pawnee wife, and their son Hawk. Hawk accompanies Glass on the expedition, but then the writers have Fitzgerald kill him before they leave Glass. We get flashbacks, not very detailed, of Glass, his wife, and his son throughout the film, but the flashbacks and the characters are not well enough developed for us to get involved with them.

When Glass finally gets on his way, he crawls most of the way, since his leg was broken. So we get a lot, and I mean a lot, of Glass crawling. Mark J. Smith, who did the earliest drafts and worked with Iñárritu, who directed, on the later ones, said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times that he “was excited about the challenge of writing an almost silent film.” Except that the crawling scenes are not exactly silent. Somewhere along the line they lost their nerve, and Leonardo Di Caprio, who plays Glass, grunts and groans. A lot. Both the crawling and the groaning get very repetitious.

And speaking of lots of stuff, boy is there a lot of snow in this movie, more than The Hateful 8 and Doctor Zhivago (1965) combined. The snow may have been in the novel, but Smith kept it, although Glass’s ordeal actually took place from August to October.

Iñárritu obviously loved the idea of shooting in the snow, and a lot of the interviews with him and the cast are about the physical difficulties of shooting the film. It does look gorgeous, but the story is so slow moving, I kept wondering how many shots were variations on the different Sierra Club Christmas cards I have sent out over the last decades.

The cinematographer is the great Emmanuel Lubezki, and he shot it, ah, no, not in 70mm, but with “a new large-sensor ALEXA digital camera,” according to a story on the film in the January 2016 Sight & Sound. I still went out of the theatre humming the scenery.

Glass eventually gets to the fort and goes on an expedition to find Fitzgerald. He does and kills him. Which we are too exhausted to care about much by that time. And the writers have made the ending into a very conventional Hollywood ending.

I assume their ending is from novel, which is subtitled A Novel of Revenge. If they wanted to tell a more difficult-to-script version of the story, they could have tried the real ending: when Glass tracked down Fitzgerald, the latter had joined the army, and the army shot people who killed soldiers. So Glass did not kill him, but he did get his rifle back. Glass was satisfied with that, and the fact that Fitzgerald was revealed to the world as a coward. That’s a much more nuanced version than the conventional “dead son” detail the writers use.

Then there’s the Indian chief. There are a number of Indians throughout the film, but a recurring one is an older chief who is looking for his daughter, Powaqa, who was taken from him many years ago. And Powaqa was Glass’s wife.

When the chief and his band come across the Fitzgerald-Glass confrontation, he is perfectly happy to let Fitzgerald die, but then he does nothing with Glass. Did he not recognize him? Or did the younger woman with him say something to him? Glass earlier in the film rescued her from being raped by French trappers. But the writers, or Iñárritu as director, don’t let us know. All we would need is a shot of her whispering into the chief’s ear to know. Not letting us know leaves us very frustrated, as does the whole film.

One other thing. In 1971 there was another movie made on the same subject, Man in the Wilderness. It runs 104 minutes. Leslie Halliwell in his Filmgoer’s Guide says at that even at that length it is “a bit stretched.”

Middle Passage.

Joy

(2015. Screenplay by David O. Russell, story by Annie Mumolo and David O. Russell. 124 minutes.)

David O. Russell loves quirky families, as in Flirting with Disaster (1996) and especially Silver Linings Playbook (2012). Joy starts out with a family similar to the one in Playbook, especially since two of the stars of that film, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert De Niro, show up early in the picture. Unfortunately the early family scenes are not as focused as those in Playbook. Instead we are just getting a lot of character scenes with not a lot of forward momentum.

Joy is a single mom, whose ex-husband is living in her basement and whose mother is living in a spare room watching soap operas. Then her father’s third wife dumps him off, since she does not want to deal with him anymore. Arguments ensue.

Then Joy, who has had a lot of bright ideas in her life, comes up with an idea for what became the Miracle Mop (the film is based on the life of Joy Mangano). By hook and crook, and with very little encouragement from her family, she gets it produced. And can find no one interested in making or selling it. She eventually tries the then-new shopping network QVC.

And the picture takes off like house afire. We are introduced to the head producer at QVC, Neil, and see behind the scenes of how QVC works. Feuding families we have had out the wazoo, but the QVC material is fresh and fascinating. When the male host at QVC bungles the first presentation, Joy talks Neil into letting her have a second try, this time with her on-camera. The tote board of sales from the phone operators goes through the roof.

Joy is now in charge of her own life, although her family keeps giving her almost uniformly awful advice. So did Russell need all that family material in the first half hour of the film? No, he could have done with a lot less, and we would still get what we need to make the later family scenes work. I don’t think I have mentioned one of my favorite mantras for several columns, so all together now: write only what you need.

Joy has to deal with a variety of crooked businessmen, which she does in entertaining ways. They have tried to steal her patents and she overcomes them. When she finishes one of them off in Texas, the film could end, but Russell seems to have several endings he wants to get in, and the script cuts back and forth between them.

Joy’s grandmother, who has been narrating Joy’s story, dies, but she keeps on narrating what happened to Joy: she becomes a big star on QVC and comes up with even more inventions that sell well, so much so that the much larger Home Shopping Network comes after her (in a nice scene, she learns this from Neil, who tells her this is going to happen, as he suspected it would).

And her company is big enough she starts listening to other people with potential ideas; there is another nice scene with a young couple with a baby pitching to her. The problem is those scenes are just as jumbled as the opening scenes, and we lose the momentum the middle section of the film had. If Russell had cut down the opening, he might have had more time to deal with some of the later story material about Joy.

For more about Carol, don’t miss our interview with Phyllis Nagy: “Less is More” When Adapting Highsmith.

And why not check out our interview with Mark L. Smith on The Revenant?