Werner Herzog's 1977 masterpiece "Stroszek" is a tragic comedy, a beautifully-rendered snapshot of Berlin slums, a heartbreaking love story, a clinical study of mental illness, a condemnation of the American Dream.
It sounds a bit much, especially given Herzog's reputed misanthropy and the preponderance of foreign films that specialize in demonizing the United States (von Trier's "Dogville" being the worst of the recent bunch).
But "Stroszek" isn't interested in the cruelty of capitalism as it is the naivete of Stroszek himself (played with tragic reserve by the troubled actor Bruno S.)
Stroszek simply doesn't fit in anywhere. A recently-released mental patient who's apparently been in and out of institutions because of his alcoholism, he quickly befriends Eva (Eva Mattes), another lost soul who can't escape her abusive pimps. Stroszek also reconnects with his seeming guardian angel - an elderly neighbor Mr. Scheitz (Charles Scheitz) who has tended to Stroszek's belongings during his self-pronounced "vacation."
The hypnotic first half of the picture paints the portrait of a seedy Berlin slum from which nothing good can emerge - but Herzog's subtle camerawork (featuring a great deal of perfectly-framed static shots) tells of an impending miracle - surely, nothing can possibly get worse.
Indeed, hope is just around the corner; Stroszek simply needs to hitch his star to the right wagon. Mr. Scheitz is planning to move to rural Wisconsin, where his nephew has promised a good life away from the gray violence of 1970s Germany.
After one last attack from Eva's pimps, the trio are off to Railroad Flats - a dismal, rural burg that is - if anything - darker than Berlin. It's a place whose few denizens bide their ample time telling stories of unsolved murders and tawdry sex jokes, a place from which just about anyone would be desperate to escape.
But Stroszek's hope, and his love for Eva, are such that he commits to the town, buying a prefabricated mobile home and an expensive color TV that neither of them can afford. But it will work out - it has to. America is the promised land, believes Stroszek - even for a non-English-speaking, alcoholic immigrant with a prostitute girlfriend.
Of course he is doomed to fail, but, unlike the programmatic "Dogville," "Stroszek" never wishes the worst for its character in the hopes of making grand Statements. It simply observes, from a distance, the tragedy of mistaken innocence. Stroszek is tabula rasa - a man who only wants to play his accordion in a public square - not to exchange bawdy anecdotes with auto mechanics.
In its way, "Stroszek" is the real-world counterpoint to Robert Zemeckis's 1994 comic adventure "Forrest Gump," where hopeful dimness is prized, rewarded, beloved - where an idiot can find salvation in rural America despite a promiscuous girlfriend and an eccentric best friend.
Herzog's vison is far more honest - he plays cynical Candide to Zemeckis's idealistic Pangloss, yet Herzog still manages to keep his sense of humor intact. Despite the tragedies, and there are many, in "Stroszek," there are surreal slices of humor that surface even during the film's great and terrible climax - which Herzog counters with langorous shots of a dancing chicken.
Theories abound about the point of the chicken, a novelty act who dances on cue when someone drops a quarter into a machine. Nonsensical on the surface, the chicken probably represents Herzog's Skinner-ian vision of humanity: Like the chicken, we are all products of operant conditioning. Like Stroszek, we are all destined - for good or ill - to follow the paths set forth from our births.
Halfway through the film, Stroszek is shown a prematurely-born baby, whose grip reflexes are so strong that it won't let go of a doctor's hands, even as the doctor yanks it into the air. Stroszek is the adult version of the baby - a confused child looking for something - anything - human to grasp onto. But no one will hold onto the poor man; his worth as a human being is disregarded by everyone save the pathetic, senile Mr. Scheitz.
In any other film, Stroszek would be rescued, validated, saved. Not in Berlin. Not in Railroad Flats. Not, Herzog might say, anywhere.
Rating: *****
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
Fracture
One of the best ways to gauge the dullness of a movie is when it's easier to focus more on the product placement than on the story.
"Fracture" is just such a movie.
Marketed as a legal thriller about the perfect murder, "Fracture" is actually a somnolescent drama about a hyperintelligent psycho (Anthony Hopkins - who else?) who goes mano-a-mano with a stud prosecutor (Ryan Gosling) with a 97% conviction rate.
Gosling's character, Willy Beachum, is on the fast track to junior partnership in a ritzy L.A. law firm, but gets sidetracked by an attempted homicide case that seems like a slam-dunk. The police have a signed a confession from Hopkins's Ted Crawford - a shady millionaire engineer - and it looks like a simple guilt-and-conviction quickie.
As the movie's trailers make clear, Crawford has very deliberately shot his wife in the head for her repeated infidelities with - surprise! - the hostage negotiator (Billy Burke) who later attended to his arrest. Thanks to the negotiator's intimidating presence during his questioning, Crawford successfully gets the confession thrown out, leaving Beachum with precious little evidence to present to the court.
Following that bombshell, "Fracture" doesn't offer any more twists than an average episode of "Law and Order." Gosling wanders around for what seems like forever, searching for evidence that he can't find, while Hopkins makes taunting phone calls to his home and office. There's a ponderous love story with a senior partner in Beachum's future employer and ethical crises of conscience, both of which which gives director Gregory Hoblit plenty of time to shoot mini-commercials featuring Spint cell phones and Macintosh computers.
On the plus side, the script, by Daniel Pyne and Glen Gers, gives Hopkins a gleeful chance to ham it up, which provides blessed slivers of comic relief and the picture's best dialogue. Hopkins isn't taking this sucker seriously, and he exposes the ponderous Gosling as a talentless blank; he's one of the few Hollywood actors who can get upstaged by a laptop.
But the ending...dear Lord, the ending. I'm not hesitant to give away plot points for stinkers like "Fracture," but explaining its denouement would render such disbelief, dear reader, that I'd have to take the blame for you smashing the computer monitor you're looking at right now. Suffice it to say that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks: It's as if Hoblit realized that he'd taken almost 2 hours on a TV-movie story and immediately pulled the plug to avoid further embarrassment.
Forget the movie's murder victim: The true injured parties are Sprint and Apple, which paid a king's ransom to be associated with this crappy dirge. Right now their marketing departments have to be scratching their heads in disbelief - they may as well have cross-promoted with Halliburton.
Rating: **
"Fracture" is just such a movie.
Marketed as a legal thriller about the perfect murder, "Fracture" is actually a somnolescent drama about a hyperintelligent psycho (Anthony Hopkins - who else?) who goes mano-a-mano with a stud prosecutor (Ryan Gosling) with a 97% conviction rate.
Gosling's character, Willy Beachum, is on the fast track to junior partnership in a ritzy L.A. law firm, but gets sidetracked by an attempted homicide case that seems like a slam-dunk. The police have a signed a confession from Hopkins's Ted Crawford - a shady millionaire engineer - and it looks like a simple guilt-and-conviction quickie.
As the movie's trailers make clear, Crawford has very deliberately shot his wife in the head for her repeated infidelities with - surprise! - the hostage negotiator (Billy Burke) who later attended to his arrest. Thanks to the negotiator's intimidating presence during his questioning, Crawford successfully gets the confession thrown out, leaving Beachum with precious little evidence to present to the court.
Following that bombshell, "Fracture" doesn't offer any more twists than an average episode of "Law and Order." Gosling wanders around for what seems like forever, searching for evidence that he can't find, while Hopkins makes taunting phone calls to his home and office. There's a ponderous love story with a senior partner in Beachum's future employer and ethical crises of conscience, both of which which gives director Gregory Hoblit plenty of time to shoot mini-commercials featuring Spint cell phones and Macintosh computers.
On the plus side, the script, by Daniel Pyne and Glen Gers, gives Hopkins a gleeful chance to ham it up, which provides blessed slivers of comic relief and the picture's best dialogue. Hopkins isn't taking this sucker seriously, and he exposes the ponderous Gosling as a talentless blank; he's one of the few Hollywood actors who can get upstaged by a laptop.
But the ending...dear Lord, the ending. I'm not hesitant to give away plot points for stinkers like "Fracture," but explaining its denouement would render such disbelief, dear reader, that I'd have to take the blame for you smashing the computer monitor you're looking at right now. Suffice it to say that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks: It's as if Hoblit realized that he'd taken almost 2 hours on a TV-movie story and immediately pulled the plug to avoid further embarrassment.
Forget the movie's murder victim: The true injured parties are Sprint and Apple, which paid a king's ransom to be associated with this crappy dirge. Right now their marketing departments have to be scratching their heads in disbelief - they may as well have cross-promoted with Halliburton.
Rating: **
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Thumbsucker
"Thumbsucker" is the latest in a mini-trend of high school movies that struggle fiercely to dismantle the coming-of-age teen offerings that sustained Generation X through the '80s and '90s.
A spiritual sister to "Brick," the excrutiatingly arch tale of a baby gumshoe with a sadistic streak, "Thumbsucker" paints a stone-faced portrait of adolescence, starring ineffectual teachers and absentee parents. Both pictures aim to flatter teen audiences by portraying their peer group as hardened wiseguys and adults as self-absorbed fools - but they're so atonal and flat that it's hard to imagine teens getting turned on.
In "Thumbucker," Lou Taylor Pucci plays Justin Cobb, a morose loner who can't maintain a decent GPA, land a girlfriend or perform on his school debate team. Justin is intelligent but depressed and sexually frustrated - conditions suffered by almost everyone I knew in high school, geeks and jocks alike.
The kid is deemed an extreme case, though, and after an intervention by the principal and his debate team coach (a toned-down Vince Vaughn), Justin goes on Ritalin, which turns him into a hypercompetitive jerk. Brilliant in debate but lacking in conviction, he becomes an extroverted, silver-tongued monster: We can envision him one day becoming a talk-radio gasbag - a slicker, smarter Rush Limbaugh.
Despite its clever execution of a midstream character shift, "Thumbsucker" can't escape the trappings of its dated predecessors. Justin inevitably finds redemption by quitting his meds and preparing for college and - we are led to believe - a life of endless discovery. Little wonder he doesn't hit the prom with Molly Ringwold or confront his father over a crashed Ferrari.
The conventional message of the picture - that psychotropic drugs are unnatural and dangerous - is papered over by a dreamlike, fragmented, stoner/fugue-state narrative - one that tricks the audience into thinking that it's more substantial than it is. "Thumbsucker" doesn't quite collapse under its own weight, but the stilts that support it creak and sway, and the ending reveals the whole enterprise as an abstract feel-good comedy: Andrei Tarkovsky meets John Hughes.
Riding shotgun are the dysfunctional-suburban cliches of "American Beauty," There's a foul-mouthed kid brother, a fantasy girl who trades her body for experience and experimentation, a hippie dentist (Keanu Reeves, in Johnny Utah mode) and a mother who's obsessed with a cheesy TV actor (Benjamin Bratt).
Worse, "Thumbsucker" demands that we like a decidedly unpleasant main character: Justin's selfishness is maintained throughout, with or without the Ritalin, and his reward goes down like bitter medicine. Vince Vaughn's Mr. Geary, with his gentle idealism and frumpy clothes, is the best character in the whole picture. Too bad he spends most of the movie on the sidelines and out of the play.
Rating: **
A spiritual sister to "Brick," the excrutiatingly arch tale of a baby gumshoe with a sadistic streak, "Thumbsucker" paints a stone-faced portrait of adolescence, starring ineffectual teachers and absentee parents. Both pictures aim to flatter teen audiences by portraying their peer group as hardened wiseguys and adults as self-absorbed fools - but they're so atonal and flat that it's hard to imagine teens getting turned on.
In "Thumbucker," Lou Taylor Pucci plays Justin Cobb, a morose loner who can't maintain a decent GPA, land a girlfriend or perform on his school debate team. Justin is intelligent but depressed and sexually frustrated - conditions suffered by almost everyone I knew in high school, geeks and jocks alike.
The kid is deemed an extreme case, though, and after an intervention by the principal and his debate team coach (a toned-down Vince Vaughn), Justin goes on Ritalin, which turns him into a hypercompetitive jerk. Brilliant in debate but lacking in conviction, he becomes an extroverted, silver-tongued monster: We can envision him one day becoming a talk-radio gasbag - a slicker, smarter Rush Limbaugh.
Despite its clever execution of a midstream character shift, "Thumbsucker" can't escape the trappings of its dated predecessors. Justin inevitably finds redemption by quitting his meds and preparing for college and - we are led to believe - a life of endless discovery. Little wonder he doesn't hit the prom with Molly Ringwold or confront his father over a crashed Ferrari.
The conventional message of the picture - that psychotropic drugs are unnatural and dangerous - is papered over by a dreamlike, fragmented, stoner/fugue-state narrative - one that tricks the audience into thinking that it's more substantial than it is. "Thumbsucker" doesn't quite collapse under its own weight, but the stilts that support it creak and sway, and the ending reveals the whole enterprise as an abstract feel-good comedy: Andrei Tarkovsky meets John Hughes.
Riding shotgun are the dysfunctional-suburban cliches of "American Beauty," There's a foul-mouthed kid brother, a fantasy girl who trades her body for experience and experimentation, a hippie dentist (Keanu Reeves, in Johnny Utah mode) and a mother who's obsessed with a cheesy TV actor (Benjamin Bratt).
Worse, "Thumbsucker" demands that we like a decidedly unpleasant main character: Justin's selfishness is maintained throughout, with or without the Ritalin, and his reward goes down like bitter medicine. Vince Vaughn's Mr. Geary, with his gentle idealism and frumpy clothes, is the best character in the whole picture. Too bad he spends most of the movie on the sidelines and out of the play.
Rating: **
Friday, June 8, 2007
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