Late Reviews and Latest Obsessions

L'Armée des ombres (Army of Shadows), Starring Lino Ventura, Simone Signoret, Paul Meurisse, Jean-Pierre Cassel, and Paul Crauchet, Written & Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, 1969

Utterly devastating without any recourse to maudlinism or sympathy, Melville’s 1969 masterpiece L'Armée des ombres is a film generally as stoic as its protagonist Philippe Gerbier (Lino Ventura), civil engineer and head of a French Resistance network during World War Two. The film manages to demonstrate that while there are plenty of moments of deep tension and fear, there are likewise moments of light and long stretches of incredible tedium in the undercover life. Yet the gripping atmosphere of the film pervades every choice, from the way Gerbier’s eyes flick around a barber shop in the midst of being shaved, his shrewd manner taking in the pro-government poster of the Vichy leader Petain, to the wrenching early scene where the Resistance has to dispose of a traitor in their midst.

In a film full of emotional punches straight to the gut, this particular scene is probably one of the harshest. Having picked up the traitor off the streets, three members of the Resistance take the feckless young man back to an isolated farmhouse. There, they discover that the recent arrival of neighbors makes shooting him impossible. As they work their way through the options available to them for his dispatch, the cold-bloodedness of Gerbier is matched against the terrified inexperience of Claude Le Masque (Claude Mann). The final decision, all three of them involved in the traitor’s slow, silent strangulation by dishcloth, is masterfully filmed, the camera moving from face to face. It is one of the more unsettling scenes I have ever watched, a character’s death being profoundly, reverently handled.

It takes some minutes to recover from this scene and even before you can manage it, Melville has Gerbier explain to Le Masque that he should keep cyanide pills on him at all times in case of capture. The young man’s two-word response is delivered in a complex mix of resignation, resolution, and anger. Shot from behind at the execution’s closing, this moment is a bleak coda: in the Resistance you must be prepared to sacrifice everything, your life, and even your own humanity, for what you know is right.

This ideal, if you can quite call it that, is part of the animating principle of this cell as we follow them through their various operations. There is a low-lit, almost religious fervor as they fight against the Nazis, with much of the film taking place in behind the scenes rather than dramatic action sequences. Though the film does have those, too. Melville skillfully blends a moment of personal doubt, dignified resistance to give the Germans the entertainment they crave and the luck of synchronicity with smoke bombs, machine guns, a prison escape, and a racing getaway vehicle.

This successful operation is mirrored in the film by an earlier less successful rescue attempt of the network’s number two, Félix Lepercq (Paul Crauchet), a scenario that involves three members dressing up in German uniforms, two soldiers and one nurse, entering the Gestapo headquarters to sneak him out right under the German’s noses. Excruciatingly slow, the whole set up has the three driving a truck into the compound, large metal gates clanging shut behind them. This plan is the brainchild of the Resistance’s most admired member, Mathilde (Simone Signoret), a housewife who authors the more audacious of all of the network’s plans with a combination of brilliance and straight-faced moxie. The planned escape attempt is a failure, but Melville draws the tension of the situation out to an almost agonizing degree. I found myself fighting the urge to leap out of my seat and frantically pace the room as the scene ground on. The lightning reactions of Mathilde as the plan goes awry are a testament to quiet intelligence and a chess-like ability to think in the midst of incredible odds against you.

This large-scale failure has its alternate success in the double-double undercover maneuver of the Resistance’s newest member, Jean-François Jardie (Jean-Pierre Cassel). Having a week earlier written a letter of resignation to Gerbier, followed shortly by another letter to the German officials denouncing himself as a man who knows much of the Resistance, Jean-François has the good fortune to be in Lepercq’s cell, bringing him the ultimate comfort one spy can give another. It is the same kind of dignity and personal avowal of respect that is given to the network’s most solid member in a late assassination that absolutely demolishes the viewer in its devastating closing mise en scène. It all happens without flash and show, effectively countering action film bombast with real human drama.

In a way, this anti-action aspect of the film is its most powerful. Anyone can make a spy movie filled with gadgetry, explosions and car chases, but it takes a brilliant director to demonstrate simply and without grandiose gestures life’s existential dilemmas under moments of extreme duress. Gerbier’s moment of truth comes not in the film, but is delivered in a closing credits caption, neatly tying back into his moment of personal failure (his view) at the Gestapo prison. Bleakly heroic, L'Armée des ombres will haunt you for quite some time.

Patricia Highsmith just completely rocks my world.

Sad, but true.

There's really....I mean....wow...there's just no end to it, is there? This crew really is beyond everything you ever imagined. If I wrote it down in a book, you'd never buy it. I mean, seriously. How can you lampoon this?

Anywhere I Lay My Head, by Scarlett Johansson, Songs by Tom Waits, Produced by Dave Sitek, Rhino/Atco, 2008

Believe me, in my dreams, this is not the ideal way I’d be writing a sentence containing the words “Scarlett Johansson” and “blows.” Nevertheless, Johansson’s epically misguided album of Tom Waits covers Anywhere I Lay My Head blows – and blows hard. From what I gathered of her vocal talents in film, when I first heard of this album, I’d conceived of some sort of smoky lounge act, a world-weary chanteuse putting a distinctively female touch to Waits numbers. Essentially, I guess, a female Tom Waits, but with a bit more reserve.

It’s not that the album didn’t manage to get my idea right. That’s not why this is an aurally repulsive addition to the catalog. I’ve tried out a few Tom Waits covers albums and many attempts take the songs and run them right into a ditch. Luckily for those hearty attempts, the band only gets one shot at it. Here we have 10 whole songs by one of America’s quirkiest masters and every last one is a disappointment. Least so is the rendition of “Fawn,” an instrumental track from Waits’ 2002 album Alice. This album opener with churchy organ and distorted strummed guitar that midway through punched out with a burst of brass and driving feedback. It promised much but rapidly squandered it and never regained it.

Sonically speaking, the music backing up Johansson is a dull droning buzz of synthesizer and guitars, occasionally perked up by some higher pitched tinkling that does little to give any song a distinctive feel. Nick Zinner of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio bring little enthusiasm to what they’ve created here. There is such a painful, dreadful sameness to each track that if you were to put the album on in the background, you’d be hard pressed to note that a different selection was currently playing. Even the tempos are monotonously presented, a leaden thump thump thump that feels funereal and leaves the listener dying for something, anything resembling interest in the music being played.

But overall blame has to rest on the person whose name this dreck bears. One of the great jokes of our modern age is that celebrities as a whole no longer have anyone telling them when their ideas are bullshit. This often leads to hilarity. Someone, somewhere along the line, perhaps an ex-boyfriend or a guy looking to get lucky, convinced Scarlett that she did indeed have a fine voice and that she really should be a singer. Well, who doesn’t like to be flattered? (And if you’re a celebrity, take that kind of neediness and amp it a hundred degrees.)

What are we to make of this voice? Flat, unimpressive, toneless, Johansson’s robotic and narcotized alto flatly churns out the words in a kind of earnest rhythmlessness like a small child clapping or an English-as-a-Second-Language rendition of a poorly understood verse. There were times when it was painfully hard to determine if this were a real singer or Tom Waits lyrics fed into one of the female computer voices AT&T uses for their customer service lines, so stilted is Johansson’s delivery. While she claims to be an avid fan of Waits songs, her vocalizations have the feel of someone reading things for the first time, odd pauses and word enjambments giving the “singing” the feel of a small town high school poetry slam.

There is also something rather precious about a twenty-four year old attempting to tackle the world-weariness inherent in the material. When the forty-three year old Waits croak-screamed his “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” it crackled with a raw electric bitterness underscored with the faintest glimmer that the fates he described could still be avoided. It doesn’t even live in the same area code as irony to have such a youthful singer whining her way through the song and the whole conceit comes off as a tired, massive failure.

Some may say (and I’ll admit it) that Waits’ catalog offers very difficult challenges for anyone covering the work, especially his compositions since marrying collaborator Kathleen Brennan. Idiosyncratic, to say the least, Waits’ music presents such a stylized jumble –self-created instruments, jarring noises, jazz, country, rock, and show tune influences competing for dominance, his aggressively whiskey marinated variation on Louis Armstrong vocals – that covering him ought to be Herculean. One either falls under his sway or ejects everything wholesale save for the lyrics and the melodies (such as they are at times).

Johansson and crew have gone the second route almost with a vengeance and, in doing this in the manner they have, much of what makes Waits’ music pleasurable is lost completely. You don’t need to be a slave to your source (a fact Waits states quite aptly), especially when the original material is iconic (think Woody Guthrie), but here the relatively recent music is just simp-ified, dumbed down to the point of filler. It’ll probably lodge itself into heavy rotation as background noise at a Forever 21 or H&M, but I doubt it’ll score legions of fans. If this CD were to turn anyone on to Tom Waits, I’d be astonished. If it made anyone pine for a second Johansson record, I’d probably spontaneously combust.

I finally done busted my 100,000 visitor cherry. And who was the lucky web crawler who will win exactly nothing? Well, here's what we can ascertain through the magic of Site Meter. Our magic visitor is from Bombay (Mumbai, to you, sucka) in the state of Maharashta, India. Apparently a fan of children's literature and the grumps who sometimes review it, my mystery reader is a savvy Firefox user who got here from The Bartimaeus Trilogy review which had apparently been Googled about an hour previously. This repeat visit wins Mumbai, India, the prize.

Well, that's life as a big time blogger. The winning data below.

I promise.

Okay, so Scarlett Johansson's downward slide into utter irrelevancy as far as my attraction goes has accelerated to near light speed. Jeeeeeeeezus.

When I heard about this album, I thought, hey, maybe it won't suck total balls. But guess what? If this clip below is any indication, it sucks total balls to the power of infinity.

Tonight, Tom Waits will die, just so he can spin in his fuckin' grave.

The Squid and the Whale, Starring Laura Linney, Jeff Daniels, Jesse Eisenberg, and Owen Kline, Written and Directed by Noah Baumbach, 2005

There ought to be some kind of term for excruciating comedies that make you cringe with horror and recognition. Likewise, there ought to be a term for amusing dramas that make you snort at how absurd people can act in the most serious of situations. If I had to guess, even money would be on there being a French term for both. Nevertheless, you will experience both conditions – sometimes simultaneously – while watching Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical film The Squid and the Whale.

Son of two writers (the novelist Jonathan Baumbach and Village Voice critic Georgia Brown), Baumbach’s film is the story of two sons whose writer parents are divorcing. What starts out as a very rationally presented direction for the future begins to disintegrate as long simmering resentments bubble up in the parents and bad behavior by the sons begins to manifest itself in reaction.

The father, Bernard Berkman, well played here by Jeff Daniels, is a fading novelist who once rubbed elbows with great names in the literary life and now teaches writing classes and struggles even to find an agent. His wife, Joan Berkman, is played by Laura Linney, who is phenomenally good in her very subtle, very quiet way, as she is in simply everything with her name attached. Here her long smothered wife, serial adulterer, and budding novelist can come off as tender, smug, and selfish without once losing our sympathy. Bernard is a tougher creature to sympathize with, his pretentious opinions essentially correct yet delivered with such assured condescension that you want not to believe his judgment of books and films correct. When he says at a dinner conversation about Dickens, “What is it about high school? You read all the worst books by good writers,” the sentiment is generally inarguable. Yet Daniels manages to bring the kind of pomposity to his character that undermines our every chance of really feeling for him.

When Bernard moves out, schlepping across the park to another neighborhood, he describes his new place as the “filet of Prospect Park.” The sad truth of it is much more depressing. Bernard is coming down in the world and his ongoing insistence throughout his divorce that certain books he left behind in the house are his (Walt often steals them for him) is just one manifestation of his inability to let go, to face reality. He sadly continues throughout the film to convince others of a certain reality, as when he drops his sons’ hamburgers on the floor then serves them up anyway, denying what happened though one son saw him doing it. In a way, you understand Joan’s infidelity as an insistence on her own reality, divorced from her overbearing husband’s insistence.

The two parents, in the early days of the divorce while they were attempting civility, had divided up the week with “every other Thursday” acting as a balance to the uneven number of days in the week, going so far as to even divvy up where the cat will live in this joint custody experience. The discussion of the cat and the books and even what time Bernard will arrive are nasty little bits of fun that scenes can hinge on, suddenly turning into touching pathos. At one point, let into the house by his younger son, Bernard stares up at the bookshelf, realizing that his ex-wife still keeps copies of his early novels. Daniels holds this scene, freezing like a man caught up in his own bad dream, numb to the meaning of a moment, so caught up is he in the sensation of the moment.

Older son Walt Berkman (Jesse Eisenberg) is a mess, a poseur who apes his father’s stances and opinions but without the experience to back it up. Alternately blazingly angry or simulating cool detachment, he spouts even the same phraseology of his father’s opinions and you simply cringe waiting for him to get caught. His stumbling relationship with classmate Sophie (Halley Feiffer) is marked by uncharming moments as when he tells her he wishes she had fewer freckles on her face. Delightfully ignorant of some things, when Sophie discusses “The Metamorphosis” with him, Walt sums the story up as “Kafkaesque.” His intellectual plagiarism takes him so far as to first, pre-divorce, play on guitar and take credit for the Pink Floyd song “Hey You,” then later repeat the act at the school talent show. It’s one thing to trick your highbrow parents with this stuff; it’s another kettle of fish to think you can brazen it out in front of a high school crowd.

As word of Joan’s repeated affairs gets out, Walt is thrown by the secret history of his parents and begins acting out of rage. He decorates his room at his father’s house with a poster for the French film The Mother and the Whore. He listens to his father’s advice that he can “play the field” and dumps sweet Sophie for the attention-seeking Lili, a writing student of Bernard’s. He goes ahead with his disastrous talent show plagiarism (later telling someone that he felt he “could have written it” so that another’s authorship was just a “technicality”). He denounces his mother at every opportunity. All the while, he believes that his wounded soul is well-hidden and his bitterness a sufficient mask.

His psychological crack up is nothing, though, compared to that which we are treated to by the almost autistic performance of Owen Kline as younger son Frank Berkman. At around twelve or thirteen, he takes up secret drinking and the even more disturbing habit of masturbating at school and spreading his semen over the spines of library books and lockers. His aid in this is a naughty picture torn from a magazine that he keeps on him at all times, in one scene even setting it on his chair at dinner with his father and brother, glancing down every now and then throughout the meal. His own personal drama comes to a head when Bernard goes away for a weekend reading at an upstate college, taking Walt with him and forgetting that Joan is also out of the town for the weekend. Left alone in his mother’s house for three days, Frank drinks himself into a stupor, passing out on the floor.

All of this sounds rather disturbed and seedy, yet the whole is saved by Baumbach’s amusing script that turns the minor indignities of life into savage dramas and the sad facts of unhinged adolescence into high, if bizarre, comedy. One of those talkative films that pack more character growth and development into its short eighty one minutes than many an epic manages in three hours, The Squid and the Whale feels longer than it is, but in a good way, as though you had watched a life play itself out in front of you. And in a way, you have.

I will get a post up, but not this week. Getting things ready for TLC's much delayed birthday party and the influx of ankle-biters that will soon be invading my back yard and (hopefully not) the inside of my home.