Anselm

 Grandiose, monumental, and a bit inhuman:  these words describe both Anselm Kiefer's art and Wim Wenders' laudatory documentary about the artist.  This last description is inaccurate:  Wenders' 2023 documentary is really about the artist's works; we learn next to nothing about the artist and his motivations.  The movie is spectacularly beautiful and, notwithstanding it's rather austere premises, compelling. I saw the picture streaming on Amazon Prime.  Viewed in a proper movie theater, in its authentic format (the movie is shot in very high definition video and designed to be projected in 3D), I presume the visual spectacle would be overwhelming.  As with his 3D film about Pina Bausch (Pina), Wenders assumes, reasonably in my view, that a documentary about an artist should be about his or her art almost exclusively and that the artist's biography, opinions, and personal affairs are, more or less, irrelevant.  This approach assures a glorious and detailed accounting of Kiefer's enormous art works viewed from an Olympian altitude, a bird's eye perspective (often literally since the picture makes extensive use of drone footage) that treats the work as abstract manifestations of nature.  The film doesn't show us anyone examining or reacting to Kiefer's work; we see the artist striding through his vast ateliers but there are no talking heads, no critics, no gallery-goers --  it's as if the artist works solely for himself, making environments and objects for his own personal delectation.  Of course, Wenders eschews any crass interest in the commercial aspects of Kiefer's enterprise -- on the evidence of the movie, Kiefer is fantastically wealthy, financially equipped to acquire huge landscapes that he stocks with his art and, obviously, employs a small army of assistants, librarians, accountants and the like.  None of this is documented:  we see Kiefer lying on his back, half naked in one of his studios and, later, he reclines on a tiny bed in an ascetic-looking garret, but these are metaphoric or symbolic images:  how Kiefer lives and where, his companions, wives, girlfriends, friends, children -- all of these things are completely absent from the picture.  This approach is rigorous and conceptually valid but a little astringent -- we really have no sense of what the artist is like; he is, Wenders posits, defined entirely by his work.  The film is a companion to Wenders' Pina, a documentary about the famous choreographer's works, also made in 3D and similarly remote and reticent in tone-- the first name titles of the movies suggest that they are intrinsically related, bookends as it were.  And despite the first name titles ("Pina" and "Anselm"), the pictures are clinically remote, respectful, even hagiographic.

In an early scene, shot from an aerial perspective (Kiefer's studios are cathedrals that seem to contain rooms a hundred feet high), we see the artist, a bald, lanky and athletic old man, tugging a huge work mounted on a dolly into his warehouse.  He nonchalantly shoves the vast object -- it's not really a canvas but a 20 by 40 foot surface all cauterized by fire, a landscape made from burnt reeds, gallons of excrement-colored paint applied impasto, and heaps of congealed lead -- across the floor toward a half-dozen similarly monumental 'paintings.'  It seems hazardous to simply let the object roll across the concrete floor -- what if it were to slam into one of the other paintings?  But, then, you think, what if it did collide with the other works?  all of them have similarly ravaged surfaces and any damage inflicted would just be part of the work's allure -- these things look like they have gone through volcanic eruptions.  In his current warehouse, somewhere near Paris, we see Kiefer riding his bicycle, touring a factory full of art objects and enormous stacks of industrial materials, a place that seems to be about the size of a rural Minnesota county.  The place is endless, dauntingly clean and well-organized, a vast storeroom extending to the horizon. The film commences with crickets chirping and huge exteriors -- Kiefer has made life-size armatures of women's clothing, spectral white figures without arms or legs and mostly headless (some of these apparitions have wood stacked up where their heada would be or are equipped with metal rings and loops like the orbits of sub-atomic particles.)  In the distance, towers rise, weird haphazard structures made from stacked concrete boxes, irregularly shaped artificial ruins.  The structures look like campaniles and the skyline is eccentric, dilapidated, a forest of towers like those in San Gimignano -- archival footage relates these buildings to the ruins of German cities devastated by aerial bombardment:   in several scenes, we see armies of women digging through rubble fallen from buildings whose facades have collapsed exposing the naked insides of the rooms in the wrecked structures -- these campaniles are similarly open, as if the sheathing that covered the tower has collapsed to reveal the interiors of the chambers stacked one atop another.  (Kiefer was born in 1945 and the film posits that much of his art is conspicuously post-war, that is, obsessed with the ruins of Hitler's Germany -- this is a commonplace about Kiefer's work and, certainly, there's nothing surprising or interpretatively innovative about Wenders' depiction of the art.)  The movie proceeds in a generally chronological fashion organized around imagery of Kiefer's studios, places that became progressively larger and larger.  There's a nod to the controversy surrounding the artist's Venice biennial pavilion, claimed by some to be proto-fascist or neo-fascist.  (Kiefer says that his work certainly is not anti-fascist because this would be a libel - Beleidigung -- impugning those who were legitimately anti-fascist in the war and paid for their political opposition with their lives; at this early stage in his career, Kiefer espouses some modesty about the role of art in life -- by the end of the film, Kiefer has constructed elaborately vast landscapes and enormous ruinous structures that blur any rational distinction between art and life.)  All of the familiar touchstones influencing Kiefer are glanced-at:  we hear the poet Paul Celan reading Todesfuge, his famous concentration camp poem, and. later, we see another poet, Ingeborg Bachmann reciting verse -- Kiefer has inscribed many of his art works with phrases from both writers, inscriptions scrawled into the magma-like surfaces of the painting, neatly handwritten.  Heidegger's famous encounter with Celan is duly mentioned and there are several shots of the famous philosopher at his cottage in the Black Forest or walking pompously in the woods.  Beginning in 1992, Kiefer set about creating a massive environment at Barjac, France.  The film tours the premises consisting of clay catacombs, some of them flooded, campanile towers, and what seems to be an elaborate rococo villa with its walls seared and charred with Kiefer's murals.  Underground colonnades and ruinous cloister walks on the surface extend to vanishing points hundreds of feet away -- Wender's 3D camerawork features steep perspective shots along seemingly endless arcades and walkways.  In one scene the camera moves through an aerial conduit, hundreds of yards long, suspended over the mangled red earth of the compound.  Gigantic mazes open to our view -- sometimes, the camera tracks behind the tall figure of Kiefer, clad like Frank Lloyd Wright, in a sort of cape and black hat.  Huge amphitheaters are full of "petrified" fighter jets and silos open onto crumbling clay missiles that seem kin to the forests of bell-towers on the hillsides.  Kiefer never makes one example of a thematic motif, but rather constructs hundreds of the things -- we see football-field size galleries full of bicycles with wings, or plane wings snapped off the fuselage and strewn around like the rotors of vast windmills.  Some sequences show Kiefer slapping mud-like pigment onto his works, raised high over the studio floor on a scissors lift.  In other scenes, the artist sprays fire from a torch onto his canvases while an assistant trails along splashing the burning surfaces with water from a hose.   Kiefer spills buckets molten lead onto canvases while a couple helpers admonish him to not let the lava splash -- "but I want it to splash," he says.  The film ends with a Kiefer marching around the Piazza San Marco in Venice.  He has an installation there in some sort of renaissance structure, his mangled surfaces seem to coexist with immense paintings by Tintoretto.  Although he now enjoys "old master" status, Kiefer says that he feels banned, always in exile, always "on the way"-- a formulation that cites Heidegger.  Wenders stages a dream sequence.  Kiefer walks a tightrope above a landscape of bombed-out ruins, several of his own campanile standing in the rubble.  To balance himself on the tightrope, Kiefer holds an eight-foot stem of a sunflower with a blackened blossom on one end.  This is a reference to Kiefer's youthful travel to Arles following the footsteps of Van Gogh -- the German has always been famous; in High School, he won an international award that financed his travels in southern France where he is said to have made over "300 sketches and paintings" of sites significant to the Dutch painter.  (Apparently, this exploit was covered in detail by the media in his home city of Duesseldorf.)  In one picture, we see him next to Joseph Beuys, both wielding scary-looking lances -- with a hundred other art students (under the leadership of the charismatic Beuys), this was a protest about the destruction of the German forests, that is, an environmental protest.  The film's penultimate shot is a landscape at Barjac, a site now abandoned, more or less, by Kiefer, with a huge statue of wings mounted on a pedestal on a ridge top.  Kiefer is standing next to the statue but, then, vanishes.  After the titles, we see a last work by the artist:  it shows a glowing golden void like a movie-screen in an empty excoriated auditorium with rows of seats like geological formations facing the illumined wall.  

Wenders stages some scenes from Kiefer's youth using the artist's son who is now middle-aged.  Wenders own child or grandchild appears as a spooky-looking urchin wandering around the artist's installations or reading poetry.  The little boy looks like a lemur, a nocturnal creature.  The film is fascinating and like Kiefer's late works built on an enormous scale.  It exudes a fatal magnificence -- it's not a critique of the Fascist architecture of Albert Speer (his designs are frequently alluded to in Kiefer's work) but a revival of Speer's work in another context and by other means.  As far as the picture is concerned, Kiefer does nothing but make art; he has no other existence and, on the evidence of insanely prolific creativity shown in the film, this seems to be a truthful characterization of the old man's life.  In one scene, we watch him wandering through a library of art books -- the library seems to be about the size of train-station.  Kiefer gets down a book and carefully studies it.  Many of the books are as big as a man, creations by the artist -- in one, there are yard-long pictures of Greenland, images of the Arctic landscape taken from the air.  The book is bound in leather and it takes a forklift to move it:  "here," Kiefer says, "we have the skin of the earth."

(Around 1986 or 1987, Kiefer's work became famous in the United States, primarily through a big retrospective mounted at the Chicago Institute of Art.  I planned to go to the show with my son, Martin, who was then about seven.  But things had gone wrong in my life and I was in the middle of a divorce then and had no money.  I couldn't afford the gas and lodging to drive to Chicago.  I recall wondering if I could come up with enough cash to make the trip.  Ultimately, I decided that it wouldn't be prudent to travel at that time.  I was sad about this and, when I walked out to my car, having concluded that I couldn't attend the show, I slipped on the ice, flew through the air, and landed on my back hard on the sidewalk -- the wind was knocked out of me and, for some reason, I always associate Anselm Kiefer with my bad fall.  I solaced myself by buying the catalog of the exhibition which I read several times and studied fervently.  Kiefer is so insanely productive that he has initiated about a dozen new schools of work since that time and, it seems, that every collection in the United States has one or more of his grandiose objects -- for instance, there is a great Kiefer in the contemporary wing in the art museum in Des Moines, Iowa.  Viewed in reproduction, Kiefer's work is impressive but lacks the monumental "wow" factor that the objects induce when seen in person.  I attended a show of paintings by Otto Dix and his followers at the Deicherhalle in Hamburg.  There was a floor-to-ceiling Kiefer, forty feet tall, showing a pour of lead running down the surface of the canvas at the center of a pale, cream-colored shaft of light -- the thing literally took my breath away.)

American Fiction

American Fiction (2023, directed by Cord Jefferson) is a witty, warm and generous, and, above all, civilized.  It's a cautious, intelligent movie about race and family. The movie is pretty good and quite entertaining. If it seems that I am damning the picturewith faint praise, this is intentional.  

There are three (possibly four) separate movies fused together in American Fiction.  More than half of the film is a family drama with romantic comedy elements -- this aspect of the movie is conventional and sentimental.  The domestic melodrama, involving several tragedies, grounds the the picture:  the African-American protagonists are almost exactly like the target demographic for the movie:  well-heeled, with complicated sex lives, and the sort of prosperity that includes a servant and a beach house.  (The characters are like the elites that we used to see in Woody Allen movies -- money is not a problem for them and so they can brood instead on romantic entanglements.)  Alongside the family drama and the rom-com, there is a parallel plot that involves race-relations and the media.  This aspect of the picture is satirical and angry, although it's sharp edges are blurred a bit by the other warmer elements in the movie.  Finally, there is a fourth strand to the picture that seems post-modern, a Pirandello-style aspect to American Fiction involving an embedded narrative and indeterminate ending presented in three alternative versions -- the audience gets to decide how they want the movie to end.  This latter strand in the film emerges in its fullest development in the movie's last ten minutes, a jarring intrusion into the picture that is surprising and feels like a "cop-out"; the screenwriter and director didn't know how to end the picture and, so, several (not too compelling) options are presented.  This part of the picture also surfaces briefly in a Pirandellesque sequence midway through the picture in which the hero, a writer, is composing a salacious narrative that we see acted-out as he types --from time to time, the caricatured bad-asses in his novel turn to the writer and ask him what they are supposed to do next.  This is amusing but cuts against the grain of the film.  (There are some great movies that combine completely disparate elements:  Hitchcock's Psycho is the most notorious example of this kind of picture, swerving alarmingly from its sex and heist plot when the heroine reaches the Bates Motel; Brian de Palma's astonishing Body Double also explores the idea of a mid-picture change of course deviating from slasher-horror to something like musical comedy.  I'm not opposed to films containing jarring changes of pace and theme; but here I observe that American Fiction is too conventional to pull this off in a convincing manner.)

American Fiction starts strong.  The hero, Thelonius Ellison (called "Monk" after the jazz musician) is a novelist who has written literary fiction well-reviewed enough to earn him a gig at a liberal arts college.  He's teaching a short story to students by Flannery O'Connor, "The Artificial Nigger", much to the consternation of one of his students.  There's a clash about use of the so-called N-word and Monk loses his temper.  We learn that Monk hasn't been able to publish his most recent novel and may be creatively blocked; the administration reluctantly suspends him and he attends a book fair where he sees another African-American writer, Sintara Golden (Issa Rae) feted for her raw portrait of life in the ghetto -- she's a darling of the White upper middle-class folks attending the festival; her novel is written in some hideously caricatured species of Ebonics and Monk finds the whole thing offensive and, even, racist.  (Monk doesn't regard himself as a Black writer but simply as an author and he says that he doesn't even think about race -- a view of the world undercut in a short, cutting scene in which we see him try to hail a taxi that ignores him to pick up a White customer.)  Monk goes home to Boston where his family is in chaos -- his mother (played by Leslie Uggams) is suffering from dementia and there are some scary scenes involving her wandering away from the house or appearing to be utterly dazed and confused.  Monk's hyper-competent sister, an ob-gyn, is managing the situation but needs help.  But, then, in a dire sequence, she has a heart attack in a restaurant and dies.  We learn some Gothic details about the family:  Monk's father who was also a gynecologist committed suicide -- he was a philanderer and everyone in the family was aware of his affairs (except the rather absent-minded professor, Monk); Monk's brother, Cliff, who is flamboyantly gay, has come back from Tucson for his sister's funeral -- he's also a doctor, a plastic surgeon.  The deceased sister has been recently divorced and Cliff has just ended a long-term relationship; money is tight:  the family pays a maid, Lorraine, and own a beach-house as well as their Boston residence; in other words, they have an expensive life-style.  Much of the action takes place at the Beach House where the family gathers for their sister's obsequies.  There's a meet-cute with an attractive neighbor and Monk and the woman have an affair.  

Nursing Home care is costly and Monk, as a joke and to earn money, writes a parody novel, incorporating every possible stereotype about the Black underclass:  criminality, deadbeat dads, and pervasive gun violence, all of this expressed in raunchy ghetto-ese.  Monk's literary agent sends the manuscript to a publisher under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, a reference to the prototypical Black bad hombre, Staggerlee.  The parody is called My Pafology ('f' for 'th').  Monk's recent serious novel, said to be a modern variant on Aeschylus The Persians, has been "passed on" by his publisher -- but My Pafology is greeted with wild enthusiasm.  Monk is paid a $750,000 advance on the novel and, later, agrees to a four million dollar contract for movie rights.  Monk does some interviews, making a code-switch to appear as a tough guy fugitive from justice.  (Later, in a provocative gesture ecstatically received by his white editors, he demands that the novel be re-named "Fuck".)  When the book appears in print, it is a number-one bestseller, demonstrating that the stupidity and guilt of White readers knows no bounds.  Later, in a development that the viewers can see coming a mile away, Monk is appointed to a committee charged with making a prestigious literary award.  Of course, Fuck as it is now called, appears on the list of best books of the year and Monk is faced with deliberations involving the novel that he has pseudonymously  written.  Both he and Sintara Golden, also on the panel, dislike Fuck immensely and see it as salacious and pandering.  But the White members of the jury all rave about the book's authenticity and rage.  Meanwhile, Monk's mother's memory is deteriorating.  (In one moving scene, she says that she always knew that her son was a genius; but, then, we realize she doesn't know to whom she is speaking -- although Monk takes her words to be about him, in fact, she's talking about her homosexual son, Cliff.)  The stress of maintaining the lie about Fuck preys on Monk and he gets in a nasty fight with his girlfriend to the extent that they break-up.  The family's maid, Lorraine, falls in love with a gentleman caller and, in a sweet subplot, they get married.  Everything, then, leads to the awards banquet where the prize will be given to the alleged fugitive from justice, Stagg R. Leigh.  A callow young director, a sort of Quentin Tarantino wannabe, is directing a movie about Stagg R. Leigh's improbable career as an author and this triggers the film's post-modern and recursive gesture to the audience -- we get to decide on the film's ending.  

Jeffrey Wright is superb as Thelonious "Monk" Ellison and the entire cast is excellent.  The movie has some sharply written satire but is mostly a sentimental family drama trafficking in revelations and reconciliations, pretty standard stuff.  The theme of the Black artist nudged into exploiting racist tropes for profit is explored brilliantly in Spike Lee's much more problematic and indignant Bamboozled -- in that film, an African-American artist performs in minstrel corked-up black-face, intending offensive satire but, astonished, to find that White people love the character and are willing to pay him a fortune for his offensively caricatured performance.  Spike Lee's picture is a sort of encyclopedia of racist mass-media imagery, contains some raw sexual material, and, further, demonstrates a very peculiar and poignant response to the minstrel humor that it exploits -- Lee seems weirdly nostalgic for the good old days in which racist themes were overt and, somehow, endearingly goofy.  Bamboozled is everything that American Fiction is not:  it's legitimately disturbing, outrageous, and wildly indignant, a muddled mess of a movie that most critics despised when it was first released.  I think American Fiction is reasonably good and worth seeing, but it needs to be on a double-feature with Spike Lee's disturbing and hilarious take on the same theme.  American Fiction is competently directed in the standard Hollywood style used for well-made and prestigious pictures -- it's completely bland from a pictorial standpoint, a bit like a made-for-TV movie or TV sit-com.  By contrast, Lee's Bamboozled is a febrile dream studded with spectacularly racist imagery.  It's not fair to attack American Fiction for not being a Spike Lee joint and it has its own merits, including a sort of lucidity and coherence that Bamboozled conspicuously lacks.  But...

(Stagger Lee was a Black pimp who shot a man in St. Louis around the turn of the 20th century; a song was written about the crime and became very popular in a version by Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians (!).  The song has been performed by dozens of artists and presents the archetype of the bad, dangerous Black man. American Fiction respects its audience's intelligence and doesn't footnote this reference or the allusion to Thelonious Sphere Monk, the great Jazz man.)

Watch these YouTube videos:  Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians "The Happy Wanderer" and, then, "Dem Dry Bones by the same group.  This will lead you to a version of "Dry Bones" by the Harmoniums and, at last, a scary music video from The Singing Detective of the same song.

Hundreds of Beavers

 In Wisconsin's north woods, a pioneer named Jean Kayak harvests fruit from his orchard and distills applejack.  He gets drunk.  Everyone gets drunk.  Beavers gnaw through the poles supporting Kayak's distillery vats and the booze gets spilled in the snow.  When the fiery high-proof stuff encounters a campfire, there's a huge explosion and both the orchard and the brewing equipment are destroyed.  Jean Kayak is alone in the snow, struggling to light a campfire for warmth, but the wind keeps changing and blowing out his flames.  Starving, Kayak hunts rabbits.  The critters are wily, but Kayak is desperate -- he imagines the rabbits as chicken drumsticks and slices of pizza, that is, as delectable morsels.  Finally, Kayak kills and eats a couple of rabbits.  In the forest, sepulchral beavers are filing through the woods carrying huge logs to a sort of mastaba that they are building in the middle of a flowage.  (In central Wisconsin, flowages are lakes or swamps that show directional current.)  Jean Kayak lugs a couple of dead rabbits to a trading post where a furrier displays exchange rates -- a certain number of rabbit pelts equals a knife, six wolf pelts will get you a rifle, three beaver pelts equals a baseball bat, ten pelts will buy you a diamond.  The furrier chews tobacco and spits but the wad of juice never hit the nearby spittoon.  The furrier has a comely daughter who flirts with Jean Kayak.  Jean trades his pelts for the knife, an utensil that turns out to be tiny, a little blade about the length of his pinkie.  The furrier's daughter cuts up the dead rabbits, extracts their internal organs, and plays with them. 

Kayak sets up a trapline -- that is, a loop defined by locations where he has established traps to catch fur-bearing animals.  The loop takes him through a very dense pine forest, across a frozen lake, to a precipice over a deep valley, to a cave filled with aggressive and dangerous wolves, past an Indian trading post and a rural cemetery and, then, back to the pine forest.  At each station, Kayak has placed traps.  For some reason, beavers are attracted by coiled turds of beaver shit and Kayak places this material in his various dead falls.  Although about half the time, the traps fail, or simply catch Kayak instead of his prey, the hero begins accumulating furs for trade at the trading post.  He is able to buy snowshoes, later, a bat to bludgeon his prey, and some big traps.  By this time, Kayak has fallen in love with the fur-trader's daughter -- at one point, she strips down to her skivvies and does an exotic pole dance for him.  (Of course, the couple's lustful encounters have to be concealed from the girl's protective father who spits tobacco juice ineffectually and carries a long rifle.)  Finally, Kayak asks for the girl's hand in marriage.  He is told that he can't have her unless he delivers to the trading post "hundreds of beavers."  Emboldened by his love, Kayak invades the beaver's huge structure on the flowage, a mill that looks like Brueghel's tower of Babel from the outside, fights the incumbent beavers, and, ultimately massacres enough of them, to deliver the pelts of "hundreds of beavers" to the fur trader.  The trader, who acts a little like Jimmy Finlayson, in the old Laurel and Hardy pictures, doesn't like the transaction, but a promise is a promise.  He spits angrily and, at last, the tobacco juice hits the spittoon -- "The End."  

Thus, the gist of Hundreds of Beavers, a bizarre black and white film directed by someone called Mike Cheslik, apparently released in 2022 and, now, developing, it seems, a cult following. (Cheslik is a Milwaukee film-maker and closing credits suggest that both the States of Wisconsin and Michigan subsidized parts of the film.)  The movie is shot in black-and-white and its action occurs entirely outside with characters trudging through snow-filled forests and along icy-looking river rapids.  (This movie is unrelentingly cold-looking -- I had to wear a sweater while watching it.)  The animals slaughtered by the hero, Jean Kayak, are played by actors stomping around in the deep snow in "mascot" costumes -- that is, cloth costumes imitating rabbits, slavering wolves, and, of course, "hundreds of beavers."  (There are even two men playing head and ass of a horse.)  There seem to be about thirty "mascots" in the movie (this is how they are credited) but cell-phone style special effects expand their ranks to sixty or eighty figures.)  The film is silent except for some old-timey music and the cries of animals -- we hear sled dogs (also mascots) whimpering on the sound track, growling and howling wolves, and so on.  There are about six or seven silent film intertitles but they are, more or less, unnecessary.  Most of the film has the flavor of Roadrunner and Wily Coyote cartoon -- the trapper sets traps, his prey evades him or turns the tables:  he gets his limbs crushed by the jaws of his own traps, is repeatedly pulverized by falling logs in his deadfalls, gets sucked under the ice on the frozen lake and nibbled by barracuda-type fish; he has bent a sapling to make an improvised catapult but, about half the time,  he gets snared in the sling shot the hurls him through the air above the icy taiga.  Initially, the slapstick stunts are very funny and ingenious but the gags run out of steam half-way through the 108 minute movie.  The effects are of the cut-and-paste variety -- although many of the gags have the flavor of a Buster Keaton film, there's no sense of agility, physical prowess, or danger; this is because the special effects, involving avalanches of snow, bushes full of sharp burrs (the Midwest equivalent of the barbed cacti in Roadrunner movies), trunks nibbled to razor sharp, lance-shaped spikes, falls from lofty trees and so on, are all accomplished with minimalist computer effects or animated in some way.  There's really no sense that the figures traipsing around in the barrens are really located near any danger when the slapstick shenanigans, comprising 90 percent of the movie occur -- most of the stunts are implemented with some sort of crude animation..  

The structure of the film is a bit like a video or computer game as imagined by the Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Guy Maddin -- although Cheslik doesn't distress his film stock nor does he attempt the gorgeous chiaroscuro (after the manner of Joseph von Sternberg) that characterizes the Winnipeg director's work.  In effect, the picture seems to be auditioning for game status -- it's like Sonic the Hedgehog, Donkey Kong or the Mario Brothers.  The hero runs around a barren landscape accumulating points in the form of pelts -- he exchanges the points for bigger and better weapons and useful equipment until he has killed enough enemies (and taken their furs) to reach his objective, marriage to the fur trader's daughter.  The nondescript snow-covered fields and forests where the action occurs are vividly depicted but ultimately all the same -- a mere backdrop like the buttes and canyons in a Roadrunner cartoon or the deserts landscapes in George Herriman's Krazy Kat comics.  The film is surprising gory -- mascots get crushed, burned alive, speared and impaled but it's all cartoon violence; death is shown by the mascot's eyes displaying crossed "x" marks. (The hero has gutted on of his victims -- it looks like a man-sized raccoon -- and treks through the snow wearing the dad creature's head as a sort of over-sized crown.)  It's also a politically incorrect movie featuring an Indian chief with a peace-pipe now and then interacting with Kayak, along the lines of a cigar-store carving.  The movie is too long -- it's wildly inventive but about a half-hour of this would be sufficient.  (The great Roadrunner cartoons tend to be ten or twelve minutes long; Buster Keaton's best stuff is framed as bits strung together each gag running about eight or nine minutes -- even his feature films, which tend to be about eighty minutes in length have this form.  A comparison with Keaton is illuminating:  Keaton's most famous (and dangerous) stunt was a falling facade, collapsing over the comedian who is spared a horrible death by standing in the exact position where an open window in the towering front of the building can frame as the structure topples.  Cheslik reprises this scene not once but twice in an obvious homage to Keaton, but he just has his hero smashed into the snow in his version of the gag -- that is, there's no convenient and open window to spare Kayak.  Cheslik's film features lots of chutes and ladder antics with sudden pitfalls, slippery slopes and voids in ice-covered lakes; corpses get pressed into the snow and leave footprints and outlines where they died.  But there's no sizzle to the ingenious mayhem because we know that everything is done with rudimentary, if effective, special effects.  The film is worth seeing and should be supported because it is certainly made very much against the grain of commercial movie-making.  But it's ultimately fairly boring.    

The Holdovers

 Alexander Payne's The Holdovers (2023) is intentionally anachronistic on several levels.  The movie is set around New Year's 1971; the Vietnam war is still in progress and kids without college deferments are being killed in action. The Holdover's script channels seventies' influences, most notably Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (based on a Robert Towne screenplay and featuring Jack Nicholson) crossed with the somewhat later movies made by John Hughes (The Breakfast Club seems a particular influence.)  The Holdovers posits that an unhappy, if resigned, older man can have a beneficial influence on a selfish youth -- and that the boy's spirit can reinvigorate his mentor and breathe fresh life into him.  I doubt that people in sophisticated circles believe such things today, but this sort of theme was popular in the seventies and eighties and, of course, still has a naive appeal.  Further, Payne devises his movie to imitate the conventions of seventies' filmmaking -- there's the sound of a projector at the outset of the picture and the movie is shot in handsome wintry monochrome using zoom shots, lateral panning motions, and many expressive close-ups; it's a conventional style but absolutely well-calculated for the outdated and (mostly) predictable material that comprises this film.  Payne is an important film-maker but has shown himself to be conventional in technique and subject matter.  The question arises as to why this rather slight, if pleasing, movie was made -- certainly, we don't need another iteration of the story of the curmudgeon humanized by his relationship with a kind  of rebellious waif, a cliche back when George Eliot penned Silas Marner.  (The film set in an expensive New England prep school also reminds me of novel people read in the seventies, but no longer -- John Knowles' A Separate Peace).  Payne has suffered some recent reversals -- his baffling, if ambitious (and unsuccessful) movie Downsizing cast him into some temporary disrepute (people might exclaim:  What was he thinking?) and allegations, very stale to be sure, of statutory rape committed more than 30 years ago, came close to canceling his career.  My surmise is that Payne needed to play it safe, engineer a film that exploits his strong work with actors and conventional plots, and get some scores back on the board.  The Holdovers is perfectly acceptable, modestly entertaining, and good enough for a weekend night -- it's feels fairly long and has, perhaps, too much material in its second half, but I thought it was okay.  It is not, however, in any sense a necessary movie whatever that might mean.

After a half-hour opening act, The Holdovers evolves into a two-hand movie:  Paul Giamatti is a repressed, embittered, and highly intelligent instructor at a private school  He's buttoned-up and disliked by everyone at the Boy's School where he has taught for the last thirty years (after attending the place when he was in prep school himself).  According to the conventions of this sort of screenplay, Giamatti as Mr. Hunman is the sort of character to whom nothing interesting can ever occur -- until, that is, something happens to dislodge him from his ordinary, stifling routines.  Angus Tully is a rebellious 17 year old, one of Hunman's students in his class on Ancient Civilizations (for the purposes of the movie, Hunman is basically something like a Latin and Greek teacher),  Tully announces in the opening scenes that he is excited about a trip to St. Kitts with his parents over the Christmas Break.  As soon as he tells everyone that he is headed to the tropics, of course, alert members in the audience know that he will go to no such place, and, indeed, find himself trapped with Hunman over the holidays.  When school is dismissed for the semester, Tully, in fact, learns from his mother that she is going on a honeymoon with his stepfather and that he has been abandoned over Christmas vacation.  Hunman is being punished for failing the son of a prominent benefactor of the private boy's school -- as a penalty for his arrogance and disobedience, he's condemned to babysit Tully (and, intially, four other boys) over the break.  There's some interesting and poignant byplay between the other kids and Hunman / Tully:  two of the older boys clash with Tully and there's a fight; one of these kids is overtly vicious and, probably, a psychopath.  The two younger boys are also interesting:  one is a straitlaced Mormon kid and the other is a Korean child too far away from home to be returned to his home country (this poor boy is also a bedwetter and intensely homesick).  This cast of characters is literally whisked away in a surprising plot development about a half-hour into the movie and the story, then, focuses on the fraught relationship between Tully and Hunman.  A couple of subplots complicate the action:  there's a pretty administrative assistant to the noxious Headmaster, implying, perhaps, a romantic relationship between Hunman and this woman.  A Black manager of the cafeteria is crippled by grief for her son who died in Vietnam.  She tries to conceal her sorrow but its gets the better of her.  A series of misadventures, construed as mildly comic, ensue:  Tully gets hurt defying Hunman and has to go to the emergency room (his shoulder is dislocated); at a Christmas party, the cafeteria manager and head chef gets drunk and belligerent and breaks down; Hunman's desire for love and romance, a yearning so repressed that he can't acknowledge it even to himself, is thwarted and, in the show's fourth act (of five), Hunman and Tully go to Boston where they have several other encounters with minor characters.  Of course, a movie like this requires that surprising and painful secrets be divulged and, of course, this occurs in due course.  These events, rather implausibly, result in Hunman's discharge from the school -- something that may be a blessing in disguise in light of the fact that his work at the place has crippled the older man's life and emotional responses to things.  Tully seems to have become a better man as a result of the adventures with the witty, emotionally stunted Hunman.  

All of this (except I think Hunman's firing) plays out convincingly in a minor key.  Colors and events are muted.  There is a moving close-up of Giamatti's face when he learns that his unexpressed, but nascent desire for the boss' pretty secretary can not be realized.  The mixture of self-contempt, sorrow, and relief on his face is perfectly depicted.  The movie has a lot of bad language that would probably not be accepted in a movie made in the seventies or earlier eighties and we are reminded that people smoked a lot in that period -- the cook, for instance, generally has a cigarette dangling from her lip.  On the other hand, movies in the seventies and early eighties were more bawdy, had more nudity and sexual content.  Payne decorously avoids sex in the film and the picture is mostly chaste.  The Holdovers is, as they say, life-affirming, has a good script (and an interesting soundtrack of seventies folksongs), and is beautifully acted. It's the sort of picture, a success d'estime, that predictably garners a lot of award nominations (but doesn't win in most categories).  I thought it was good but not completely interesting.  However, I hope the critical success of this movie will free Alexander Payne to direct something more exciting in the near future.  

(One of Hunman's foibles is that he has a box full of volumes of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a book that he gives to people when he needs to make a gift -- it's his all-purpose gift and he doesn't really care if the book is appropriate for the person to whom he gave it.  One of my very good friends, now deceased, was a prominent college teacher in town and, also, admired Marcus Aurelius.  He was also always giving people copies of the Meditations, a text that he thought would calm its readers into stoic acceptance of things as they are.  But, often, he was unrealistically idealistic about the influence of the book.  If you are seriously distressed or mentally ill, Marcus Aurelius will not penetrate to the heart of your misery.  In The Holdovers, we see that there are aspects of human suffering that can't be assuaged by aphorisms in Latin.  Nonetheless, I always admired my friend for relying on the Meditations as a sort of vade mecum; the remedy was true to him and his spirit and I respected it.) 

The 3-Body Problem

 The 3-Body Problem is a complicated science fiction story crammed with impressive visuals and some effective special effects.  Although derived from a celebrated book by the Chinese novelist Liu Cixin, said to be rigorously scientific and absorbing, the Netflix series (eight episodes) mostly bundles together well-worn cliches and, ultimately, isn't that compelling.  After a strong start, the show gets lost in the intricacies of its globe-trotting plot and, because the 3 Body Problem is the first of a series of novels, ends in a welter anti-climaxes intended to set up the inevitable sequels.  

Something has gone wrong with the laws of physics, at least on a quantum level.  Chaos rules at the world's greatest laboratories and results derived from huge particle accelerators and other impressive apparatus make no sense.  Physicists take their theories and formulae seriously and the fact that their laboratory results seem randomized has driven a number of these scientists to kill themselves, often in gruesome or picturesque ways.  At first, the show seems something on the order of a detective or crime picture -- the question presented to the hard-bitten authorities is whether the scientists are simply committing suicide in dramatic ways or being systematically killed.  This turns out to be a red-herring since this aspect of the plot fades into insignificance once the narrative begins in earnest.  

Some impressive flashbacks introduce us to a woman named Ye, also a world-class physicist, but a traumatized survivor of Mao's Cultural Revolution as well.  (These scenes directly engage with the source novel; however, the rest of the film has been largely transposed to London and the West, featuring a cast that is about half Asian and half European or American.)  After seeing her father beaten to death at a huge public rally, Ye gets sent to a concentration camp somewhere in Mongolia.  She survive and her talents as a physicist are recognized; she is recruited to work on a secret project operated on a mountain top overlooking the vast forests of inner Mongolia.  The Commies on the mountaintop are trying to contact aliens.  Ye figures out how to use the sun as an amplifier (don't ask me how this works) and transmits a message to a nearby star.  In that star system, there are beings called (in the Netflix version) Santees.  These critters are highly advanced and communicate with one another telepathically.  They are interested in the Earthlings and begin communicating with a cult-like order of their worshipers on Earth.  (I wasn't able to figure out how this cult formed or why.  I  think Ye had something to do with it.  The plot seems to suggest that Maoism with its mobs of like-minded robot Red Guards waving Mao's little red book in the air is similar to the group-think of the cult founded by Ye and Santee's collective consciousness -- this is an interesting idea but never developed in the show.)  Unfortunately, one of the Santee servants on our planet reads a a fairy tale to his Lord (the Santee are hive-mind in which "they" is a "he" or "she" depending upon the scene).  The Lord is horrified to learn that the earthlings can lie to one another and, in fact, do this frequently.  Shocked that sentient beings can misrepresent the truth, the Santee cut off communications with the Earth declaring that they are "very afraid" and launch an expedition to attack our planet where they, apparently, intend to exterminate "the bugs" as they now call the inhabitants of our world -- this seems a distinct over-reaction of "Little Red Riding Hood."  (The murderous intent of the space aliens doesn't keep members of the Santee cult from continuing to revere the space monsters.)  Interstellar travel is taxing and we are told that it will take 400 years for the aliens to reach our planet to wipe us out.  All the best minds on Earth are recruited to a secret "Manhattan project" in which counter-measures are developed to repel the Santee invasion penciled onto our human calendar for 400 years in the future.  When she was imprisoned in Mongolia, Ye met a ecology-minded Anglo named Mike Evans with whom she may have had an affair.  Evans, uses his scientific savvy to become an energy mogul -- (everyone in the show is genius of one sort or another).  How Evans morphed from conservationist and ecology crusader to a world-destroying plutocrat is not clear to me.  The show is fairly dull in places and I may have fallen asleep when this was explained.  Evans spearheads the Manhattan project underway to devise means to forestall or repel the Santee invasion.  

I have to make surmises as  to how certain parts of the show fit together because much of the plot is indecipherable -- perhaps, you are supposed to have read the Chinese novel before watching the TV version.  (Although I doubt that this would be too helpful since the names and places used in the Chinese original have all been changed so that the story could be lifted out of China and dramatized as occurring in London and its environs.)  There's a effects-heavy subplot about virtual reality video games that doesn't make much sense and that I didn't understand.  My guess is that the Santee, using proxies on Earth, have devised the VR game, utilizing gleaming steel helmets to deliver the computer content into the brains of the players, to destabilize the Earthlings and lure our best and brightest to their doom.  The game scenes have a sword and sorcery (or Game of Thrones) vibe and feature lots of decapitation, armies of dehydrated zombies who are revived by being cast into the sea, and much dim-witted Dungeons and Dragons bullshit -- this subplot is pretty much an embarrassment and I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean.  Further, the show inexplicably drops the story after about the third installment although in the last twenty minutes someone discovers yet another helmet terminal for the VR game and dons the device.  (I don't recall who this was or why this was supposed to be significant).  The VR scenes establish that planets entrapped in a three sun system (the titular 3 bodies) involve orbits that can't be reliably calculated, leading to long periods of "chaos" in which civilization is impossible -- I surmise that the Santee are trying to destabilize human culture so that our propensity for lying doesn't infect them, that is, induce three-body dynamics on Earth. In the end, there's a space shot in which the disembodied brain of one of the heroes is sent on a mission to encounter the Santee, a ride in a fast conveyance that, even at 1% of the speed of light, will take, at least, 200 years -- the hero's brain is put in a canister and kept in a twilight state of suspended animation during the space trip.  Things go awry and the eight hours of 3 Body Problem end with the protagonists vowing to fight smarter and better in the next series.  

The plot is driven forward by a group of attractive young scientists who are like apprentices on the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.  They're all incandescently brilliant, pretty, young, fit, and prone to wise-cracks.  Several of them get killed for no good reason.  The leader of this cadre of young heroes is a Black man named Dr. Saul Durand -- he's sort of a catalyst around which the characters gather: the others are a snack manufacturer ("Jack's Snacks" is his business) who's horny and cynical -- he gets offed early in the show which is too bad because his character was reasonably interesting.  A beautiful young woman named Auggie has developed ultra-strong and durable fibers -- this is some sort of nano-technology which is so threatening to the Santee that they threaten her with a running countdown projected onto the cornea of her eyes that stops only when she gives up her scientific endeavors.  This woman's technological innovations are central to several big scenes in the show:  the showstopper is a sequence set at the Panama Canal; the sinister and self-loathing cult of Santee worshipers have taken to the seas after the manner of Ron Hubbard and his scientologists (cf. Sea Org).  They are traitors to their species, inviting the Santee to appear and wipe out the "bugs' -- that is human kind.  When the Santee cult on their vessel "Judgement Day" sail through the Canal, tiny, invisible strands of nano-wire are set up to block their passage.  These fibers act as a giant  wire cheesecutter slicing the Judgement Day and its passengers into lateral segments -- this is a gory and impressive sequence that is undeniably effective, although gratuitous; one would think that the objective of stopping the Santee cult could be accomplished without using the momentum of the ship to slice everyone into six inch wide slabs of metal and gore.  Toward the end of the series, the Manhattan project scientists again enlist Auggie to build a "radiation sail" to power their spacecraft carrying the disembodied brain into the lap of the Santee -- what this is supposed to accomplish is also unclear.  Auggie's last scene is in Mexico where she is using her nano-fiber filters to finally solve the problem of bad, diarrhea-inducing water in that country.  Dr. Ye, who loves the Santee, goes back to Mongolia and, apparently, jumps off a cliff next to the ruins of the radio telescope that sicced the Santee on our world.  Her motivations have been impenetrable throughout the show.

3-Body Problem has a big cast.  But the characters are all, more or less, stereotypes, an aspect that is typical of Science Fiction, where the concerns of the narrative don't have much to do with psychology and schematic motivations are characteristic.  There's the avuncular and down-to-earth African American, Saul Durand, the obsessed and driven scientist Auggie, some other science types including a nerdy Chinese girl-savant, and a young man dying of pancreatic cancer who never really dies, long outliving his welcome on screen -- he's an irritating figure and his fate, of course, is a bummer.  These young people have boy- and girl-friends and there's some low level and uninteresting romantic intrigue among them.  The dying guy has bought a star for one of the women (she's going out with a dashing Indian naval officer) -- he's spent 19.5 million dollars to have the star named after the girl but he's too shy to tell the woman about his lavish and futile gift.  Before he can come clean, his brain is excised, stuffed in a flask of what looks like dry ice and shot into space.  On his death bed, the young man is confronted by his sister and her husband and they ask him to make sure that they inherit his wealth -- this sequence is baffling and typical of much of the show:  characters appear with demands of various sort, conflict with one another, and, then, drop out of the plot entirely.  

I think this show is carefully scripted and suspect that it makes sense if closely watched.  But the subject matter is just junk of a predictable variety and, so, although you're entertained it's not enough for you to keep close track of the proceedings.  After a while, you can't really figure out what is going on because the material isn't intrinsically interesting enough for you to undertake the intellectual effort of keeping track of all the intricate, and, seemingly, random plot developments.  Everything seems theoretical, a point that the characters make within the plot as well -- the Santee aren't due to land on Earth for 400 years so why are we all so upset and determined to repel them?  We live in a world in which everyone was warned about climate change for the last fifty years and, yet, no one has done anything, just kicking the can down the road for another couple decades or so.  Why would the threat of an alien invasion four-hundred years in the future cause anyone much concern.  If we haven't been moved to worry about the sea's turning into steam baths and inundating the coast as Greenland's ice-cap melts and Antarctica's ice shelves crash into the sea, why would an alien invasion announced for the year 2425 cause us any concern at all?  My point is that all the epochal and world-ending imagery in 3-Body Problem lacks urgency -- we all revert to magical thinking:  either the aliens will get detoured to some other star-system or we'll figure something out; a solution can always be improvised so long as we don't have to accomplish this feat today.   

Ripley

 Evidently, the life of a charming and murderous sociopath is arduous.  Tom Ripley, the protagonist of the Netflix limited series that bears his surname, spends much of his time traveling by train and ferry across Italy, hiking up and down mountainous stairs at Atrani, Naples, San Remo, and Palermo, and laboriously disposing of corpses on the rock-girt Amalfi coast and, later, the Via Appia in Rome.  Often, we see him mopping up blood, a task that invariably leaves telltale stains; he has to master forgery, write various letters that he ascribes to others, learn painting, book-editing, and idiomatic Italian.  (Patricia Highsmith's source novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, describes the situation exactly in its title -- Tom Ripley is, indeed, talented, a polymath who is a lightning swift study, and a master of fraud and deception.)  The material is a little thin and previous move versions of Highsmith's book (Rene Clements' 1960 Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella"s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley) clock in at about two hours.  But the longer limited series format of Netflix's Ripley allows the director Steve Zaillan to emphasize the hard, repetitive work of being an amoral and murderous criminal -- hence, all of the symmetrical shots of trains and ferries, the coming and going, the protracted encounters with suspicious police officers and private eyes, all of the laborious machinery of hoax and fraud.  The two previous film versions of the story are shot in gorgeous technicolor to exploit the spectacular Italian locations in which the action takes place.  Zaillan' adaptation is filmed in equally spectacular black-and-white and the film is glorious to behold,  Zaillan's photography is exquisitely conceived, frequently dividing the image into two lateral frames -- a fountain or structure occupies half the foreground composition with a remote figure moving or standing alone on the opposite side of the image.  The photography derives from Hitchcock (and Fellini) and features austere vertical shots, majestic dollying movements across piazzos and through stairwells, and dozens (probably hundreds) of "empty frames" -- that is, still compositions generally focusing on baroque objets d' art, flamboyantly expressive terra-cotta statuary, and all sorts of curious knickknacks.  In one scene, Zaillan orchestrates an encounter between a desk clerk and Ripley (and, then, a detective) around a little figurine of a saint lugging a cross (undoubtedly St.Peter of the crossed-keys, the patron of innkeepers); the encounters revolve inserted close-ups of people moving the little statuette from one place to another on a cluttered desk.  The positioning of the figure on the chessboard of the counter seems as important to the narration as the dialogue and plot-points motivating the scene.  Various gargoyles, putti, stone saints and angels and martyrs, all afford a running, if obtuse, commentary on the action, Tom's various crimes that are about as secular as possible -- Italy, it seems, affords a continuous contrast between Ripley's sordid adventures and the landscape of sacred beings and enormous empty palazzos with cloistral arcades and ecclesiastical arches, the places in which these events occur.  The show lags a little in its mid-section and doesn't really have a satisfactory conclusion -- in fact, the ending of the show is, more or less, a launching pad for the next installment of the tale; Highsmith wrote a number of Ripley novels and Zaillan's version introduces John Malkovich into the final episode as a corrupt art dealer, presumably as a teaser for the next series.  Nonetheless, the program is delightful and shows that the fearsome objectivity of the Hitchcock thriller is alive and well.  Highsmith worked with Hitchcock -- the director adapted one of her novels into the 1951 Strangers on a Train  -- and Zaillan stages many of Ripley's bravura sequences after the manner of Hitchcock, deploying exotic settings as the sinister, strangely indifferent backdrops for homicidal action; Zaillan's use of point-of-view shots, eccentric minor characters, and close-ups inserted into scenes to disrupt the flow of events and serve as a sort of cubist commentary on events depicted also closely tracks Hitchcock's stylistic practices.  Ripley is suspenseful in a nihilistic way -- the audience is invested in Tom Ripley's perspective on things and we find ourselves rooting for the peculiarly opaque and affect-less hero.  Ripley just doesn't care about anything but his own survival -- his bland, cheerful demeanor is the opposite of any sort of charisma; nothing is really premeditated; he's a master of homicidal improvisation. (Andrew Scott is excellent in title role.)

We meet Tom Ripley as a penny-ante crook running cons out of a squalid apartment in New York City.  Ripley's sexuality is ambiguous throughout the show.  He seems to be gay, but in a muted asexual way.  A private eye accosts him in a bar and introduces him to a plutocrat, a businessman who runs a ship-building enterprise.  The plutocrat's son, Dicky Greenleaf, is abroad, living in Italy where he aspires to be an artist (although he has no discernible talent).  The shipbuilder believes that his son knows Dicky (and, perhaps, suspects a sexual relationship between the two young men.)  In fact, its unclear that Ripley has had anything to do with Dicky in Manhattan.  In any event, Greenleaf pere dispatches Tom to the Amalfi Coast on a mission to retrieve the errant scion and return him to New York.  Ripley finds Dickie ensconced in palatial digs at Atrani, a lavishly beautiful Italian hill town on the cliffs overlooking the Adriatic Sea.  Dickie has a girl friend, Marge, played by Dakota Fanning, that he mostly ignores -- she's writing a travel book about Atrani.  Ripley admires Dickie's trust fund life-style and, ultimately, murders the young man, bludgeoning him to death with the oar of a rented row-boat and, then, sinking the corpse in the sea tethered to the boat's anchor.  (This murder sequence is extravagantly staged:  Ripley has to hammer Dickie's skull into a bloody mess with repeated blows and, then, gets tangled up in the anchor that he uses to sink the cadaver; he falls out of the boat which spins in circles with its outboard motor rotating around the place where the corpse is sinking to the bottom -- the anchor towed by the out-of-control boat brains Ripley, (temporarily) sending him to the bottom, and he comes within an inch or so of being disemboweled by the spinning rotor of the outboard motor.)  Ripley, then, assumes Dicky's identity, drains his accounts of funds, and decamps to Rome.  In the Eternal City, a louche buddy of Dicky's, the decadent Freddie Miles (he's a playwright) discovers that Ripley is playing the part of his friend.  Ripley has to kill this guy too and most of an hour episode documents his efforts to conceal the gory dead body and, then, desert the corpse in Freddie's Fiat on the Appian Way.  This murder inspires the interest of the police and an investigator (Inspector Rivini) doggedly hounds Ripley, suspecting that he has something to do with the English playwright's death.  More complications ensue and the actions shifts between Palermo, San Remo, and, at last, Venice.  

Zaillan, who senses that there's not enough of a story here for eight hours, introduces a peculiar subplot into the narrative.  Dicky was an admirer of Caravaggio and took Ripley to see one of his paintings.  (A priest appears when Ripley is standing before a Caravaggio canvas on an altar and says gnomically "It's the light" -- this is a mantra that reoccurs in the movie, a gesture toward the extravagantly beautiful chiaroscuro that Zaillan employs in the show's camerawork.)   There is some suggestion that Tom Ripley is a reincarnation of Caravaggio -- the artist was gay, murdered a man, and spent the last years of his life on the run from those seeking to avenge the crime.  Zaillan is not content to merely imply connections between Caravaggio and Ripley, but, in fact, dramatizes this metaphor in a series of tableau-like scenes depicting events from the life of Caravaggio -- I'm ambivalent as to whether this foray into what seems to me to be supernatural terrain is warranted or effective; but it is certainly interesting.  Zaillan seems to suggested that the "talented" Mr. Ripley is, indeed, an artist of some kind (we see him effortlessly mastering all sorts of skills) and that he is akin to Caravaggio in some occult way.  A theme of the show is that Ripley is better at various endeavors than those who claim those activities as their vocations -- he's a better, more charismatic playboy than Dickie and a better artist as well; he turns out to be a better author than Marge; and he outwits the Italian authorities with stylish aplomb.  (A running joke is the Italian inspector who insists on speaking English which he thinks that he is mastered --but his discourse is well-nigh impenetrable with strange locutions and, even, stranger pronunciation of English words; by contrast, most of the film is shot in Italian since Ripley seems to have mastered conversation in that tongue.)

The show features many spectacular locations, possesses a wry black humor, and has a rich rogue's gallery of supporting characters.  (Eliot Sumner is indelibly weird and sinister as a depraved hermaphroditic British playwright -- the actor who uses the pronoun "they" is the musician Sting's...what? son  or daughter?  I can't tell.)  Ripley is slow but full of interesting details.  It documents an era when artists about to become famous and well-known lounged around Italy -- one imagines Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg wandering around Italy and North Africa in the early fifties and there's a La Dolce Vita vibe to the imagery -- Fellini's lustrous black and white cinematography is particularly evident in many of the shots that Zaillan stages.  I enjoyed this series and recommend it.  

Anatomy of a Fall

 Anatomy of a Fall is an intense courtroom drama.  The 2023 film, directed by Justine Triet, is entirely straightforward narrative, in effect, the dramatization of a trial transcript.  The movie is single-minded and wholly self-confident -- there is no reaching for significance, no symbolism and not much in the way of ambiguity. The viewer, used to conventional films, expects the motion picture to expand outward at some point to embrace broader themes or perspectives.  But this never happens.  The movie remains doggedly focused on the crime, the procedural aspects of the investigation, and, for most of its two-hour plus length, the trial itself.  When the trial concludes and the verdict is rendered, the movie has nowhere to go -- its raison d'etre is gone and the film just comes to an end without extracting (or abstracting) any meanings from the proceedings that we have seen.  The protagonist says it better than I can:  at the end of the movie, she says that she expected some sort of release or exhilaration  from the outcome of the proceedings; "instead," she says, "it's just over" and that all there is.  There's no sense of uplift or meaning. As a result the film seems rather futile and unresolved.  But this is intended by the filmmakers.  The facts are all that matters in this rather chilly, alienating film -- most documentaries labor far more strenuously to mine significance from the events shown.  But this isn't the nature of Anatomy of a Fall and it's unfair to criticize the movie for not being something other than what it is intended to to be.  (A friend who watched this movie noted that it seems influenced by Otto Preminger's similarly dispassionate Anatomy of a Murder -- however, in that film, which, indeed, is obviously a precursor, the ending of the picture is ambiguous; we are left in doubt as to whether the criminal law has delivered justice or the truth and issues of guilt or innocence seem unresolved.  The French film doesn't indulge in these ambiguities; the outcome of the trial is shown to be just and reasonable and, indeed, the legal and factual questions posed by Anatomy of a Fall are never really in doubt.)  The movie has a Gallic aspect -- there is faith that if reason is applied, even to the unreasonable, a fair outcome will be achieved.  

Anatomy of a Fall begins in an unsettling way.  At a mountain villa in the French Alps, a famous writer is being interviewed by a young woman, apparently a graduate student at an university in Grenoble.  The two women are drinking wine and there is something mildly flirtatious in the encounter.  Suddenly, music booms overhead, a loud heavily bass and percussion inflected version of Fifty Cent's P.I.M.P performed in an instrumental adaptation.  Then, we hear power tools and pounding.  Conversation between the women is impossible although they are both too polite to allude directly to the loud music interrupting the interview.  The older woman, the author whose name is Sandra, suggests a meeting that seems to be a "date" for later in the week in Grenoble.  Sandra's son, Daniel, is giving the family dog a bath.  With the dog, Snoop, Daniel goes for a walk in the snowy mountain landscape, an impressive frieze of peaks across the deep gorge and hilltop where the house stands.  When Daniel and Snoop return, a man is lying next to the house, his head smashed open.  This is Daniel's father and Sandra's husband.  He seems to have fallen from the attic level of the house where he was using power-tools and hammers to renovate the structure.  The man is dead and, immediately, suspicion focuses on Sandra -- it seems possible that she may have killed him by hitting the man on the side of his head and, then, flinging him from the attic window about forty feet above the ground.  In the aftermath of the incident, the camera angle is low, tracking through the chaos at the scene behind Snoop, the dog. This seems an odd way to portray the scene, but, in fact, is significant -- as it will happen, the dog represents the film's solution.  The two least important figures at the confusing and tragic scene, Daniel and his dog (the animal we later learn is a "seeing-eye dog" since the boy is partially blind) will turn out to be integral to resolving issues at the criminal trial that ensues.  

The authorities suspect that Sandra has murdered her husband.  Sandra engages a lawyer who was formerly her lover.  This was before she was married to Samuel, the husband.  The lawyer is an ethereal, angelic-looking man who seems high-strung and nervous.  In his discussions with Sandra, whom he has not seen for years, the attorney, Vincent, learns that the couple were unhappily married and that, in fact, had a violent quarrel just the day before Samuel fell out of the attic window.  Samuel is also a writer, but an unsuccessful one and he had a penchant for recording conversations, including the horrible quarrel the day before he died -- he uses these recordings as sources for his writing.  This quarrel, which at first Sandra denied, becomes central to the trial that occupies two-thirds or more of the trial.  The question posed by Samuel's death is whether it was murder or suicide -- there are no other alternatives.  In the course of the proceedings, many conflicts in Samuel and Sandra's marriage come to light.  When Daniel was four, he was injured when a motorcycle struck him.  This accident resulted in injury to Daniel's optic nerve and his partial blindness, a condition for which Sandra blamed her husband.  In the aftermath of the accident, Sandra became somewhat unhinged and had several affairs, including a brief sexual liaison with a woman.  The prosecution alleges that Sandra and Samuel quarreled over her ostensible interest in the young woman who had come to interview the author -- this was the fight that resulted in Samuel's death, according to the prosecuting attorneys.  Further, there is evidence that Sandra used material from a failed novel written by Samuel, but unpublished -- she is said to have "plundered" his work for her successful book, at least, this is what Samuel says in the quarrel which, ultimately, degenerates into violence (plates are thrown, Sandra slaps and hits Samuel).  There is also evidence, although it's unclear, that Samuel has previously attempted suicide and a deadly plunge from the third story window is not outside the range of possibility.  Indeed, the film is skewed in favor of the theory that Samuel killed himself, Sandra's defense to the indictment lodged against her; although Sandra is glacially cold, cruel to Samuel, and indifferent to his pain, murder doesn't seem to be within her repertoire.

The film shows the pre-trial investigation and, then, the trial, itself, in lavish detail.  Experts are retained to provide theories and counter-theories of Samuel's fatal fall -- there is forensic evidence involving dummies pitched out of the window of the villa and blood spatter testimony.  A psychologist who was treating Samuel is called to testify and he implicitly blames Sandra for the death.  Caught in the middle of these alarming proceedings is the teenage son, Daniel -- he wants to remain neutral, since, of course, both of his beloved parents, are involved in this matter.  We see him furiously practicing on the piano and his ultimate testimony is based upon a recollection of Snoop's claws clicking on the hardwood floor of the house as he is practicing Chopin.  (The use of sound cues as a trigger to Daniel's understanding of the event is significant -- he is partly blind and has spooky, somewhat cloudy, blue eyes and, so, it makes sense that he would discover the meaning of events on the basis of something that he hears but doesn't see.)  

I don't exactly understand French criminal procedure and so the trial has aspects that are unclear or confusing to someone versed in Anglo-American law.  The proceedings take place in a enormous room in Grenoble in front of an elaborate mural.  The courtroom is filled with spectators because the case is celebrated and reported extensively in the media.  There is no privilege against self-incrimination.  The accused participates directly in the investigation and is called upon to explain factual points, a process that is repeated at trial.  The case is tried to a tribunal of a dozen or so factfinders who sit on a bench above the courtroom and a woman lawyer is the presiding officer.  Although the process is clearly adversary, with battling lawyers, there don't seem to be exclusionary rules of evidence -- all sorts of highly speculative testimony is admitted and there are few limitations as to relevancy.  (Some of these features may be exaggerations for dramatic purpose, but the viewer has the sense that the basic elements of French criminal procedure are accurately reflected.)  In the courtroom, the lawyers ask long, argumentative questions and seem to argue the case as it proceeds.  Although there are apparently closing arguments, it seems that the lawyers continually interject their arguments into the presentation of evidence and the proceedings have a discursive aspect in which there is really no distinction between fact and opinion or between factual proof and argument.  Notwithstanding the unfamiliarity of the process, an American viewer can understand what is happening with sufficient clarity to be involved emotionally in the trial and its outcome.  

The film's dialogue is largely English.  One of the points of contention between Sandra and her husband, Samuel is language.  Sandra is German and Samuel French.  As a compromise, they use English, described as a "neutral ground", in the home.  (There is no German spoken in the movie.)  The trial is conducted in French, but Sandra's command of the language is not sufficient for some of the questioning and exposition required in the hearing -- therefore, she asks leave of the Court to speak in English and permission is granted for that discourse.  Sandra generally speaks English to her French lawyer.  (This film demonstrates the extent to which English is necessary as a lingua franca in Europe; French and German people, including husband and wife, communicate in English as a sort of middle-ground between their respective languages.  The situation is similar in Indian films in which Hindi or Bengali or Tegulu-speaking characters often use English in order to communicate with one another.)  The part of Sandra is performed by the great actor, Sandra Hueller, a German-speaking movie star who is never less than brilliant in her films.  She played the title role in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann (2016), her first film widely known in this country, demonstrating great talent for deadpan comedy.  She has acted in many important German films and, in the year that she performed in Anatomy of a Fall, she also famously acted the part of Rudolf Hess' wife in the concentration camp film Zone of Interest.  Although neither beautiful nor glamorous, she is an astonishing actress, completely natural in every role in which I have seen her.  She is also a fixture of the German stage and has played, for instance, the role of Penthesilia in Heinrich von Kleist's lurid tragedy.