The Saddest Music in the World (2003, Canadian)

Of the Guy Maddin films I've seen, Saddest Music is probably the most lighthearted, despite a preponderance of sexual infidelity, premature funerals, drunken amputation, and, well, sad music. It will also afford Kids in the Hall fans an opportunity to see a VERY different side of Mark McKinney, who is (surprisingly) perfectly cast as a glib Americanized showman. Isabella Rossellini is clearly having a fantastic time with her role - Lady Helen Port-Huntley, the legless beer baroness who challenges the musicians of the world to come up with the titular saddest music. It's hard to label any of Maddin's films as being particularly "accessible," but perhaps Saddest Music, with its cast of somewhat recognizable indie actors and reasonably linear plot, comes close.

Little Children (2006, USA)

I’ll admit up front that I’m going to be entirely unfair to Little Children, because I read the book just a few weeks ago, and loved it. Movie reviews shouldn’t necessarily focus on the shortfalls of book to film translations, but in this case I just can’t help myself. Oh, and there are massive spoilers here for those of you who haven’t read/watched either version.

And they are two entirely different versions, or at least it feels that way when the movie comes to an end. The denouement of the novel is a nice summing-up – it brings four of the principal characters together in a way that feels entirely unexpected, and serves an interesting comment on the nature of community. In the movie, writer-director Todd Field and writer-novelist Tom Perrotta pull the characters apart, creating insular realizations (with one exception) that diminishe the impact of what has come before.

There’s also the problem of what to do with Ronnie. I’m not entirely sure why Field and Perrotta decided to change Ronnie’s fate in such a massive way, but I do know that I don’t like it. The end of the book has Ronnie admitting to a crime that isn’t even mentioned in the movie – he does this because his mother, the last person who cared for him, is gone, and he knows that without her influence he cannot keep himself from hurting others. Going back to jail is the safest choice for everyone, and the most heroic thing he could have done given the extraordinary circumstances. But the movie has Ronnie finding "redemption" in a much uglier way – he realizes all of those castration wishes that the other characters have been voicing by performing the surgery himself. It’s not clear if Ronnie survives, but with this reduction of his character, does it really matter?

I was also bothered by the resolution of the Sarah-Brad/Todd romance plot. Brad/Todd’s wife has a much more active role in the novel – here, she merely calls in reinforcements in the form of her mother, and then retreats into the background. Sure, fine – some character reductions have to be made in the transition from the book to the screen, but this was massively unsatisfying, and doesn’t speak at all to why Brad/Todd would choose to stay in a relationship with his wife. In the book, his decision not to show up at the playground to run away with Sarah leaves her in the lurch. The movie has Sarah making her own decision, as her panicked realization that Lucy has wandered off reprioritizes her emotional spectrum (there is also a great deal left out about her failing marriage, which colors things differently yet again). As the details of movie-Sarah's character are fuzzy, perhaps this makes a bit more sense than it does in the book, but it lacks the emotional impact of the central character's closing realizations about love and identity.

The movie's not all bad, though – the photography is beautiful, and the Thomas Newman score is lovely, if a bit heavy-handed at times. The performances are strong all around, even for those actors, like Jennifer Connelly and Phyllis Sommerville, who have very little to do. The voice-over has the ironic effect of making the characters and setting seem like something of a zoo or a nature program, which is brilliant when not, again, heavy-handed. Had Field and Perrotta decided to keep the original ending, they would have built a much more complex, more richly satisfying film, but there are still good things to be had in Little Children.

Color in The Deep End

The Deep End happened to be on television this weekend, and I couldn’t help but watch it for the fourth or fifth time. One thing that has fascinated me about the film since probably my second viewing is the depth of color symbolism, and how color shifts as the story progresses.

The movie opens with blue – blue is the color of the masculine sphere (quite obviously so when Margaret Hall finds herself in the unfriendly environment of the gay club), but it’s also the color of danger. Water is blue, as is everything to do with Darby Reese – his car, his clothes, and his scary eyes. As counterpoint to all this blue, Margaret and the other females in the film are surrounded by green. I like this choice, rather than a more obvious “feminine” color, as it speaks to the natural beauty of the Tahoe location, and especially how the forest seems to practically descend straight into the blue waters of the lake. The two colors coexist uneasily, and their relationship reminds me of Tilda Swinton’s androgynous beauty.

Alek Spera is the wild card. He wears black and gray, and drives a red car – the most jarring use of color when the brightest thing in the frame for the first half of the film has been Swinton’s hair. And it’s obvious that the power balance has shifted when Margaret emerges from the house late in the film wearing a bright red coat.

Simplistic as the colors themselves might be, I am fascinated by the completeness of the scheme. The level of detail that Scott McGehee and David Siegel invested in the color scheme is impressive – the youngest son of the Hall family cleans out an aquarium filled with blue rock; Paige, the only daughter, eats a green apple before going to work on her mother’s forest-green Jeep; grandfather Jack carries dangerously heavy blue bottles of spring water before collapsing from a heart attack. It’s one of the things, on top of a superb performance by Swinton and the freaky beauty of Goran Visnjic, that keeps me coming back to this film.

The Good German (2006, USA)

Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German is little more than an exercise in style – a self-conscious recreation of 1940’s American war pic style, fashioned after classics such as Casablanca and The Third Man (to name two of the most obvious sources). Soderbergh and his crew (or perhaps more accurately, Soderbergh himself, as he served as both cinematographer and editor on this project, in addition to producer and director) painstakingly recreated basic stylistic details such as hazy-edged horizontal wipes and deep chiaroscuro lighting, and more complex anachronisms, such as the use of stock footage as background for moving car scenes. Mid-century filmmakers had no choice but to rely on technical crutches such as stock footage, whereas Soderbergh had all of the tools at his disposal to make his film look slick. Why didn’t he?

Perhaps he wanted to tell this story – a rote melodrama of betrayal at the tail end of World War II – in this particular way so as to pay homage to the above-mentioned films. Or perhaps he thought the story would be best served by the use of classic cinematic tropes. Or maybe he was just bored? The unfortunate fact is that for all of the hard work put into filmic detail, this stylistic choice does more to pull the audience out of the movie than draw it in, and this is particularly true during the opening 20 or 30 minutes. It’s jarring, rather than absorbing, and detracts more than it adds. This is a shame, as the cast looks perfect (and they act fairly well, too) – George Clooney and Cate Blanchette could be prototype matinee idols, and Tobey Maguire turns his youthfulness to a creepy advantage. Then again, with a story this weak, perhaps it’s a good thing that Soderbergh made the stylistic choices that he did, in order to keep the audience from falling asleep. With some exceptions (The Limey comes to mind), Soderbergh is an intellectual director, the heart of whose projects are often saved by his actors. His lack of warmth doesn’t meld well with melodrama.

There is at least one moderately interesting aside to be made, I think, at the intersection of classic visual style with a story in the more contemporary vein, and that is the presence of explicit sex, language and violence amid a traditionally restrained landscape. Not that sex, swearing, and blood are at all unusual in most WWII films produced today, but it is odd to see how they fit into a different frame. Again, I don’t think that this was as much of a suture as a rupture, but it was interesting to see such an impeccably-styled movie pull out of itself enough to self-consciously note the glaring omissions that post-Code films had to make when chronicling ordinary life (not to mention war).