OIL RICH

A couple of gems open in the Valley this week:

Loving Vincent—The producers stake an unusual claim for this Polish-British animated feature, six years in the making: that it’s the first completely oil-painted movie. Each of its 65,000 frames, we’re told, was meticulously hand-painted by a team of more than 100 artists, working over the previous frame’s image, all in the style of Vincent Van Gogh.

A documentary about the making of this quixotically crazy endeavor would be fascinating. As with Claymation back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, if you let yourself think too long about the labor you’re witnessing, you can start to feel overwhelmed and it can throw you out of the movie.

Happily, the movie itself isn’t just visually breathtaking, it’s also an engrossing little historical drama, well-acted by the Brit voice cast in a naturalistic manner. The story is set in 1891, the year after Van Gogh’s death, and centers on Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), the young man in yellow from the famous portrait. Armand’s postmaster father Joseph, another Van Gogh subject, tasks his son with delivering a final letter from the genius to his brother Theo.

Armand travels from Arles to Paris, and then on to Auvers-sur-Oise, where Vincent died. Initially annoyed by the errand, Armand becomes increasingly fascinated as he delves into the mystery of Vincent’s death.

The directors, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, working from a script they wrote with Jacek Dehnel, use Armand’s investigations to paint a portrait (if you’ll excuse the expression) of a truly loving Vincent. He’s beset with terrible emotional sufferings, certainly, but he’s sweet-natured and ecstatic in his visionary raptures.

But the thrill in the picture is seeing those immortal images brought to life. In the opening minutes alone, we get the Café Terrace, the Zouave reclining against the wall, Lieutenant Milliet, and so on, gliding easily into each other in service of the narrative.

I suppose there are cultural purists out there who might find using the works of one of the great figures in European art as, essentially, a storyboard, to be a crass, literal-minded stunt. But I was enchanted by this gloriously low-tech labor of love, both for Van Gogh and for the possibilities of the cinema.

Professsor Marston and the Wonder Women—There’s something delicious about the knowledge that the furious accusations of mid-century anti-comics crusaders were, in at least one case, quite right. Wonder Woman, who debuted in 1941 in what would become DC Comics, really was rooted in fantasies of bondage, dominance and Sapphic power.

And not just fantasies, either, but realities. As we’re told in this amusing chronicle, the creator of the character, a Harvard-educated psychology professor named William Moulton Marston (writing under the name Charles Moulton), spun the Amazon by blending traits of the two women with whom he lived—his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and Olive Byrne, a student and assistant who became the third member of their marriage.

It’s likely that the writer-director Angela Robinson (Herbie: Fully Loaded) has heated up the story a bit. But there are true elements that trump fiction, the juiciest being that before his comic-writing days, Marston was one of the developers of the systolic blood pressure test that led to the polygraph—in other words, he invented the Lasso of Truth in reality before he gave it to his heroine. As an adolescent in the ‘70s, watching the Lynda Carter TV version of Wonder Woman, I always found the Lasso of Truth shtick distinctly erotic; now I’d guess that Marston did too.

This movie’s historical accuracy is debatable, and some chapters work better than others, but Robinson has, any case, crafted maybe the wittiest and sweetest cinematic menage a trois in recent memory. Those looking for graphic sex will be disappointed—the threesome scenes, which involve a lot of dressing-up in theatrical costumes, are too tame and discreet for a Cinemax soft-core flick from the ‘90s. But something about their good-natured naïveté makes them sexy.

The charm in Professor Marston and the Wonder Women comes in the deadpan delivery of earnest dialogue by glamorous actors like Luke Evans as Marston and waif-like Bella Heathcote as Olive. There are nice supporting turns by Oliver Platt as early comic peddler Max Gaines and Connie Britton in a peculiarly flirtatious turn as early comic critic Josette Frank. We also see JJ Feild as fetish costumer Charles Guyette, here shown decking out Olive in a get-up very similar to Wonder Woman’s.

But the standout is Rebecca Hall as the brittle, unflappable (well, almost unflappable) Elizabeth. Her readings give a sharp edge even to lines that don’t have one built in, yet she somehow infuses them with a palpable undercurrent of love and emotional directness as well. I hate to resort to it, but indulge me: She’s a wonder.

THAT THING THEY DIDN'T

Even without the presence of James Gandolfini in the cast, Not Fade Away would be recognizable as the work of Sopranos creator David Chase. It’s made in Chase’s signature style—the same short, elliptical vignettes, starting and ending suddenly, often leaping forward in time, leaving much for the audience to infer about their significance, and about what’s happened in between.

It can be a potent storytelling method, liberating both filmmaker and audience from tiresome, de rigueur narrative tropes. It has its limitations, too, and Chase runs into them here, not for the first time. But for the first half or so of its length, it frees Not Fade Away from coming-of-age movie sentiment and preciousness.

Not Fade Away is about a rock band in New Jersey in the ‘60s. John Magaro is our hero, the usurping lead singer, Gandolfini and Molly Price are superb as his disappointed working-class parents, and Bella Heathcote is his willowy muse from the other side of the tracks. A bunch of fine, funny, authentic-seeming guys play the other band members. The movie isn’t a show-biz story, however. The focus is much more on family life and girlfriends, college and summer jobs, dinner table squabbles about long hair and Vietnam.

The band plays a few gigs over a few years, shows some promise, teeters on the edge not of stardom but of simple professionalism, as opposed to adolescent goofing off. But they’re doomed by internal egos and envies and agendas. They don’t become one-hit wonders, like the guys in That Thing You Do! They don’t even have their one glorious performance, like the title ensemble of The Commitments. They’re no-hit wonders.

Chase wants find the value and importance even in this abortive venture, and he does find some. He has a firm grasp of what, ultimately, being a rock musician is for: Getting laid. But that’s not the same as what rock music, itself, is for—the soul-deepening comforts and exhilarations it can provide to its listeners and practitioners. Chase gets past the vulgarity of the desire to hit the rock-star lottery, even if his characters don’t, and gives a hint of the growth that music has given them, without their awareness.

But in the second half, as both the band and the hero’s romance begin to fracture into disillusionment, the movie just keeps on going and going. After a while, especially after the hero and heroine leave Jersey for California, it’s like a guy in a bar boring you with an over-detailed account of his long-lost youth. There’s a lovely final coda involving the hero’s little sister (the charming Meg Guzulescu) asserting the cosmic importance of rock-n-roll, but if it’s somehow intended to pull the whole movie together, it doesn’t come close.

I doubt it is so intended, however. As the non-ending of his Sopranos series finale showed, Chase has an aversion to offering dramatic resolution. Brilliant though he is, I find this a failing, and I found that last episode a failure. The desire to confound audience expectation is perhaps commendable; deliberately leaving your audience unsatisfied is less so. Not Fade Away has the same attitude, and unlike the Soparanos finale, it doesn’t even have the virtue of abruptness. Despite the title, fade away—slowly and morosely—is just what this movie does.