CURRENT EVENTS

Opening today at Tempe’s Valley Art Theatre:

 

Watermark—This documentary makes the real world look like science fiction. It’s about the human relationship to water—how our lives revolve around it, often without our awareness, and also what we do to the world in the process of working our will upon and through water.

Directed by Canadian filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Edwad Burtynsky, Watermark begins in the dried, jigsaw-cracked Mexican delta of the Colorado River, its once-branching waters now diverted to the desert farmlands of California’s Imperial Valley. From there, we’re shown dam projects, rice paddies and abalone farms in China, scientists collecting core samples of ice in Greenland, a tannery in Bangladesh vomiting horrifying pollution into the Buriganga River, and the fountains, somehow shockingly decadent in context, at the Bellagio in Vegas.

We’re shown the pristine beauty of the Stikine River in British Columbia, the teeming human spectacle of pilgrims washing away their sins in the Ganges, and the somehow similar sight of competitive surfers at Huntington Beach and sophisticated bathers in geothermal springs in Iceland. There are some interviews, but no narration—mostly we just get long looks at the epic, and epically bizarre, imagery of people’s ingenious, if often crazily reckless, interaction with H2O. The movie is by turns terrifying, beautiful, hypnotic and maddening.

Playing May 2, 3 and 4 only at AMC Arizona Center:

Decoding Annie Parker—Samantha Morton plays the title character, a Canadian woman who believed that the cancer that plagued her, her sister and her mother ran in her family. This may not exactly seem like outlandish conjecture now, but in the ‘70s & ‘80s such a link was unproven, and often dismissed as coincidental by the medical establishment.

The story of Annie’s marriage, family life and friendships is played as an eccentric comedy-drama interrupted here and there by chemotherapy. This is intercut with a parallel strand, set at UC Berkeley, depicting the researches of Mary-Claire King (Helen Hunt), the geneticist who proved Annie right by discovering the BRCA1 gene in 1990.

The film opens with the brief, awkward, touching meeting between Annie and Dr. King, then goes back to the beginning to show how their long sagas eventually converged. The director, Steven Bernstein, working from a script he wrote with Adam Bernstein and Michael Moss, seems determined to banish any trace of the TV-medical-drama pious or maudlin, and he succeeds mostly because of Morton’s comically avid sexuality, which doesn’t shut down even after mastectomy and chemo baldness. Morton is as weirdly magnetic as ever—it’s as if Annie is simply too sexy for cancer to defeat.

SNUBSTANDARD

Somebody gets snubbed by the Academy Awards almost every year, but this year might just go down in Oscar history as The Year of the Snub. At this writing, Ben Affleck has won a BAFTA award, a Golden Globe and a Director’s Guild Award, among others, for directing his splendidly entertaining political thriller Argo.

The film itself has also been widely honored—indeed, it received seven Oscar nominations. But even if his movie won all seven on February 24, Affleck can’t be honored with an Oscar for Best Director, because he wasn’t nominated.

Argo indulges in a bit of hairbreadth-escape melodrama in its final stretch, and one could argue about whether the movie might have been equally tense and satisfying with a more realistic resolution, instead of this sort of corny Hollywood action. But this is a question of artistic taste, not of execution—corny or not, the picture, these scenes included, is rousingly suspenseful, and must be considered one of the best-directed movies of the year. It would be disappointing but perhaps legitimate if Affleck didn’t win, if the award went to Spielberg or Tarantino or Ang Lee or even to the visionary young Benh Zeitlin of Beasts of the Southern Wild. But for him simply to be ignored is arguably the most egregious Oscar snub in decades.

It seems to have happened for two reasons. First, Affleck has been a fashionable figure of ridicule for years, for reasons I don’t understand. I’ve never been a particular fan of him as an actor; though I think he’s given some fine performances—notably in Hollywoodland—he’s also been a bland lightweight at times. He’s impressively low-key and haunted in the lead in Argo, however, suggesting that he may, on top of everything else, be his own best director.

But no one really disputes the excellence of his work as a director. By any other name, the guy who directed Gone Baby Gone and The Town and then Argo would be hailed as, quite simply, a new Hitchcock. Because it’s Ben Affleck, however, much of the praise has seemed either grudging or insultingly astonished. Enough already—it’s time to declare him paid up for Gigli (sad to say, I’m part of that small cult of outcasts who thinks that Gigli, while certainly flawed, is overall a worthwhile movie).

In the long run, the snub will likely work to Affleck’s benefit—the standing ovations he’s been getting while he wins all those other directing awards suggest that it may have caused the filmmaking community to look at him with new eyes. And his oh-so-gracious-and-humble acceptance speeches, though probably sincere, are also flawlessly played.

The other reason for his omission seems to have been the need to find a place among the nominees for director David O. Russell, for Silver Linings Playbook. Russell is a superb director, rightly nominated for 2010’s The Fighter; snubbed himself for his terrific 1999 Three Kings. But while Silver Linings Playbook is a watchable, generally touching comedy-drama, I don’t think it represents anything near Russell’s best work, and it doesn’t come within a mile of Argo. I’m not sure why it’s been so rapturously received.

Silver Linings Playbook also seems to have figured into this year’s worst acting snub, that of John Hawkes for his star turn in The Sessions. I admit that I’ve had a hard time warming up to Bradley Cooper, but I thought his performance in Silver Linings was quite creditable and poignant. But it isn’t in the same galaxy as the luminous work of Hawkes—in any year in which Daniel Day-Lewis didn’t play Lincoln, Hawkes would deserve to win.

I was delighted, however, that Helen Hunt received a Supporting Actress nomination for her lovely turn in The Sessions. It’s a pleasant surprise, as Hunt—an authentically great actress—has long been fashionably sneered at in the same perplexing way as Affleck.

One other note: I was also delighted that the Best Animated Short nominees included The Longest Daycare, a riotous Simpsons cartoon that played before Ice Age: Continental Drift. Nice to know that Maggie Simpson wasn’t snubbed.

TO SURROGATE, WITH LOVE

Here's a pair of gems, both playing here in the Valley, that I only caught up with recently…

Stricken with polio as a child, the poet and essayist Mark O’Brien spent most of his 49 years in an iron lung. He was the subject of the Oscar-winning 1996 documentary short Breathing Lessons (viewable here). Now, with The Sessions, his efforts to claim a satisfying sexuality, with the help of a sex surrogate, have gotten the full feature treatment from writer-director Ben Lewin (a polio survivor himself).

It’s a film of charming sweetness and easygoing wit, built around superb performances. John Hawkes, in another demonstration of his phenomenal range, is luminous as O’Brien, utterly convincing in his depiction of the man’s disability and vulnerability, but also of his indomitable spirit. The performance is both a technical tour de force and a blast of star quality.

Helen Hunt is no less a knockout as the surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, with her gentle, comically frayed aplomb and her undercurrent of admiration for her client. Then there’s Moon Bloodgood as O’Brien’s unflappable aide, and William H. Macy, terrific as his priest, who gives O’Brien’s project the green light on behalf of the Church. Alas, this means listening to O’Brien’s accounts of it, and glumly reflecting on the unspoken irony that the guy in the iron lung has a better sex life than his.

Ben Affleck is one of those high-profile celebrities about whom it was fashionably decided, at some point, that he was a douchebag and a joke, fit only for ridicule. If this had not been the case, if he were judged only on the merits of his three films as a director—Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo—what would his reputation be? I think that he would already have been hailed as the best, or at least most promising, director of suspense movies since at least Costa-Gavras, if not Hitchcock himself.

Argo, now in theatres, is a dramatization of the CIA operation to extract from Tehran the six Americans who escaped the US Embassy before it was overrun by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979, and thus were not among the 52 hostages that were held there for 444 days. It’s essentially a caper movie about stealing people instead of diamonds or whatever.

The agent who designed and conducted the caper, a man named Tony Mendez (Affleck), concocted a bizarrely over-elaborate-seeming cover story in which he and the hostages, who had taken refuge at the home of the Canadian Ambassador to Iran (Victor Garber), masqueraded as filmmakers scouting locations for a science-fiction film, called Argo.

From his crisply-edited, scary opening sequence—the Embassy takeover—on, Affleck’s step as director seems entirely sure-footed. Obvious liberties are taken in several sequences, especially toward the end, for the sake of eminent peril and hairbreadth escape, and one could argue the necessity of taking the movie so far into old-school melodrama. But the success with which Affleck executes these flourishes is spectacular: The suspense is excruciating, though it’s also nicely leavened by comedy, both from the sour, mordant CIA guys—Bryan Cranston is at his best as Affleck’s boss—and, more broadly, from Alan Arkin and John Goodman as a baggy-pants team of Hollywood cronies helping Affleck fake the production (Goodman plays real-life makeup man John Chambers, the Oscar-winner behind the Planet of the Apes effects).

As for Affleck’s own haunted, low-key presence in the star part here, Argo suggests that not only is he a superb director, but that he’s better in front of the camera when he’s also behind the camera.

RIP to Susan Luckey, a hoot as Mayor Shinn’s daughter in The Music Man, passed on at 74. Ye gods, she was cute…