PTA MEETING

Opening this weekend:

One Battle After Another--The erotic power of revolutionary violence is the initial theme of Paul Thomas Anderson's latest. Set in a strife-torn, more or less contemporary U.S., it follows the exploits of "The French 75," an SLA-like cadre who liberate immigrant detainees and blow up communication towers and banks and the like.

A French 75 operative known as Perfidia Beverly Hills (the goddessy, imperious Teyana Taylor), finds political mayhem an aphrodisiac; she's desperately turned on whenever her sheepish explosives expert squeeze "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is about to blow something sky high. Her seditious salaciousness isn't limited to Calhoun, however, but also to her enemy, the reactionary Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn)--there's a loathing sexual tension between them the second they meet, at gunpoint.

Anderson's strange saga, very loosely derived from Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (much like There Will Be Blood was vaguely inspired by Upton Sinclair's Oil!) soon fast-forwards seventeen years. The theme then shifts from uncontrolled libido to domestic complacency. Perfidia is long out of the picture, and Calhoun, now known as "Bob Ferguson," is living incognito and raising the teenaged Willa (Chase Infiniti) in an A-frame in Colorado.

Bob learns that he, and Willa, are again targets of the forces of Lockjaw, who's trying to gain membership in an order of wealthy old white guy racists, the "Christmas Adventurers." The French 75 start getting the band back together to protect Willa, but after years of sitting on the couch smoking weed, Bob finds his revolutionary chops are rusty. Besides, he's forgotten all the passwords.

A wild and blood-soaked cat-and-mouse game ensues across the west. Bob and Willa's allies range from radical nuns to a native tracker to Sergio, a relaxed but capable martial arts sensei and immigrant underground railroad conductor played by a scene-stealing Benicio del Toro. The action is often laugh out loud funny, and though the comedy is grim and splenetic, these characters are weirdly endearing.

Partly this is because DiCaprio, Penn, del Toro and others are about as good here as they've ever been. But it's also because Anderson puts them through standard action movie paces--gunfights, rooftop scrambles, interrogations, and one of the more original, woozily effective car chases in some time--but they execute them like real human beings, fumbling in uncertainty. "Tom Cruuuuuise!" Sergio crows at one point, trying to encourage Bob to some derring-do, and it's a funny yet rueful reminder of the contrast between what we're capable of and what the movies have taught us we should be capable of.

If there are real-life revolutionary groups in the style of The French 75 of any significance currently active in this country, I haven't heard about them. But One Battle After Another still has the ring of emotional truth. It all may seem crazy, but it sure doesn't seem nearly as outrageous and improbable as it would have, say, ten or twelve years ago.  Like Ari Aster's recent Eddington, this is a flailing, angry satirical portrait of where we are emotionally right now. But unlike Eddington, it gives us characters we can root for rather than just pity.

Eleanor the Great--Like last year's Between the Temples, this one is about an elderly woman connecting with a younger person, and preparing for a very belated Bat Mitzvah. June Squibb the Great plays the title character, a sassy 90-something widow who moves in with her daughter (Jessica Hecht) in New York after many years in Florida when her beloved longtime roommate Bessie (Rita Zohar) passes on. 

Eleanor accidentally wanders into a Survivors Support Group at the Jewish Community Center, and finds herself telling everyone about her experience during the Holocaust. Nina (Erin Kellyman), a young journalism student who's there observing, understandably latches onto it as a great story, and she and Eleanor quickly bond as friends. The trouble is that the story isn't really Eleanor's; it's Bessie's. Eleanor is from Iowa; she converted to Judaism when she married.

It's clear that Eleanor's impulsive act isn't just angling for attention; she's trying to keep Bessie's story, which she never told anyone else, from fading away. Nina is deeply bereaved over the recent death of her mother, and her father (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a famous TV journalist, has been distant from her since the loss. But he takes an interest in the story, and pretty soon poor Eleanor is in over her head.

This peculiar but painfully plausible comedy-drama marks the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson. Her work is crisp and proficient, but the script, by Tory Kamen, is unsteady; the attempt to pull everything together toward the end doesn't quite come off. None of this, however, is an impediment to the indomitable Squibb, whose fearless, direct performance transcends any shortcomings in the material, as she did in last year's similarly uneven Thelma. And despite the unsavory tension behind the situation, her scenes with the excellent young Kellyman have a sweet hum.

The intriguing film programs at Scottsdale's Western Spirit Museum probably don't get as much notice as they should. The movies are free with museum admission; $10 for just the movie.

The current series is Robert Rodriguez: Sinema Sin Fronteras. The next selection by the Texas auteur, the charming Harryhausen-esque fantasy Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams, shows at 2 p.m. this Sunday, September 28. It's followed by Once Upon a Time in Mexico at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 1; Spy Kids 3: Game Over at 2 p.m. Sunday, October 5; the vampire yarn From Dusk till Dawn at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 8, and the bloody actioner Machete, starring Danny Trejo, at 6 p.m. Wednesday, October 22.  

The Spy Kids flicks are great for children; the evening Rodriguez movies are decidedly for grown-ups. Go to westernspirit.org for details.

DAD CHOKES

Opening at Harkins Camelview at Fashion Square today...

Flag Day--Based on Jennifer Vogel's 2004 memoir Flim-Flam Man, this is roughly the zillionth telling of one of the perennial American dramas: The relationship with the father. The author's often-absent dad, John Vogel, was a career criminal in the '80s with everything from bank robbery to arson to counterfeiting on his record; he was also a sensitive, loving person who sketched, and who introduced his daughter and son to Chopin and marinated steaks.

Sean Penn, who directed and who plays John Vogel, makes us see how both of these personalities can exist, albeit uncomfortably, in one guy. It's one of his most painfully believable performances since his turn in The Falcon and the Snowman back in 1985; like that guy, Penn's John Vogel is one of those people who are both repellently obnoxious and charismatic, somehow at the same time. He's a hustler in the grand Willy Loman tradition, insisting, when asked what he does for a living, that he's "an entrepreneur," with many irons in the fire at any given time.

Penn's daughter Dylan Penn is impressively un-histrionic and sympathetic as the grown-up version of Jennifer, taking over for a couple of first-rate younger actresses who play her earlier vintages. The director's son, Hopper Penn, effectively plays Jennifer's little brother as an adult.

Stylistically, the movie generates superbly convincing period atmosphere, and it has a '70s art-cinema vibe. It's like something by Terence Malick, with lots of leisurely montages cut to melancholy songs and deliberately grainy, home-movie-ish footage, and heavy use of Dylan Penn's voice-over narration. Virtually a catalog of severe family dysfunction, it's a bitterly sad story, but seen strictly in terms of Jennifer's accomplishment, it's a pretty inspirational story, too.

I wondered why Jennifer's beleaguered Mom (Katheryn Winnick) didn't get more sympathy, until her inaction during a crisis about midpoint in the film makes it harder to like her. Overall, though, the movie is yet another illustration of the tremendous, and tremendously unfair, emotional advantage that fathers tend to wield in the family dynamic, and in the Western narrative tradition. 

TRUNK SHOW

The specific subject of Terrence Malick’s new film The Tree of Life is a mid-century, middle-class, middle-American family—dysfunction & tragedy played out in Norman Rockwell light. Malick isn’t big on specificity, though, & it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that what he’s really taking on with this movie is no less than the Meaning of Life, the inscrutable Fruit & Root of the title Tree.

Malick’s story concerns the O’Briens, of Boomer-era Waco, Texas: Dad (Brad Pitt), who gave up his dream to be a classical pianist for a career as an industrial engineer, the radiant & saintly Mom (Jessica Chastain), and three boys. The eldest of these, Jack (played by Sean Penn as an adult & by the terrific Hunter McCracken as a preteen), is our point of view for most of the film.

It’s an iconic American motif; what makes The Tree of Life different from innumerable other treatments is, first of all, Malick’s narrative style. The story is given to us in elliptical fragments, mostly brief, often enigmatic, seemingly meant to suggest snatches of memory. In its broader organization, it’s also suggestive of a piece of symphonic music, with movements: a light & joyous passage devoted to the mother, a brooding one for the father, a turbulent one for the boy’s sexual awakening, and so forth (the powerful score is by Alexander Desplat).

Past and present, the dramatic & the trivial, are freely mixed with scenes of the characters wandering in expressionistic landscapes. It’s disorienting at first, and some of the questions that arise about exactly what’s happened to the family remain ambiguous. But the wisps & glimpses of story accrue emotional force, & most of what’s onscreen is superbly done—it includes, among other merits, one of Brad Pitt’s best performances, a turn of almost Brando-like vibrancy. Still, what we aren’t shown can be exasperating.

Secondly, The Tree of Life is remarkable for Malick’s ambitiousness of scope: In addition to emotional conflicts—career and personal disappointments turn Dad from a stern & hard-assed but by no means unloving father to a repressive tyrant—& coming-of-age drama, the family is also visited by heartbreak & loss. They cry out to the Almighty, as people do in such times, with the Eternal Questions: “Who are You? What are we to You?” And Malick takes his unironic best shot at giving them, & us, an answer, in visual terms.

The oddest branch on The Tree of Life is a lengthy, epic special-effects sequence depicting the formation of the Cosmos, and the development of life on Earth, from slimy blobs & worms to plesiosaurs & dinosaurs. It’s a majestic free-standing episode, inevitably reminiscent, in atmosphere, of Kubrick’s 2001 (Kubrick crony Douglas Trumbull reportedly worked on the effects), but what, you might well ask, does this titanic spectacle have to do with the O’Briens of Waco, Texas?

The question could be answered in more than one way. It could be that Malick is saying to the bereaved questioner, in the manner of a rationalist-era Voice of God to Job: In light of this magnificent, terrible, pitiless, glorious pageant, how dare you ask for an explanation for your sufferings?

I don’t think, so, though. I think he’s trying to put personal & family travails into a cosmic context—to suggest that our lives are every bit as important, in the grand scheme of things, as exploding suns & volcanoes & primordial monsters. The film seems in some sense theistic in outlook, though not simplemindedly so, & the point seems to be that human life & our interpersonal connections do have metaphysical or transcendental significance, even if we can’t quite understand it.

Of course, Malick’s depiction of The Grand Scheme of Things is just that—a depiction. Your own sensibility will have a lot to do with whether it repels you or thrills you, whether it seems pretentious & presumptuous or an audacious & visionary use of the medium.

For me, it was the latter. Malick, now 67, has made only five features as a director. His marvelous debut, 1973’s Badlands, holds up as a classic; I’ve found most of his subsequent work interesting but diffuse. But The Tree of Life, for all its loose ends & ramblings, strikes me as another that may still look like a classic four decades from now.