Monday at the Movies - November 5, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, two magnetic idiosyncratic performances.

My Dinner with Hervé (2018) – This HBO biopic has been something of a passion project for Peter Dinklage, so I’m glad to see him cash in that Game of Thrones check and do something that fascinates him. Dinklage is indisputably commanding as Hervé Villechaize, best known for his work in The Man with the Golden Gun and Fantasy Island. Jamie Dornan co-stars as journalist Danny Tate, assigned to a puff piece on Hervé before it turns into an all-night confessional bender. The cast is rounded out by some heavy hitters: Andy Garcia as a pretty unflattering Ricardo Montalbán, David Straithairn as Hervé’s long suffering agent, and Oona Chaplin as Tate’s ex, lost to him before his days of sobriety. As biopics go, this one is fairly by-the-numbers, leavened with the added pathos of Villechaize’s increasingly debilitating dwarfism. The central attraction for My Dinner is Dinklage’s masterful performance; though he does not quite physically resemble the distinctive Hervé Villechaize, he has his voice down pat, capturing the curious nasal way that Villechaize’s French accent crept into his performances. Moreover, Dinklage has an earnest sympathy for Villechaize, which overrides the issue of physical resemblance and gives his performance something of the weight of Tyrion Lannister’s confession speech from Game of Thrones. It is enough as an acting showcase and should earn Dinklage his fair share of awards on his gift of impersonation alone, but it is not, I think, a gamechanger in the genre nor a film that needs much revisiting unless one, suffering aphasia, forgets what a talent Dinklage is.

Phantom Thread (2017) – Here, on the other hand, is a film that I know I need to see again. The latest collaboration between director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis follows the life of cranky fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis), caught in a bizarre triangle between his unwed sister Cyril (Lesley Manville, simmering), guardian of the fashion house, and muse Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), who begins to upset the established order in the House of Woodcock. That’s all I’ll say by way of summary, because the marketing only prepared me for a film about an uptight fashion designer whose life changes when he falls in love, and I can safely say that that description barely scratches the icebergian surface of what Anderson is up to in this film. In the way that There Will Be Blood was “about” an oil man but only barely, and The Master was “about” Scientology and huffing Lysol, Phantom Thread is more about the idiosyncrasies that power Woodcock and his petulant reactions as those habits are challenged. But it’s also about Alma, and Cyril, in ways I did not expect. I suppose I had anticipated a more demure outing from Anderson and Day-Lewis, in his ostensible swan song, but that was a fool’s bargain; both are in rare form, collaborating on a puzzle of a script and setting loose its peculiar questions on an unsuspecting audience. As ever, Anderson is invested in process, lovingly photographing the intricacies of sewing and the careful preparation of mushrooms, suggesting that perhaps he too is as demanding of his art as Woodcock is of his own life. I think the best of Anderson’s work takes so many turns that demand a second viewing just to sort it all out, but I’m equally looking forward to reveling in the quiet menace of a Day-Lewis stare, the withering retorts clipped by Manville, and the quiet ferocity of Krieps in the kitchen.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” If it sounds like Phantom Thread might be a candidate for a “Take Two Tuesday,” you may not be far off the mark. Indeed, “Take Two” returns tomorrow, but for a 2015 film. We’ll see you then!

Lincoln (2012)

Four score and two years ago, Walter Huston starred as Abraham Lincoln in the D. W. Griffith biopic of the Sixteenth President, the first “significant” portrayal of the man on film.  Here in 2012, we have another – Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, ably helmed by Daniel Day-Lewis.

Lincoln subverts the normal biopic pattern by beginning with the President (Daniel Day-Lewis) on the eve of his second term.  Allied with Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) and Congressional Republican Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), Lincoln presses to pass the Thirteenth Amendment before a negotiated peace with the Confederacy would maintain slavery as part of the terms of surrender.

In a sense, Lincoln is more civics lesson than characteristically Spielberg film, with the director backing off his signature style in favor of a more subdued experience that puts the actors fully in charge of translating the political maneuvering.  It’s a wise choice, especially with a cast as gifted as this one.  Day-Lewis is unsurprisingly engrossing as Lincoln, disappearing behind the gaunt cheekbones and stovepipe hat with a voice that recalls a timid Daniel Plainview.  To paraphrase Cornel West, “Do not be afraid to say Oscar!”  Day-Lewis’s totalizing performance is the stuff Academy Awards are made of; he’s practically a lock for a nomination, and a third Oscar for his mantel wouldn’t be a surprise.

The perfection of Day-Lewis’s performance is no surprise; when I heard that Liam Neeson had left the project, I was dejected only until hearing who would be replacing him.  But what’s more surprising is the plethora of familiar – and talented – faces rounding out one of the best ensemble casts in history.  Strathairn handles well the friendship with Lincoln, one of mutual respect tempered by political disagreement.  Jones is the true scene stealer here, inspired casting for an aging curmudgeon with a proclivity for verbose condemnation.  Though Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln is the weak link, Spielberg wisely restricts her to only a few scenes.

But the film is populated with veteran character actors, each of whom does wonderful and memorable work with only a few minutes of screen time.  James Spader, John Hawkes, and Tim Blake Nelson play rabble-rousers courting Congressional votes, while Jackie Earle Haley appears as the Confederate vice-president.  There’s Hal Holbrook as an influential Republican, Walton Goggins (best known as Boyd on Justified) as a hesitant Ohio representative, and Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant.  It’s almost enough just to list these folks, because you know the kind of work that they do; it’s as exceptional and entertaining as it’s always been.

What the film doesn’t do particularly well is tell us who Lincoln was.  The performance is entirely enthralling, with Day-Lewis giving it more than his all (as he always does).  But the film relies almost too much on Lincoln’s legend, taking for granted our reverent regard for him.  We never really get much access to Lincoln the man, with almost every scene feeling like a performance; in this particular month, Lincoln was the master strategist, playing each side and timing each move to achieve his goal.  It’s compelling and probably more honest than most whitewashing historians are willing to acknowledge, confronting the performativity of politics without bowing entirely to the “Great Man” simplification.  But it’s a bit of a cop-out when Lincoln refuses to tell his wife’s dressmaker what he really thinks about slavery, as if the movie doesn’t want to press too hard against our canonization of Honest Abe.  The truth is here somewhere – it’s likely that this Lincoln wanted to preserve the Union first without sacrificing his moral convictions against slavery, but the film never goes there, instead allowing this Lincoln to remain inscrutable.

But for this moment of historical disingenuousness, Lincoln is a marvelously gripping film, a certain Oscar contender on the other side of 2013.  It’s a showcase for an actor at the top of his game, a museum exhibit populated by an array of talented moving parts, and a Spielberg film that doesn’t hit you over the head with base sentimentality.  A film this talky ought to be a snoozefest, but the performances are lively and the politics accessible – a bit like The Wire at its most viewer-friendly.

Lincoln is rated PG-13 “for an intense scene of war violence, some images of carnage and brief strong language.”  The film begins with a brutal war scene, and there are several visits to battlefields strewn with bodies and dismembered parts, though these scenes are by far in the minority.  A few period-era profanities occur, but this is more Yosemite Sam than Deadwood.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for our Thanksgiving surprise!

Gangs of New York (2002)

Martin Scorsese ushered in the '00s with the start of a beautiful friendship - with Leonardo DiCaprio, who's been called Marty's new DeNiro - and this epic look at the birth of modern New York City set, like Casino (albeit in positive terms) against personal rise-and-fall stories.

Sixteen years after the murder of his father (Liam Neeson), young Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) returns to New York and his old neighborhood, the Five Points. After meeting up with old friends and new acquaintances - chief among them the pickpocket prostitute Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz) - Amsterdam finds himself falling in with a gang led by his father's murderer, the man he's vowed to kill: the merciless Bill "The Butcher" Cutting (the ever-riveting Daniel Day-Lewis). Meanwhile, Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) is coming to power, the Civil War rages, and an impending draft notice might just ignite the powderkeg that is New York City.

As with every Martin Scorsese movie reviewed here thus far (with the possible exception of Shutter Island), Gangs of New York is a mesmerizing epic, with characters and events representing larger forces and ideals of national consequence. On one side, Amsterdam and his immigrants; on the other, Bill the Butcher and his nativists. Already, then, the conflict becomes something more than just two men in battle. There are other issues at stake - what it means to be an American, what the nature of honor is, and even an examination of the political process. All of these plates Scorsese keeps spinning without ever losing sight of the immediate Amsterdam/Bill conflict, and in that respect the film succeeds.

Scorsese is like Sidney Lumet in that he reliably casts actors who turn in star performances, even if it wasn't quite expected of them (prime example for Lumet: Vin Diesel in Find Me Guilty). Gangs of New York begins a series of (to date) four films Scorsese has made with DiCaprio, and it's here that we get glimmers of the actor that DiCaprio has since become. While his performance isn't completely polished - his Irish accent slips in places - it's a giant leap forward from Titanic and a good start on the road to The Departed. Diaz, of whom I've never been a big fan, is decent here, her accent slightly more consistent and a hair/makeup job that almost lets you forget that this is the same actress responsible for Charlie's Angels. Bit players get chances to shine; Broadbent is mirthfully corrupt as Boss Tweed, Liam Neeson is a show-stealer in the film's brutal opening reel, and as an Irish cop John C. Reilly proves that he is, like all good comedians, a fine dramatic actor too. The greatest performance, unsurprisingly, is Daniel Day-Lewis's villainous turn as Bill the Butcher, a baddie of the highest order and the kind of man who could keep company with Deadwood's Al Swearengen and No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh; that Day-Lewis lost the Oscar that year is a travesty, though the early inklings one gets of his Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood suggest that this is an actor who builds on what he does until the majority sit up and take notice.

At nearly three hours, this sprawling epic might not be for everyone. Unlike the Kill Bill series, which was a non-stop wham/bam "roaring rampage of revenge," Gangs of New York is more deliberate in its pacing. After a showstopping opening (successfully ignoring Rip Torn's advice from The Larry Sanders Show, "Never open with a showstopper"), Amsterdam encounters Bill almost immediately upon returning to New York, simmering and gathering information before he makes his play for vengeance - which promptly pans out completely unpredictably, leaving Amsterdam to slink back, lick his wounds, and restrategize. And so the film contains three action pieces - beginning, first climax, and second climax - with little "action" in between; instead, the focus is on character (story vs. plot, as Scorsese would put it) and scenery - downright gorgeous scenery, with Scorsese's trademark meticulous attention to detail and a high degree of historical accuracy as far as capturing a bygone era on film.

While it's not Scorsese's absolute finest work (that honor, in my humble opinion, belongs to The Departed), Gangs of New York is arguably among his more polished pieces. If nothing else, Daniel Day-Lewis proves himself a first-rate actor as the terrifying villain of the piece.

Gangs of New York, like nearly everything else Scorsese makes, is rated R, this time "for intense strong violence, sexuality/nudity and language." There aren't really words to describe how unflinchingly brutal the violence is in this movie, as it's probably the most intensely violent of Scorsese's movies. Prostitutes are topless in three separate scenes, and the characters make brief but vulgar sexual remarks. As for language, there are more racial slurs than F-bombs, though the main justification for the R rating, I'm sure, is the downright savage violence.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

(NOTE: This was written early in January of 2008, before the Coen Brothers took home Best Picture for No Country for Old Men. I'm still smarting over that one.)

With Oscar season upon us and the awards ceremony just around the corner, I submit for your consideration what may be the only perfect movie of 2007: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

From the director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, Anderson’s latest tells the story of Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), a rising self-made oil magnate attempting to strike black gold in the small religious community of Little Boston. Plainview, after successfully leasing enough land to begin drilling, crosses paths with Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a healer/preacher in Little Boston and the only person who may be able to match wits with Plainview.

To distill the movie into a mere battle between two men, however, would be to do the film a gross injustice. There Will Be Blood is many things: an epic about a Machiavellian capitalist’s boundless ambition to conquer, the story of a man’s self-imposed meteoric rise and plummeting fall from glory, or even a Marxist commentary on the parallel malevolences of capitalism and religion. But the one thing it’s not is simple. Even the film’s last line – “I’m finished!” – has at least four different levels of meaning apparent on the first viewing alone.

To the best of my knowledge, Martin Scorsese’s 2006 gangster blockbuster The Departed was the last perfect movie Hollywood churned out. Don’t get me wrong; 2007 has been a year of great movies – Sweeney Todd, Juno, and No Country for Old Men come to mind – but seldom does a movie come along that commands a second viewing like There Will Be Blood does.

I might add that my second viewing came exactly twenty-four hours after my first viewing, and though the film was still fresh in my mind Anderson offers so much at once that it’s impossible to catch everything in one go.

Day-Lewis as Plainview is one of those offerings. Day-Lewis, who previously took home a Best Actor Oscar playing disabled artist Christy Brown in 1989’s My Left Foot, is almost guaranteed to win this year’s Best Actor award. Though Johnny Depp was delightful as the musically murderous barber Sweeney Todd, he can’t hold a candle to Day-Lewis, who commands attention from the first scene to the last line. It’s impossible to look at anyone else while Day-Lewis is onscreen, so commanding is his performance.

Even Dano, who performed admirably both here and in Little Miss Sunshine, comes up short against the Day-Lewis juggernaut. Playing the dual role of twins Paul and Eli Sunday (Eli being the more prominent of the two), Dano is suitably over-the-top as he delivers quack sermons but also beautifully pathetic as he questions God’s “mysteries” in the last reel of the film.

Though this was my first Paul Thomas Anderson outing, I’ll be sure to check out more films in the canon, since Anderson’s direction here is non-pareil. The first fifteen minutes, in what feels like an homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, elapse in virtual silence; the only dialogue – save for a brief gasp of “No!” – comes from those inevitably chatty people sitting behind you. From there on, Anderson launches through a tour de force portrait of turn-of-the-century California, complete with what I understand are his trademark long takes. As a film fan madly in love with long takes, extended scenes such as the one where Plainview meets his brother Henry are breathtaking. And the soundtrack, which at times sounds like a train whistle that crescendos into a swarm of bees, is instrumental in building the suspense that Anderson so effortlessly crafts.

But where Anderson truly shines as a filmmaker comes about halfway into the film, when one of the characters is permanently deafened by a drilling accident (to divulge that character’s identity would be a criminal revelation). Anderson deftly switches between shots of the flaming derrick and close-ups of the newly-deafened character, accompanied by only the swooshing noise of what the deaf character can only hear.

There Will Be Blood, as I’ve said, is one of that rare breed of “perfect movie.” When the film was over, I sat in stunned silence, desperately trying to catch my breath and looking around frantically for an usher with an oxygen tank. Seldom does a movie take my breath away like this one did, and even rarer is the film that I must see a second time in the same weekend – let alone threaten to drag all my friends to see.

The last ten minutes of the film, which more than live up to the title, are as gripping as anything I’ve seen in a film in a long time. With my hand clasped over my mouth, I watched as Day-Lewis took the film beyond great and into perfection, all with the line “I drink your milkshake!” And both times I watched in rapt horror as the film’s final, tragic moments played out like some inexorable Greek tragedy.

At one point, Plainview tells his brother, “I look at people, and I see nothing worth liking.” Yet when I look at There Will Be Blood, I see not just a movie that I liked, but a movie that demands to be liked.