Beginners

This week is when all the top ten movie lists for 2011 come out, and everyone has something to say about the state of cinema, with each critic trying to outdo the other and make their list more edgy or artsy or controversial.

However, I’m not here to talk about a movie from last year but the year before last – 2010 -- a year I was living overseas and woefully bereft of cinematic inspiration.

G put on a movie last night from our archives and this one would have occupied a premier position on my top ten list for 2010 simply by virtue of the canine actor, a Jack Russell named Arthur, who is in almost every scene. That and the fact that the director chose to include subtitles for this four-legged thespian.

I know some of you are cringing at the thought, summoning up smarmy scenes from Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marmaduke. But this was subtle and creative and, for any of you that actually have a dog and create speech bubbles for the creature on a constant basis, so very, very true-to-life.

The movie I'm talking about is Beginners, starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer, with an equally moving performance by French actress Melanie Laurent. McGregor plays Oliver whose mother dies of cancer after which his 74-year old father, Hal (played by Plummer), comes out of the closet and begins a new life as a gay man. As Oliver narrates, “My parents got married in 1955, they had a child and they stayed married for 44 years, until my mother died. Six months later my father told me he was gay. … He was gay the whole time they were married.”

No need for a spoiler alert, by the way, because all of this is revealed in the first five minutes of the movie, along with the fact that, after four years of living the life of Liberace, Hal also passes away, leaving Oliver with the rich remains of Hal’s long life, including his dog who has the crackerjack cuteness of a wirehaired terrier and the sage, contemplative regard of a Buddhist monk.

The director uses the dog’s visage with aplomb, artfully attaching commentary onto Arthur’s long, thoughtfully blinkless gazes. As Oliver chides the dog when he first brings him home, “Look, it’s lonely out here, so you better learn how to talk with me.” And Arthur replies with one of his signature, no-nonsense truisms, “While I understand up to 150 words – I don’t talk.” Hence the subtitles.

My favorite of his skillfully placed aphorisms, this one to Oliver when he’s clumsily courting Anna, the French woman he and Arthur meet at a friend’s costume party: “Tell her the darkness is about to drown us unless something drastic happens right now.” Yes, that’s right, ever-so-eloquently uttered by a dog via a soulful stare and a single subtitle.

The movie shows us the painful demise of love and life – from the fear and doubt that plague the young couple (Anna: “Why do you leave everyone? Why did you let me go?” Oliver: “Maybe because I don’t really believe it’s going to work and then I make sure that it doesn’t work.”) to the father’s denial of his own mortality as he continues to throw parties in the hospital room despite a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer. As Oliver points out, facing his own personal grief while confiscating everyone’s paper cups,“There is no stage 5!"

Yet there are also many moments of delight. Oliver’s imagistic way of providing exposition, detailing his life history while archival footage flashes across the screen: “This is 2003, this is what the sun looks like, and the stars, this is the president. And this is the sun in 1955, and the stars and the president.” The way the movie shows us a romantic connection that is vulnerably honest and authentic without the need for a single sex scene. And did I mention the dog?

It was one of those movies from which I expected nothing (I had never even heard of it before last night) and woke up with a bevy of vividly heartfelt scenes to cull through the next day. That’s the kind of quiet film that catches you off-balance, so surprising and rare in the scope of a year’s worth of movies -- like finding a forgotten twenty dollar bill stuffed at the bottom of a coat pocket.

So in the spirit of Spinal Tap, I think my top ten list for this year will have to go up to eleven.

By the way, a quick aside about Arthur: turns out his real-life name is Cosmo and Beginners is not his first film role, although I’ll spare you the titles of his previous movies because they’re akin to Beverly Hills Chihuahua and Marmaduke. Cosmo was rescued from a shelter and trained by acclaimed animal-trainer Mathilde de Cagny who ended up adopting Cosmo herself. Seems she has a penchant for Jack Russells, and is most famous for training another well-known terrier named Moose who played Eddie in all eleven seasons of the television show Frasier.

And one last tidbit: McGregor was so smitten with his canine costar that he adopted a dog right after the filming ended. My research couldn’t uncover what breed it was, but I’d bet money it was a Jack Russell.

Perry's Place

Before the hug clutches and the offspring and the cast iron homilies scattered across the front lawn. Before the heartache of crow’s feet and bad French wine. Before that momentary lust for her own teenage limbs, quick-witted and carelessly indifferent.

One thing is for certain: she needs a drink.

And just before the highway disappears into the scrub-bald mountains, she finds it. A strip mall’s asphalt, headlights gleaming a sandwich board: Perry’s Place.

Tucked in the corner between the donuts and the hairspray, a miracle of sorts in this land of milk and nearly-lost dreams.

Christmas lights kindle the Jager maker, Blondie on the jukebox, and back behind the bar the bulbs strobe a million Bud reminders. Each barstool a tear-stained promise, a temporary home.

You wanna buy a car? the ramshackle bartender wheezes, passing the crumbled newsprint her way. A Buick Riviera, 1966, year-of-her-birth. All fin and vinyl and clamshell curves, the come-hither headlights edging the fenders. A Rolls Royce in the fog.

She sure was pretty once, he breathes. And so she orders another round, the new year startled into silence.

True Romance

“I feel like my heart is gonna go pee.”

That’s Patricia Arquette proclaiming her love to Christian Slater from the lip of a giant billboard towering over the Hollywood Hills. How did I ever miss this early 90’s classic? G got his hands on a director's cut of Tony Scott’s True Romance. Tarantino wrote the screenplay and it has his fingerprints all over it: the hilariously over-the-top violence, the droll cadence of the noir dialect, the palette of 1950’s Americana from Arquette’s turquoise stiletto heels and matching over-sized sunglasses to Slater’s silhouetted alter-ego in the guise of a young Elvis (played by Val Kilmer, by the way). And of course let’s not forget the Pepto-Bismol pink Cadillac.

Not to mention the cameos, the eye candy, the soundtrack -- from Big Bopper’s Chantilly Lace to Nymphomaniac’s I Want Your Body to Billy Idol’s White Wedding as a backdrop to the tattoo parlor scene when Arquette and Slater bond over matching tattoos.

A few other cinematic highlights:

Christopher Walken’s bone chilling portrayal of mob boss Vincenzo Coccotti and his interrogation scene with Dennis Hopper, the tension wound so tight you can hardly look at the screen. As Walken explains to Hopper with exquisite Walkenian impassivity, at once glacial and maniacal, “I’m the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You tell the angels in heaven you never seen an evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.”

Gary Oldman as the dreadlocked ersatz homeboy Drexl Spivey, with his black leather beret, glass eye, and metal-capped grin, his face a scarred map of knife fights, he looks like Jack Sparrow’s evil twin. As he states so very eloquently, “Now I know I’m pretty, but I ain’t as pretty as a couple of titties.”

Bradd Pitt’s Spicoliesque characterization of Floyd, the couch potato/stoner dude ripping righteous bowlfuls from a makeshift honey-bear bong (classic!). It’s a somewhat early role for Pitt (post-Thelma and Louise but pre-Fight Club) and it’s a deliciously goofy spoof, with Pitt donning a red-yellow-and-green Rastafarian beanie and the blank stare and dopey grin of a true pothead. Watching him chuckle stupidly confirms he's lit up a few real ones in the name of theatrical research. As the mob men burst through the screen door, shotguns cocked, Floyd mumbles from his horizontal position on the couch, “You guys wanna smoke a bowl?"

And Patricia Arquette’s Alabama Whitman, platinum blonde, her voluptuously whimsical wardrobe lighting up the screen: neon polka-dotted camisole, skin-tight leopard skin knickers, heart-shaped drop earrings. She’s the Goodwill’s poster girl, her New Wave sensibility bringing on waves of nostalgia and vivid memories of mothball smells and scratchy synthetic fabrics. As she says to Christian Slater after their first accidental date, “I’m not a whore. I’m a call-girl. There’s a difference, you know?”

The film is exceptionally violent, but I suppose that’s redundant considering who wrote the screenplay. I usually don’t gravitate towards films with gratuitous brutality, but I couldn’t help give a few sideline cheers as Arquette bashes James Gandolfini’s head in with a porcelain toilet tank lid after he beats her senseless in an attempt to find out where the suitcase of cocaine is hiding. He breaks the cardinal boy-rule that you aren’t supposed to hit girls, and he does it repeatedly and without shame. Difficult to watch, yet when the tables are turned and she jabs him with a corkscrew and then gets him straight in the eyes with a heavy mist of hairspray, lighting his face on fire, you find yourself egging her on with shouts of approval, the revenge is just that sweet.

Right before the ending credits roll across the screen, Alabama’s thick southern drawl in a voice-over narration:

“Amid the chaos of that day, when all I could hear was the thunder of gunshots, and all I could smell was the violence in the air, I look back and am amazed that my thoughts were so clear and true, that three words went through my mind endlessly, repeating themselves like a broken record: you’re so cool, you’re so cool, you’re so cool.”

His Girl Friday

Like a quintessentially perfect pop song, true to its time and place, clever and ever-so-optimistic, His Girl Friday lifts us up and carries us along on a dogged path of lyricism.

A bit of history: when I was about ten, my parents newly divorced, I spent the weekends at my dad’s house. I remember with a child’s vivid clarity lying on the floor against one of those 1970’s corduroy floor cushions, propped up in my pop’s arms, and watching the That’s Entertainment series -- mostly musical clips from MGM’s black-and-white classics. I cut my teeth on Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, Judy Garland and Ann Miller. Their bold, East Coast way of speaking, as if every proclamation were first-time and fresh: “Lets put on a show!” and they did and it was colorful, and urgent and just-this-side of divine.

Things were so simple then; this 1940’s world mirroring the simple joy I felt nestled up in the crook of my dad’s arms, the clip-clap of tap dancing bouncing off the screen and the ebb and flow of love lost and gained.

Last night, for whatever reason I know not, G agreed to watch a B&W flick from the classic days; I didn’t question it, just told him to push play and we settled into a superbly entertaining evening of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in one of the most deliciously molten relationships in cinematic history. This is verbal choreography at its best, the characters dipping and diving through their lexical fencing.

The film is a battle of the sexes, the relevance of its message amazingly intact 60 years later: As women, what is our place? The house on the hill and a handful of children? A career where success is clawing and spitting and shoving your way to the top? A husband who punches a safeguarded clock or a life-partner who digs his heels into a doggedly animated vision of the world and whisks you along on his magic carpet ride?

Russell is breathtakingly at ease with her womanhood: tall, lanky, non-blonde, she exudes power, confidence, hunger and an agility with a turn-of-phrase that is stupefying. She is the spark to Grant’s self-centered ego-driven flame and together they heat the screen. It’s like a rap duet, so contemporary is the feeling of their rapport.

You can get this all on Wikipedia, but let me just give some quick background info: His Girl Friday was released in 1940 and directed by Howard Hawks, an adaptation of the play The Front Page. So fascinating (to me anyway) to know that they changed the role of Russell’s character, Hildy Johnson, from male to female.

The film was originally supposed to be a straightforward adaptation of the play with both the editor and reporter being men. But during auditions, Howard Hawks's secretary read reporter Hildy Johnson's lines. Hawks liked the way the dialogue sounded coming from a woman, resulting in the script being rewritten to make Hildy female as well as the ex-wife of editor Walter Burns. Most of the original dialogue and all of the characters' names (with the exception of Bruce Baldwin, Hildy's fiance, who was of course a woman in the play) were left the same.

Hawks had a very difficult time casting this film. While the choice of Cary Grant was almost instantaneous, the casting of Hildy was a far more extended process. At first, Hawks wanted Carole Lombard, whom he had directed in the comedy but the cost of hiring Lombard in her new status as a freelancer proved to be far too expensive, and Columbia could not afford her. Katharine Hepburn, Claudette Colbert, Margaret Sullivan, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunbar were offered the role, but turned it down, Dunne because she felt the part was too small and needed to be expanded. Joan Crawford was reportedly also considered.

The beauty of the black-and-white shadows is superb as are the scenes with Russell rushing back-and-forth among several hand-held candlestick phones with all her journalistic fervor, the technological irony alive and well. Communication was just as much a matter of multi-tasking in 1940 as it is with our iPhones and Blackberries today.

My favorite line of the film: "Get back in there, you monk turtle!"

My favorite bit of trivia (courtesy of G): In his early 50’s, Cary Grant underwent a series of controlled experiments with LSD. He ultimately became the first mainstream celebrity to hail the virtues of psychedelic drugs. In his autobiography, he writes eloquently about the benefits he derived from these psychiatrically monitored acid trips:

“The shock of each revelation brings with it an anguish of sadness for what was not known before in the wasted years of ignorance and, at the same time, an ecstasy of joy at being freed from the shackles of such ignorance.”