The Commitments (1991)

Note, in the front row: baby Glen Hansard!

Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) is obsessed with music. Two of his friends ask him to whip their band into shape, and he responds by taking it apart and putting together a new one: The Commitments. This soul cover band has a wise old veteran trumpeter, an egotistical dick of a lead singer, three talented female backups (who could easily have replaced insufferable frontman Deco), and five young nerds on guitar, bass, sax, piano, and drums. Will the band succeed, or will it be destroyed by too much infighting and not enough money?

Early on, one bandmember suggests that they may be too white to play soul music. Jimmy responds that the music fits them because "the Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud." This sort of sentiment, well-intentioned though it may be, makes me really uncomfortable. First of all, it seems to render actual black people invisible? There are black people in Europe--and, indeed, Ireland--and if white Irish are "the blacks," then who are black Europeans? Also the blacks? Different blacks? Now, Jimmy's trying to draw a parallel between Britain's historical treatment of the Irish and America's historical treatment of black people. I get that. But that is itself problematic: you can't reduce "blackness" to just the experience of oppression or to a romanticized picture of musical "character" born of suffering. Not to be (even more) obvious (than usual), but it's a bit dehumanizing to treat people as metaphors instead of as, um, people.

This same sort of presumption manifests later in the movie, when club walls are papered with the band's posters proclaiming them the "Saviours of Soul." I'm sure Roddy Doyle, Alan Parker, et al. didn't mean anything by it, but saviors from what? I don't know. Maybe this isn't as bad as it seemed to me. I do this; I make a big deal over practically nothing. What do you guys think?

Race stuff aside, the movie seemed to me to have some structural weaknesses. The Commitments is based on a novel, and it felt like it would work better as a book. I haven't read the book, but I'm going to speculate wildly that there's probably more substantial character development there than in the movie. Plus, I think novels can get away with having less conflict than films.* There's a lot of conflict in the movie, but it isn't explored in a plottish way; it just erupts and subsides and erupts again, unhandled and probably unhandleable. (These are all official critical terms. Pauline Kael will back me up.) Anyway, to me, the movie felt a little thin on plot and on character.

Still, it's not thin on charm. I enjoyed watching it. I rooted for the band. I loved the dialogue between Jimmy and Joey "The Lips" Fagan at the end. Couldn't ask for a line much better than "That would have been predictable. This way it's poetry." Overall, though, I expected to like the movie more than I did, and I expected there to be more there there. (Not unlike my feelings on Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.)

Maybe I should just be happy I got through it. In the last couple days, I have tried to watch Diabolique and Return of the Secaucus 7 and gotten bored with both. I think I'll go back to them. They're probably very good. Maybe my attention span is just shot. Maybe I'm having post-Moon malaise, as I predicted I would. Maybe, right now, I only have eyes for The Wire.

*It is possible that I'm full of shit.

- Liked It

Hunger (2008)

Well, here we go, everybody. Hunger opens with three intertitles, which say:

Not a lot of context, especially since the movie is so stingy on dialogue. I don't know much about the Troubles, generally, or about the Maze prison, specifically, so I was a little lost at first. That turned out to be completely okay. If anything, my ignorance heightened the feelings of desperation and immediacy that Hunger works to build. The movie's not apolitical, but it's also not primarily political. It's more about specific conditions and individual reactions to them. It's a microscopic examination of pain as a way of life--for prisoners and officers alike.

I just said there wasn't much dialogue in Hunger, but that's not quite true. For about 25 minutes in the middle, Hunger is all talking. But the movie before that long scene and the movie after it is light on speech and heavy on physical degradation: excretions, beatings, death. It's slow but riveting, unfolding at an oozing pace.

Basically it's a date movie.

In the first section of Hunger, we see the routines of two Republican prisoners and a guard. Their daily lives are tedious, violent, and dominated by bodily fluids. The guard often looks, rapt, at his bloody knuckles. He examines them when he smokes; he soaks them in hot water before and after his shifts. For the prisoners, their excretions are their last resort. They are years into the no wash protest, and their cell walls are thick with shit and blood. At a yelled signal, they all pour their collected urine under their doors into the H-Block hallways.

The genius of this painfully long, lovingly filmed portrayal of seeping misery is the contrast it creates with the second part of the movie: the 25-minute conversation between Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham). Without realizing it, I had adjusted to watching violence and putrefaction, and I felt the thrill you're supposed to have during the actiony bits of movies in the one scene where no one is hitting anyone else, where there are just two people talking in a room without sticky sights or sounds.

Sands has called the priest to the prison to talk about the impending hunger strike. They banter for a while, but then they get down to the business of arguing. Father Dom thinks Bobby is being crazy and destructive; Bobby thinks Dom doesn't get it on account of living a cushy life without shit on his walls. Although the scene's between a priest and a man about to embark on an act of pseudo-Christian martyrdom, the conversation's aggressively secular. They talk about the propaganda value of the hunger strike. They talk about attempting negotiations with the British government. When Sands asks, detached and skeptical, "God's gonna punish me?" Father Dom responds, "Well, if not just for the suicide, then he'd have to punish you for stupidity." It is a really good scene, you guys.

The talk ends, and the last section of the movie begins with a doctor describing how a hungry body shuts down. Then we see Sands starve. It's really, really brutal, and it feels really, really long (it's actually just under 20 minutes--shorter than the Father Dom scene). As Sands flickers out, we see his memory/vision of himself as a child in the countryside. I could have done without that. It's a callback to the end of his conversation with the priest, and it's not that sentimental, but it's still too sentimental for me. This movie's so tough to watch; I didn't want anything that felt like a relief from that. Little Bobby in the field felt to me like a lone distraction in an otherwise single-minded movie. Steve McQueen, the director, said in an interview that he "wanted to get out of that prison cell" and give "people a chance to breathe," but I didn't want a chance to breathe at minute 123 of this 125-minute beast.

Sands' exchange with the priest is definitely my favorite part of the movie. Not just because it is mercifully free of fecal sculpture and running sores, but because DAMN is that some acting and DAMN is that some writing. Fassbender and Cunningham perform this smart, emotional scene with passion and nuance. The intensity is amplified by the famous seventeen-minute take; for most of the scene, the two actors share the frame, the camera fixed, their profiles in shadow (see below). They're so expressive, but you don't see their faces very clearly. You feel the urgency and conviction in the words, their voices, and the tilt of their bodies.

(Look, I feel really weird about the tags for this: I don't want to rate it. Five stars, I guess? It is superbly put-together and made me have a lot of feelings, so I'm not sure what more I could ask. And while it fails the Bechdel test, so what, you know? Almost no one talks in this movie. There's one long conversation. Apart from that, you could count the intelligible lines on two hands--one hand if you don't count the audio clips of Margaret Thatcher.)

Frozen River (2008)

I'm going to make this one brief because I want to stop thinking about this movie as soon as possible. Look: it is a good movie. I am not criticizing its movieness. But it is just so sad.

It is too sad.

Okay, so here's this very sad movie, quickly: Ray (Melissa Leo) is fraying from her efforts to support herself and her two sons. Out of desperation (which desperation is painstakingly, lovingly depicted on screen), Ray resorts to smuggling Asian immigrants through an Indian reservation across the Canada-U.S. border. Her, um, partner in crime, I guess, is Lila (Misty Upham), a similarly miserable, trapped woman.

This is a feature-length trek through grinding poverty. It is not pleasant to watch. It is unremittingly bleak. Well, not quite unremittingly. There is a little bit of remitting. At the very end.

I mean, good job everyone involved. The acting's great: Leo is fucking ridiculous. It is such a good performance. If you know me, you know that I am deeply in love with Kate Winslet and was thrilled when she finally won her Oscar, but 1) she won it in the incorrect category (her role in The Reader was supporting) and 2) if she was gonna get stuck in Best Actress, she deserved to lose. Sorry, Kate Winslet; I still love you. But Melissa Leo breaks my heart as Ray.

Courtney Hunt, the writer-director, also deserves massive, massive credit, for, among other things, writing the character of Ray--one of the more richly developed roles I've seen in a long time. And if we're talking specifically about roles for women... shit, this is leaps and bounds ahead of everything else.

Okay, before I end this, I also want to mention the wonderful performances of Misty Upham as Lila and Charlie McDermott as Ray's teenage son T.J. When I finished watching this movie, I wondered what else McDermott had been in. Is he great in other things? Is he in other great things? Well, apparently he is a regular on The Middle, a show whose existence and success are as depressing as the plot of Frozen River.

El Espíritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) (1973)

Two things about this movie:
1. I did not understand it at all.
2. I loved it.

Six-year-old Ana (Ana Torrent) lives in a Castilian village in newly Francoist Spain. At/near the beginning of the movie, she sees James Whale's Frankenstein and is captivated by it. When she and her sister Isabel (Isabel Tellería) are laying in bed that night, Ana asks the older girl about the motives of the monster and the mob. She wants to know why violence happened--why the monster kills the girl, why the people kill the monster. Isabel doesn't know, but when Ana accuses her of ignorance, Isabel reacts by lying: the monster is alive, and he lives nearby!

You guys, this is great. The characters of Ana and Isabel are maybe my favorite depictions of childhood in any movie I've ever seen. (Plus, fun side effect of making two prepubescent girls the main characters: this film passes the Bechdel test so hard.)

Ana becomes preoccupied with the monster, whom she wants to befriend. And Isabel elaborates on her lie, of course. Here's how you summon the monster. Here's where the monster lives. Ana returns to the abandoned building--the monster's house--without her sister. She looks around, and you can see that she's hesitant, nearing skeptical. But she sees a footprint that's gargantuan in comparison with her own tiny foot, and an incredibly subtle change comes over her face. I got so excited in that moment. She's on the verge of knowing better, but she pulls back just in time.

Look, I could happily describe how each scene of this movie made me feel, but that would be ridiculous, so I'm just going to say that there's a lot of important, loaded stuff in this movie: mushrooms, loneliness, a Republican soldier, bees, a family in pieces. If symbolism were physically dense in the same way as celestial bodies, this movie would be a fucking neutron star. I'm often impatient with that sort of thing, but this time I was too busy being engrossed. And this movie--because it is really, really good--is 100% enjoyable even if you, like me, know nothing about fascism, Spain, or filmmaking. The acting, writing, and direction are as confident as they are understated; the cinematography (by Luis Cuadrado) and music (by Luis de Pablo) are flawless. If I recommend this movie any harder, I am going to pull a muscle.

El Espíritu de la Colmena could have been prescribed to me as medicine. When I watched it yesterday, I was so sad, and I needed something as sad as I was--but still undespairing. And frankly, I needed to see something that made me feel but didn't even try to make me understand.