Movie Muse

The second of a handful of planned city-themed vignette films about love, “New York, I Love You” aims to capture a city, its diverse population and theoretically how its people love. In 10 segments with some small transitional scenes, 10 directors attempt to capture a piece of the Big Apple — but the operative word here is “attempt.” Some do, some don’t and all the stuff that tries to blend them together is confusing. It’s very good for the most part individually, but “New York, I Love You” comes up flat on the whole. Read the rest of this entry »

Does the independent drama have a formula? “Sunshine Cleaning” is a touching family/relationship drama with a great cast, but there’s also something incredibly familiar about it. For instance, there’s Amy Adams as Rose, a former high school cheerleader now a single mom without a steady paycheck having an affair with a married man (Steve Zahn). What I mean is, Rose Lorkowski is the prototype of the indie protagonist; she’s a lower- middle-class working woman with a boatload of personal issues. As far as independent film characters go, she can get in line, but the difference is clearly the charm of Adams. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been tons of films that depict addictive drug abuse, but no film does it quite like Darren Aronofsky in “Requiem for a Dream,” using camera techniques to mess with your mind and visually drive you insane, much like the characters of the film spiral into drug-induced oblivion. The film is not particularly insightful — it is an independent film — whose goal is clearly to make a film that shows drug abuse in a way never done before.

“Requiem” follows essentially four characters whose lives go south because of drugs. There is Harry (Leto) and Tyrone (Wayans), two junkies who turn to selling dope to make a living, Marion (Connelly), Harry’s girlfriend who will do anything for cocaine, and Sara, Harry’s mother, an older, widowed woman who gets selected to be on TV and begins to take pills to suppress her appetite so that she can wear her favorite dress on air. Sara’s story is the most jarring and unique to movie plots and therefore feels distanced from the others, but the technique is what matters in “Requiem” more so than the story itself.

This is Aronofsky’s film from beginning to end. Numerous camera techniques are employed, particularly rapid sequences of close-ups when the characters are doing their drugs of choice. In addition, Aronofsky uses camera mounts on characters at times and even security cameras to capture some scenes in Sara’s storyline. Aronofsky also does various slow downs and speed ups, white fades and more in the editing process that continue to inject director presence into the material. He really experiments with everything with varying degrees of success. 

What makes Aronofsky’s work so great, however, is not the techniques themselves, but how they are allegorical for drug addiction. He feeds them to us in steady and unobtrusive doses at first with the rapid close-ups for the first hour of the film, then as things start to go out of control in the plot, we get more and more abrupt changes in our viewing of the film from camera angles to the edits. It’s brilliant because you can easily enjoy the beginning of the film, but by the end you feel really disturbed by everything and it all happens so quickly. Aronofsky actually psychologically messes with you, successfully.

Other praise for this film goes mostly to Ellen Burstyn as Sara. She’s hauntingly brilliant in showing the gradual turn to insanity. A much deserved Oscar nomination. Leto and Connelly are also good, but this movie is more about how Aronofsky makes them appear rather than how they act.

“Requiem” is really an art film, not a Hollywood-friendly drug movie about the dangers of drugs, but an experiment with the human mind and its ability to be altered by fine director craftsmanship. While there’s no true catharsis in the film, it’s a movie-watching experience in its own little category by itself and worthy of a try if you’re in the mood for something radical.

For yet another indie relationship drama without a straightforward plot and more than one central character, David Gordon Green makes something of a quiet masterpiece out of “Snow Angels,” based on the 1994 book by Stewart O’Nan. Although the film begins with us overhearing two gun shots and then backing up to show us their origin, “Snow Angels” takes a long time to develop its conflict, which puts pressure on Green to keep our attention. He does so fairly well, using convincing realism to set his characters and audience up for the tragedy that follows.

Green, whose previous credits are also of the independent tragedy vein, has a way of self- referencing the story through visuals that interconnect the film’s many sub-plots. Taking place in a small town where it’s incredibly cold (it’s snowing during football season), a high school student named Arthur (Michael Angarano) deals with his parents’ separation and the new girl, Lila, (Olivia Thirlby) who he doesn’t realize is completely into him. In the Chinese restaurant where he works, his former babysitter Annie (Kate Beckinsale) is living the tough life of a single mother whose ex (Sam Rockwell) is a born-again Christian battling a drinking problem that wants to get his family back together.

The stories connect structurally in that they both deal with divided families, but one really admirable quality about it is that Green will take an image or something that a character talks about in one sub-plot and manifest it in another. In one scene, Arthur talks about using his mother’s hand mirror when he was younger to peep under the door when Annie was babysitting him and taking a shower. Later, Rockwell’s character Glenn is seen holding a hand mirror.

This technique really helps unify the story in a way that the plot never really does. “Snow Angels” is collectively about the familial ideal, of wanting things in love and family to work out and trying to make amends for the mistakes that harm it while battling one’s own personal feelings and desires. The drama comes from the Annie-Glenn story line and that’s supposed to influence how we think about what’s going on with Arthur and his family and his girlfriend, which is the more realistic and conflict-free part of the story.

There’s also a good deal of pressure on the actors when the conflict is really only coming from one source in a multi-plot story. Angarano and Thirlby play wonderful innocent kids falling for each other, but the true talent in the film is Rockwell. His character is the most troubled and the most complex, the one who really drives the conflict by not leaving Annie and their young daughter alone and trying to fight Annie’s new boyfriend. He convinces you that he’s worthy of a second chance, but then fails to meet your expectations. It’s a role that requires him to be completely committed to a flawed point of view and Rockwell nails it.

Films without focused and attention-grabbing plots don’t often get bonus points, but Green wins about as much of them there are for drawing out some important questions and meaning from the relationship drama of the film. The realism with which he portrays these characters, their softness and fragility, makes them intriguing enough for us to watch carefully so we can understand what it is that really makes their story a tragedy.