Halle Berry burst into tears as she accepted a Golden Globe award in 2000 for her starring role in the HBO movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” a picture she had produced herself and fought for tirelessly. Starlets’ tears are always suspect, particularly at awards shows. Whenever a pretty actress sobs at the podium, she becomes an open target for both critics and the viewers at home: “She’s beautiful, she’s successful, she just won a prize,” the thinking goes. “What’s she got to cry about?”
People (a writer for Salon among them) criticized Berry for her tears and her speech, in which she said, “In just five seconds, by announcing my name, hopefully that burden of discrimination will be removed from me. This is for my inner struggle.” On its surface, that speech did seem self-serving or at least misguided. But what Berry’s critics didn’t take into account was that she was a black actress who had just won an award for playing an extremely talented black actress and singer, one who, after being touted as an up-and-coming star, had barely had a movie career and could never have won a major acting award of any kind.
In the 1950s, an era many of us consider ancient history at this point, Dorothy Dandridge tried hard to be a movie star and to reap all the concomitant awards: good roles, big money and top billing.
In 2002, black actresses are still trying.
Maybe you’d cry, too.
Black actors of both sexes have had their problems getting recognized for good work. Part of the problem, of course, is that African-Americans, who make up some 13 percent of the total U.S. population and about 25 percent of moviegoers, are sorely underrepresented in Hollywood, both on the screen and behind the scenes. Sidney Poitier, who will be given an honorary Oscar at this year’s awards, was the last black actor to win an Academy Award for best actor, for “Lilies of the Field” in 1963. (That was before we put a man on the moon, and think how long ago that seems.)
Simply put, though, there are more movie stars — actors who can carry top billing in a film — among contemporary black male actors than among their female counterparts. Denzel Washington, Will Smith and Eddie Murphy lead the pack; others, like Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Wesley Snipes, Chris Rock and Martin Lawrence are less luminary but are nonetheless instantly recognizable to most moviegoers.
But does anyone ever refer to “the new Angela Bassett movie”? Does anyone rush out to see new pictures featuring Regina King, Thandie Newton or Nia Long based on those actresses’ star power? Worse yet, how many moviegoers actually recognize those extraordinarily talented actresses when they see them? Those actresses and plenty of others remain below the radar of the average moviegoer in a way that Washington and his colleagues do not. In fact, Berry, nominated for an Academy Award this year for her performance in “Monster’s Ball,” is the first black actress in years to make that kind of mainstream impression. (Whoopi Goldberg, who won an Oscar in 1991 for her role in “Ghost,” is a peculiar exception; her reputation rests largely on comedy and she has rarely been allowed to express any kind of romantic or sexual presence on screen.)
There’s no shortage of terrific black actresses in Hollywood. So why do we have to look so hard to actually see them in the movies?
At this point I want to address any of you who think I’m simply being an apologist for minorities. Go ahead and accuse me of saying that actors of color should always win awards because of their race and regardless of the quality of their performances (I’m not), or of claiming that actors are always deliberately cheated out of awards purely because of their race (debatable, although not entirely dismissible). Please also feel free to accuse me of condescension: I am, after all, a white liberal making a special plea for a group to which I don’t belong.
The truth is that my reasons are purely selfish. The hardest thing about going to the movies for a living isn’t sitting through bad movies; it’s seeing good work go unrecognized. Anyone who genuinely loves movies and the actors who people them has at one time or another come across a performer and wished to see him or her in bigger, more challenging (or even just different) roles. A few years back, when I wrote about the sad state of contemporary romantic comedies, I offered a list of movie actors I’d like to see paired on-screen. I received several letters asking me specifically (and not belligerently) for more examples of black actors.
Those letters made me realize that many of us (myself included) are guilty of putting African-American actors in their own separate category: They’re perfectly acceptable as the stars of glossy, enjoyable comedies like “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” or “Two Can Play That Game” — pictures aimed specifically at black audiences — but we’re not clamoring to see them in “our” comedies. There’s no good reason for that other than cultural conditioning. And while cultural conditioning isn’t racism, it’s one of the elements that allow it to thrive.
It’s important to note that awards mean nothing more than recognition: They can be recognition for bad work that for some reason appeals to the award voters just as easily as for work that’s genuinely wonderful. But winning an award does raise an actor’s profile, at least for the moment. For that reason, a major award means something different when it’s given to an actor who’s a member of a racial minority. For better or worse, producers and casting agents pay attention to awards. Berry may not get better roles if she wins the Oscar (it hasn’t worked that way for Hilary Swank, after all). But getting a nomination is at least evidence that your colleagues know you exist, and it opens the door a bit wider for you and your contemporaries.
The question of why there are few good roles for black actresses is virtually irrelevant. A more significant question might be: How many roles in Hollywood movies actually need to be played by a white woman, and a white woman only? In a Scripps Howard News Service article written by Dave Mason earlier this year, actress Sherri Shepherd, who had a role in the short-lived TV show “Emeril” and has also made guest appearances on “Friends,” explained that there have been days when she’d have just one audition to go to, while the white actresses around her would grumble about having to go to two or three. “I wouldn’t say it’s discrimination,” Shepherd said in the article, referring to the shortage of work for black actresses. “They don’t think the part is for an African-American. For a lot of roles, the breakdown is for a white woman. They need to expand their thinking — maybe an Asian woman, maybe a black woman can play it.”
One problem is that there are so few people of color in positions of power in Hollywood. But raising that issue simply raises another question: Why should it take more black power brokers to raise the profile of black actresses? That only lets the existing white studio executives off the hook. Why should they need to have their arms twisted to consider a black actress for a role in which race is of no consequence?
The Hollywood power structure thinks it has a pretty good idea of what audiences will and won’t buy in a movie, and it believes that audience standards are fairly rigid and slow to change. But there’s no reason even the most conventional minds can’t be nudged into more daring territory. Thandie Newton was cast as the love interest opposite Tom Cruise in “M:I-2,” a casting choice that Cruise reportedly fought for, to his credit.
Whatever problems audiences may have with interracial romances on film are beside the point. (Very often, in fact, it’s black women who object most strongly to them, notably in situations where black men are depicted with white women.) At the very least, the romance in “M:I-2″ — which wasn’t presented as an interracial romance at all — recognizes that in life and in love, we don’t always match ourselves up along color lines. Now that one of America’s most white-bread movie stars has shown that he’s keenly aware of the racial inequities of Hollywood casting, what’s everybody else’s excuse?
Slowly but surely, we’re seeing more interracial romances in the movies, among them the relationship between Nia Long and Giovanni Ribisi in “Boiler Room” (in which the characters’ racial differences are never an issue) and that between Berry and Billy Bob Thornton in “Monster’s Ball” (in which the characters’ racial differences are the whole issue). But even if you view these depictions as small triumphs, they still continue to attract the wrong kind of attention, and from surprising sources. In his recent New Yorker review of Randall Kennedy’s book “Nigger,” the critic Hilton Als derides the interracial romance in “Monster’s Ball,” claiming that Berry plays “a white man’s idea of black female suffering — nothing too overwhelming or internal.”
Worse, though, is the way Als characterizes Berry’s features as “distinctly European.” In other words, she’s not black enough to count as an official black person. Perhaps he means that audiences would be too shocked by a relationship between a darker-skinned woman and a white man, and thus he believes Berry’s casting represents a failure of nerve. But that overly generous reading doesn’t even begin to answer the question of why Als himself (who is African-American) stoops to the thinly veiled bigotry of measuring degrees of blackness. If that’s his line of thinking, should Lena Horne be considered less black because racist men of the ’40s and ’50s found her skin light enough to be acceptable in the movies?
With friends like that, black actresses don’t need enemies. What they do need, as Shepherd noted, are not necessarily better parts for black women but writers, casting agents, directors and producers who recognize that a range of actresses (regardless of race) could play most parts.
But they also need those power players to pay attention to the roles black actresses have already played and to think of new ways to put them to work. Since the ’70s there have been too many such women who have proven their talent only to disappear, almost literally, into the ether. Actresses like Cicely Tyson (“Sounder”) and Lonette McKee (“Sparkle”) never had the careers they deserved. Their history kept repeating itself, with a succession of other actresses in the starring role, straight through the 1990s. Bassett’s portrayal of Tina Turner in the 1992 “What’s Love Got to Do with It” was one of the toughest and finest performances I saw by an actress in the ’90s. Although Bassett was nominated for an Academy Award (she lost to Holly Hunter for that actress’s one-note performance in “The Piano”), has acted regularly in the movies since then (most notably in “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”) and is uniformly terrific no matter what the role, she hasn’t landed nearly as many major parts as she deserves. She’s an actress on par with, say, Jessica Lange; but she never became the star that Lange was at her peak, nor has she earned as much critical attention.
Bassett is the most significant example of a great actress who’s been hurt by the color barrier. But if you consider that the movies have room for all kinds of white actresses — not just Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek and Michelle Pfeiffer, but also Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan — then why are there so few berths for black actresses? Regina King has superb comic timing, and she’s been wonderful in pictures like “Jerry Maguire,” “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” and “Down to Earth.” Newton brought as much depth and resonance to the throwaway “M:I-2″ as she did to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Besieged.” (Luckily, Jonathan Demme has cast her against Mark Wahlberg in his upcoming remake of “Charade.”)
Berry is a fine actress who may do better work yet if she hooks up with directors who know how to use understatement to shape a role: Her big scenes in both “Monster’s Ball” and “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge” are the weakest and most forced; but when she tosses it all off casually, she’s terrific. Most people remember her in the stinker “Swordfish” for her big topless scene; what I remember even more than those exquisite breasts is the way she brazenly (and, I think, knowingly) undercut the gratuitousness of that scene. The look on her face as Dominic Sena’s camera lingers on her is a blasi but sexy challenge; it says “Go ahead and look, if that’s all you’re interested in.” (It’s also an object lesson in what moviegoers miss when they don’t bother to read an actor’s expression.)
And what about the actresses who may not have the chops to carry off big, serious roles but whose good looks and charm might carry them a long way with movie audiences? In terms of raw talent, I wouldn’t put Vivica A. Fox (“Soul Food,” “Two Can Play That Game”) or Gabrielle Union (“Bring It On,” “Two Can Play That Game”) in the same league as Bassett or Berry. But they’re beautiful women who, at the very least, have a flirty, vivacious appeal.
And then there are actresses who are too talented for their own good — or, more specifically, who are too good at things Hollywood just doesn’t care about. Vanessa L. Williams is probably still most famous for being a dethroned Miss America (for many of us, that was the thing that actually made her cooler). She’s been a sparkling presence in pictures like “Eraser” (opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger) and “Dance With Me.” Even in smaller roles, she’s a smart, sensitive presence; she should have been poised to get better and better as an actress — if the roles had been there. What’s more, Williams looks sensational, with her apple cheekbones and ice-blue eyes, and can sing and dance to boot. (She’s about to open in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.”) Hollywood has no use for that kind of multifaceted talent; if only that mad genius Baz Luhrmann, one of the few working directors with the guts to attempt musicals, would dream up something for her to do.
There is also a long list of actresses who have shown promise even though they’re just getting started or who, even with a good handful of Hollywood roles under their belts, don’t seem to be getting the opportunities they should: I’d like to see more and better roles for Nia Long (“Boiler Room,” “Stigmata,”), Jada Pinkett Smith (“Ali”), Kerry Washington (“Save the Last Dance,” “Our Song”), Queen Latifah (“Living Out Loud”) and Kimberly Elise (“Beloved,” “John Q.”). I’m not much of a Destiny’s Child fan, but Beyoncé Knowles might be fun as the next Austin Powers girl. And although you’d think black actresses who specialize in comedy would have an easier time building a career (if Whoopi Goldberg’s success is any indication), I’m still wondering when average moviegoers are going to finally start noticing Wanda Sykes (“Pootie Tang” and “Down to Earth”), who takes broad comic conventions and stretches them into some pretty far-out territory.
We can’t really predict what’s to become of this underappreciated crop of actresses. There is evidence that things are changing for the better: Younger audiences, raised on hip-hop, are more receptive to movies that don’t walk strictly defined color lines. (The teen interracial-romance picture “Save the Last Dance” was a huge hit, bringing in more than $90 million at the box office.) Quentin Tarantino resuscitated the career of the fabulous Pam Grier with the 1997 “Jackie Brown,” creating a good starring role for a largely forgotten but deserving black actress. (Not to mention that Grier is a knockout reminder of how much sex appeal a 50-ish woman can have.) Tarantino didn’t cast Grier simply to make a political statement — he had always loved her work — but my guess is that he was also hoping to lead by example.
Hollywood is, unfortunately, slow to pick up on such subtleties. Last spring, People magazine published a report on the status of African-Americans in Hollywood. It was an update on a subject the magazine had first addressed in 1996, and while there have been a few encouraging signs of progress in the past five years, overall the picture wasn’t particularly heartening.
That’s partly because, to put it bluntly, the same old dunderheads are running the studios, and they show their true colors simply by opening their mouths. The People article noted that studios sometimes claim that movies featuring African-Americans tend not to do well in overseas markets, which is why less money is spent on them in the first place. (To give you a sense of the scale: Berry made $2.5 million for “Swordfish”; Julia Roberts was paid $20 million for “Erin Brockovich.”) The article quotes 20th Century Fox studio chairman Tom Rothman saying that African-American dramas like “Soul Food” are “too specific an American experience to be relatable to an international audience.”
Surely, that’s the voice of genius speaking. Everyone knows that only black Americans are interested in black Americans. (That purely black American art form, R&B, sure turned out to be a dud in other nations of the world, didn’t it?) Comments like Rothman’s are the purest example of the narrowness of mainstream Hollywood. Could you imagine the same argument being used to keep “Monsoon Wedding” out of American theaters?
My guess is that Rothman phrased his answer as he did because he can’t come right out and say that movies featuring black actors aren’t profitable — because it simply isn’t true. In its roundup of movie grosses for 2001, Film Comment includes “The Brothers” ($27 million) and “Two Can Play That Game” ($22 million) in the “hugely profitable” category for movies released by indie divisions of major studios. Among major studio releases, “Rush Hour 2″ ($226 million) and “Save the Last Dance” ($91 million) were also hugely profitable. And among independent releases, “O” ($16 million) was second only to “Memento” ($25.5 million).
So if the issue is profit in relation to cost, then the Hollywood power elite can’t claim that African-American actors can’t be cast for financial reasons. And there’s no excuse for them to be casting male actors in big movies but not women. Newton didn’t keep “M:I-2″ from being a big hit, and my guess is that Berry won’t hurt the next Bond movie, either.
To say that many of Hollywood’s most powerful players are guilty of narrow thinking is an all-too-kind understatement. Mostly, they’re not thinking at all. Lena Horne lost the role of the racially mixed Julie in the 1951 “Showboat” to Ava Gardner, who, in the eyes of the studio execs, fit the role just fine; all she needed was a slightly darker shade of Pan-Cake.
Fifty years later, no movie studio would dare such a move: Even the most boneheaded executive would recognize it as racially insensitive. But the invisibility of black actresses is a bigger and more elusive problem. If Hollywood is making movies strictly for so-called Middle America — for those steadily shrinking patches of the country where one has to drive for miles to encounter a person of color — then it’s not making movies for America at all. Studio execs may look at the numbers all day long. But they still don’t see who we are.
“Oslo, August 31st” is, as the title suggests, an evocation of one day in the Norwegian capital, as experienced by a troubled young man who’s facing the end of summer and the end of his youth. It’s a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward. While much of international art cinema can seem overly talky or conceptually alien to American viewers, this second feature film from Norwegian director Joachim Trier is a dynamic, even breathtaking visual experience without much dialogue or any philosophical heavy lifting, following the bony, handsome, exceedingly vulnerable Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) through coffee shops, nightclubs and bodies of water, en route to an ambiguous final destination.
I saw “Oslo, August 31st” last year at Cannes and found it powerfully affecting, but I never would have guessed that this small movie from a small country would have touched an international nerve the way it apparently has. In the wake of a breathless profile of doctor-turned-actor Lie and his supermodel wife, Iselin Steiro, in the New York Times’ style magazine — which made the film sound rather like a fashion accessory, or a handbook to Oslo architecture — I almost feel the need to dial back expectations a little. Yes, there are drugs and dance clubs and traveling shots but, honest to Pete, we’re not talking stylish, scenic, lovable hipster romp here, people. While “Oslo, August 31st” definitely has the dynamism and street-level energy of, say, an early Godard picture, and may indeed leave you eager to visit Norway, it’s first and foremost an intimate tragedy about a likable young man who has wandered off the path of life into some very dark woods, and isn’t necessarily finding his way back.
As in Trier’s equally wonderful first film, the 2006 “Reprise” — I’m pretty much the president of the cult on that one — the director is interested in exploring the existential dark side of Scandinavian social democracy, with its largely homogeneous character and devotion to equal opportunity. When I talked to Trier about that film, which featured Lie and Espen Klouman-Hoiner as a pair of arrogant, doomed aspiring novelists, he observed that in Norway “there are a lot of people with a lot of choices. It sounds wonderful but there’s a darker side to that. Lots of people are not dealing with those choices very well.” Anders in “Oslo, August 31st” is something like the worst-case outcome for Lie’s character in “Reprise”; he’s a guy from a loving, middle-class family who’s got looks, health, intelligence and education, but for unknowable reasons finds himself on the edge of middle age as a penniless, unemployable, supposedly recovering junkie.
Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt adapted their central premise from “Le Feu Follet,” a 1930s novella about alcoholism by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, but “Oslo, August 31st” could really be set anywhere at any time. It’s about the painful necessity of adapting to change, every single day that we’re alive, and if we identify with Anders even as we rage against his despair, it’s because every living human has at some point considered the possibility that it’s just too much and the struggle isn’t worth it. Anders is doing well in drug rehab, and has cautiously been granted a one-day leave to visit Oslo friends and apply for a job. But we can tell from the first moments of the film that his agenda is more complicated than that; Anders is in the position of a certain Danish prince, evaluating the reasons for being against the reasons for ceasing to be. (Trier, by the way, is cousin to another famous Dane, “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier, and one could argue their visions of the world are related as well.)
“Oslo, August 31st” runs a lean, mean 95 minutes, and not one second seems unimportant. Anders moves through the streets of Oslo looking for reasons to live and reasons to die, and even though we don’t know those streets as he does, we can tell that they’re haunted with memories and private agonies. The city is dotted with construction cranes and demolition sites, remorselessly regenerating itself while he appears to stand still. Indeed, Anders’ family home will soon be sold, and one of his personal missions is to pay a final visit. (The fluid, poetic cinematography is by Jakob Ihre.) He insults a prospective employer, refuses to make peace with his alienated sister, falls off the wagon — at first tentatively, and then enthusiastically — and leaves increasingly pathetic messages for his lost love, a woman who’s now in New York. (It’s the voice of Steiro, Lie’s real-life spouse.) On the other hand, he flirts with a younger girl who seems affectionate and charming, and who seems to open for him the promise of a new beginning. Their scene together at an Oslo swimming pool that has just closed for the season, so suggestive of both death and rebirth (and, literally, of baptism) is so gorgeous I wanted to cry. OK, I did cry, and that wasn’t the only time.
But none of that, not even the scenes where we feel that Anders is in imminent danger of taking his own life, are quite as painful as his visit with Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), an old friend and veteran of long literary discussions and booze-and-drug sessions. Thomas has a wife and a kid now, and his vices involve an occasional bottle of beer. In the manner of one-time bohemians who’ve more or less grown up, he’s kind of an ostentatious jerk about it — but then admits to Anders, when they’re alone, that he’s desperately unhappy. Perhaps that’s the “ordinary unhappiness” Freud wrote about, the unhappiness we all have to accept to get from the last day of August into the first day of September, in Oslo or anywhere else. But is that enough? Is that ever enough, for anybody? And can we forgive those who decide that it isn’t?
“Oslo, August 31st” opens this week at the IFC Center in New York, and June 1 at Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 in Los Angeles, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
All the details of Wes Anderson’s rapturous and hilarious mid-1960s New England summer romance “Moonrise Kingdom,” taken one at a time, are plausible. Indeed they are more than plausible; they’re perfect, from the fitted uniforms and yellow canvas tents of the troop of “Khaki Scouts” headed by cigarette-smoking Edward Norton to the achingly picturesque island home where the brood of children belonging to Bill Murray and Frances McDormand sit around listening to the Leonard Bernstein recording of “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” (I’m not going to bother questioning whether that record existed in 1965; some production intern probably spent half a day tracking down its history.)
Yet, as usual with an Anderson movie, this meticulous and convincing detail does not add up to realism but — depending on your perspective — to something either much less or much more than that. Something that could be described, and has been, in all kinds of ways: As fantasy or fairytale; as a whimsical miniature under glass; as a diorama created by a brilliant, obsessive-compulsive child. All reasonable descriptions, at least up to a point — and I’m on board for all of it. I’ve pretty much been on Anderson’s wavelength from Day One — or at least from “Rushmore,” which isn’t quite Day One. That’s not the same thing as saying that I think all his movies work equally well, or that he doesn’t occasionally lapse into laziness or self-indulgence. (I’ll have to give “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” another chance one of these days, but I feel pretty confident that was a misstep.)
I understand why Anderson’s films drive some viewers nuts, in fact, and I would simply respond that it should be clear by now that his vision of cinema and the world is idiosyncratic and not to everyone’s taste and that there’s no point sitting around hoping he’ll become more normal. But here’s what I reject completely: The idea that the artificiality or hyperrealism (a better word, I think) of Anderson’s worlds — which is admittedly cranked up pretty high here — is fundamentally pretentious and insincere, or that it reflects some kind of “kidult” refusal of grown-up emotion. Yes, Anderson’s principal subject, and arguably his only subject, is the collision between the emotional lives of adults and children and the paradoxical tragicomedy it can so often produce. But if Anderson’s adults yearn for the comparative simplicity of childhood while his children long for the big, important feelings they believe (wrongly) go with growing up, that in itself is a distinctly adult perspective.
“Moonrise Kingdom” takes place at the tail-end of summer — that season which is more charged with a rueful sense of passage than any other. Its preteen lovers, Sam and Suzy (played by newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, respectively), most certainly aspire to the grand passions of Tristan and Isolde or Abelard and Heloise, and it’s entirely possible they’ve heard of them. They first met backstage during a performance of Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” at the island of New Penzance’s only church, when Sam was in his Khaki Scout uniform and coonskin cap, and Suzy was wearing a bird costume. (The use of Britten, of all possible composers, as this film’s musical muse is wonderfully unlikely, and totally Andersonian.) After a hot and heavy epistolary romance, they conspire to run away together — as it happens (so we are told by on-screen narrator Bob Balaban), just three days before a major hurricane will hit New Penzance.
As irresistible as our young lovers are — Sam with his corncob pipe and camp-tested scouting skills, Suzy in her saddle shoes and with her dangerous pre-Lolita sexuality — this isn’t a movie about kids, and they are Potemkin protagonists. Against the certainty and clarity of the childhood world, we see the real heroes of New Penzance: Norton’s upright Scout Master Ward, who confesses his secret fears to a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the depths of the night; Bruce Willis’s Captain Sharp, the island’s only cop, who’s in love with Kara’s artsy, bespectacled mother, Laura (McDormand); Murray as the gentle, lawyerly Walt (Laura’s husband and Kara’s dad), who knows he is being cuckolded but can’t quite bring himself to do anything about it. All these lonely people are portrayed with wonderful delicacy and sensitivity, right in the middle of an artificial construction that contains plenty of shtick. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever seen Norton and Willis, in particular, be better than they are here.
Sam and Suzy’s tempestuous love affair, along with that looming act of God that’s boiling up out there in the Atlantic, will not merely bring all these people together but will give them an excuse to escape their everyday routine and their ingrained fears. In that sense, and in others too, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a deeply romantic film, perhaps the sweetest and most compassionate Anderson has ever made. What has evidently confused some viewers is the fact that it’s also an obsessively curated re-creation of an era that never quite existed, a meticulous storybook version of 1965 that’s more perfect than the original. In real life, Boy Scout tents of that era were made of canvas but were never yellow, and government social workers never wore Salvation Army-style uniforms, as Tilda Swinton’s officious character (whose only name appears to be “Social Services”) does here. And so on.
I suspect that people conflate the artificiality of Anderson’s movies with inauthenticity or insincerity (different things, to be sure) because his artificiality is obvious and worn on the surface, whereas the highly mannered films of, say, Martin Scorsese masquerade as realism. I’m not picking that example at random, by the way; Scorsese has identified Anderson as his favorite among younger American directors, I suspect because he sees a kindred spirit. The two men have very different aesthetics, but both are visionaries who see the world through a personal lens, and both are technical virtuosi concerned with managing every detail of their created universes. You’re free to prefer one director’s work to the other’s, of course, but “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas” are every bit as obsessed with style and production design as any Anderson film. (The cinematography in “Moonrise Kingdom” is by Robert D. Yeoman, who has shot all of Anderson’s live-action films. The production designer is Adam Stockhausen, the art director is Gerald Sullivan and the spectacular costumes are by Kasia Walicka-Maimone.)
To the extent that “Moonrise Kingdom” can be described as nostalgia, it isn’t personal nostalgia, since Anderson himself was not born until 1969. Very likely it’s an attempt to create a fantasy version of the lost world of his own parents. I wonder whether Scout Master Ward, when the magical summer of ’65 fades into memory, will get married, move to Texas and have a son. The island cabin of Walt and Laura feels like a creation out of a classic children’s novel, but it is imbued with the sadness of a failing adult marriage. In the third act, it feels like Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola get a little lost in plot shenanigans, and they introduce several extra characters (Jason Schwartzman, Harvey Keitel and Swinton all show up in small roles) to little effect. But all of “Moonrise Kingdom” — from Sam’s miniature stolen canoe to the Benjamin Britten excerpts to Captain Sharp’s heartbreaking bachelor trailer home — is a labor of love, as pure and sweet as the lovelorn letters of its young runaways. Wes Anderson can fool some people, maybe, but he’s not fooling me.
“Moonrise Kingdom” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.
It’s a general rule of thumb that a grown man doesn’t get a lot of support for knocking out a 10-year-old child’s teeth. But Yong Hyun Kim has won himself a few fans lately for doing just that.
Back on April 11, the 21-year-old Washington state man settled in with his girlfriend to enjoy “Titanic” in 3D — right in front of a boy known only in police documents as KJJ. What ensued led to a night in jail and a charge of second-degree assault.
According to the Associated Press, the boy, who was at the theater with three friends and his mother, says “they were watching the movie and talking when Kim told them to be quiet.” KJJ maintains that they settled down, but when he later whispered something to a companion, Kim “jumped over the seat, threw an iced drink at them and punched KJJ in the face.” He says Kim told him something like, “You know what, I paid a lot of money to see this movie.”
Kim, however, insists that the boys “were hitting him and his girlfriend with popcorn, running back and forth in the aisle and bumping him with their arms.” He says that when he confronted the group, “they started laughing at him,” provoking him to take a swing at the boy. “I got so mad that it just happened,” he told police, adding that he didn’t realize his tormentors were children. He now faces the possibility of up to nine months in jail. When police arrived at 10:40 p.m., they found the boy in the lobby “bleeding from the nose and missing a tooth.”
What really transpired that night is still under investigation. I do know that, as a parent, I would never take a group of 10 year olds out late on a school night to see Kate Winslet’s boobies. Nor would I, under any circumstances, let them talk through a movie, as KJJ himself admits he and his friends were doing. I’ve suffered through too many other families and that precise brand of self-centered behavior. And that’s why Kim’s assertion that a bunch of kids wouldn’t stop wrecking his movie-going experience has struck a powerful chord of recognition among moviegoers.
Among the online commenters horrified that an adult would physically assault a child instead of just getting a manager, there have been plenty of folks who seem to know exactly where the guy was coming from. On USA Today, commenters have called Kim “a hero” and even offered “to pay for the man’s defense.” The more level-headed commenters suggest he should have hit the parents instead. And on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s site, comments have been flooded by those who admit they’ve “wanted to do that” themselves and “understand the guy’s feeling behind it.”
As ticket prices skyrocket, the movie-going experience continues to deteriorate. If you’ve gone to a film lately – or for that matter, any public entertainment — you’ve likely experienced the astonishingly rude behavior of individuals who seem unaware that they’re not in their own living rooms. Texting. Talking. Kicking seats. It’s exasperating and sometimes outright experience-ruining. And we rarely get the satisfying experience I once had when a row of rowdy teens were talking and texting during the film and a patron with roughly the dimensions of the screen barreled over, leaned down and whispered something to the group. I don’t know what he said, but the kids all got up and left. When they did, there was a palpable exhalation of admiring relief in the theater. And when an Austin, Texas, woman was kicked out the Alamo Drafthouse last year for texting, the theater’s cheeky pride in her outrage promptly went viral.
It’s inexcusable to assault someone for being annoying or disruptive or even for laughing at you. Furthermore, Kim’s assertion that he couldn’t see how young the kids were – when he saw well enough to land a face punch — seems a little shaky. Don’t knock out little boys’ teeth. In fact, don’t knock out anybody’s if you can help it. If you applaud hitting kids, you’re probably a bad person. But the lesson here – whether you’re a child or a grownup — is pretty simple. If you don’t know how to behave in public and you don’t like losing teeth or going to jail, for God’s sake, just stick to Netflix.
Here’s a startling news item: “The Intouchables,” a lively if largely predictable Parisian comedy about a wealthy quadriplegic and his ne’er-do-well immigrant caretaker, has become the biggest international success in the history of French cinema. Indeed, according to some sources — and these things are notoriously difficult to measure on a global and historical scale — “The Intouchables” is now the biggest non-Anglophone film of all time, with a worldwide gross approaching $300 million.
But beyond the business headlines, what’s really fascinating about “The Intouchables” is the way it exposes the gulf in racial attitudes between France and the United States, along with another gulf that’s just as wide, the one that has film critics and cinephiles on one side and popular audiences on the other. Viewers in numerous countries have eagerly devoured this feel-good fable about two men of different races and classes who forge an improbable friendship (dubbed by some wags “Driving Monsieur Daisy”). While the audience for foreign-language film is inherently limited in America, there’s no reason to believe it won’t do well here also. At the same time, heated transatlantic debate has erupted over whether “The Intouchables” traffics in offensive racial stereotypes, with Variety critic Jay Weissberg writing an uncharacteristically angry review that accused the film of “Uncle Tom racism” and compared the Senegalese caretaker character to a “performing monkey.”
When Harvey Weinstein first acquired “The Intouchables” in the wake of its smash success in France, he clearly imagined another dark-horse Oscar contender, in the wake of “The Artist.” The film has racked up audience awards at film festival after film festival, and currently stands at No. 93 on IMDb’s user-generated “Top 250″ list. Omar Sy, the charismatic Afro-French actor who plays Driss, the caretaker, won this year’s César award (the French Oscar equivalent) for best actor, beating out actual Oscar winner Jean Dujardin. But with the looming possibility that “The Intouchables” could spark a divisive, soul-searching racial debate — which was precisely what squelched the Oscar hopes of “The Help” — those expectations have been downplayed. (That isn’t why “The Intouchables” is being released this week, with Weinstein and most of the film-biz aristocracy in Cannes, but the coincidence is oddly useful.)
Let me come clean right now and tell you that I enjoyed “The Intouchables” quite a bit. If you’re looking for a lightweight summer change of pace, with just a smidgen of Continental flair, here it is. Both Sy and co-star François Cluzet (of the hit thriller “Tell No One”) are marvelous, the former playing a guy who’s constantly in motion, both physically and psychologically, and the latter playing a depressed and repressed guy who literally can’t move, but whose real imprisonment has more to do with his spirit than his spinal cord. Don’t go expecting serious French art cinema, please; those who have described this movie as something like a mid-’80s Eddie Murphy comedy dressed up with classy Parisian settings are correct. But here’s the question, and I can’t answer it for you: Is that such a bad thing, in itself?
Once is not enough for a movie that’s made this much money, of course, and Weinstein already has an American remake in the works, possibly to star Colin Firth as stick-up-butt wheelchair dude. The real Eddie Murphy has gotten too old to play the loosey-goosey, pot-smoking sidekick, but there’s no shortage of guys who could do it: Jamie Foxx is the default setting these days, but I’d go for the suddenly hot Kevin Hart from “Think Like a Man.” I’m not claiming it’s aesthetically or sociologically valid to remake a French movie that already feels like a reheated Hollywood throwback, by the way. I’m saying it’s a cruel reality, like Dutch elm disease or Adam Sandler, and there’s no way to stop it.
To get back to the case at hand, I do understand what the haters find so offensive about “The Intouchables.” (The infelicitous English title, by the way, reflects the fact that they couldn’t really get away with calling it “The Untouchables,” could they?) I was pretty taken aback by Weissberg’s vituperative review, and I tend to believe that “Uncle Tom” is one of those expressions that white people should pretty much never use. On the other hand, I can only applaud him for abandoning the balanced, analytical mode of trade-magazine criticism and saying exactly what he damn well thinks. (As for comparing a black man to a monkey — well, I understand what Weissberg was getting at, but it’s an error of rhetoric, the sort of comment that makes nuance and context disappear.) And I know for sure, from hearing friends and acquaintances in and around the movie business complain about this film, that Weissberg is not alone.
I believe that Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the writing-directing duo who made “The Intouchables,” are innocent of any bad intentions. In fact, “innocent” isn’t a bad word overall, for this movie and the worldview it represents. The French may pride themselves on being the most worldly and sophisticated of all people, but the debate in France about race and immigration and multiculturalism — which ramped up sharply after the suburban riots of 2005 — can sometimes sound strikingly naive to American ears. Until very recently, mainstream French opinion has resisted thinking about the nation in anything except homogeneous terms, despite growing Arab and black minorities (both immigrant and native-born) and evident social problems with segregation and discrimination. (The French census, for instance, is prohibited from collecting data on race or religion, so no one really knows how many French people are black or Islamic.)
There can be no question that the characters in “The Intouchables” are stereotypes, in the broad sense. Cluzet’s character, Philippe, is an aristocratic zillionaire who lives in an astonishingly luxurious flat in central Paris. Since being injured in a paragliding accident, he’s lived inside a cocoon of money and privilege, surrounded by antiques and modern art and a bevy of assistants. Sy’s character, Driss, is easygoing, good-hearted, lustful and uncultured, and his passions run toward pretty girls, getting high and vintage American R&B. Philippe hires Driss specifically because Driss doesn’t particularly want the job — he only shows up to get a signature for his benefits card — and feels no pity for Philippe.
Which is actually a pretty good reason. You get where this is going, most likely: Driss is a pretty inept caretaker, at least at first, but is the only person Philippe knows who will relate to him man to man. There’s a bit of borderline-homophobic humor about their enforced intimacy; there are interludes with hookers and fast cars and late-night conversations fueled by booze and marijuana. Driss learns to like Mozart and modern art; Philippe learns to get down with Earth Wind & Fire and gets some valuable tips about chicks. It’s probably fair to summarize this movie as being the story of a paralyzed white man who needs the help of a younger, stronger, more virile black man to reconnect with his own masculinity, and if you want to say that narrative reflects an underlying latticework of racist attitudes, I won’t argue with you. Then there’s the complicating factor that in the real-life story on which “The Intouchables” is based, the caretaker was of Algerian origin, and hence Arab rather than black. (The filmmakers have said they wanted to cast Sy, and built the story around him, but it’s certainly possible to render other interpretations.)
But one can concede all of that while still agreeing with French historian and multicultural activist François Durpaire, who has responded to Weissberg by arguing that the huge success of “The Intouchables” is likely to have positive effects in Europe’s emerging discussion of race and culture, even if the movie relies on crude generalizations. (Durpaire adds that if “The Intouchables” is offensive, so were the “Beverly Hills Cop” movies.) Movies are not meant to be seminars in sociology, after all, and most viewers will receive “The Intouchables” as an upbeat story about two guys from vastly different circumstances who turn out to have a lot in common and help each other, etc., rather than a lesson in racial semiotics.
Perhaps the strongest endorsement for “The Intouchables” has come from aging French ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen, who has described it as an allegory about how the future of his nation depends on disenfranchised young immigrants from the suburbs. He thinks that’s a “dreadful” vision, mind you — but, seriously, who knew that guy was so smart?
“The Intouchables” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.
American men are bewildered about their place in the cosmos, or so we have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years. They don’t know whether to thread their eyebrows or wield a welding torch, and end up trying to do both at once (which is inadvisable). As comedian Adam Carolla laments in a scene from Morgan Spurlock’s documentary “Mansome,” the old-time certainties of gender identity have melted away: Women are flying fighter jets and men work at the hair salon; there are no longer “chick jobs and guy jobs.”
I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.
It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)
Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)
In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.
Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)
Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.
“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.
Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton in "Moonrise Kingdom" 
(Credit: iStockphoto/IBushuev) 
A still from "The Intouchables" 
Jack Passion in "Mansome" 
