In Spike Jonze’s film “Adaptation,” screenwriter Charlie Kaufman writes himself — or, rather, a version of himself — into his own screenplay. The movie’s Charlie Kaufman, like the real Charlie Kaufman, has been trying to write a movie treatment of Susan Orlean’s book, “The Orchid Thief,” and has found himself stymied at every turn. He deems the book unadaptable, too oblique to be shaped into a motion picture. So the movie’s Charlie Kaufman writes himself into the drama of Orlean’s story as a way of ruminating on the sorry lot of writers and their flailing, pathetic, ostensibly moving attempts to capture anything real and true.
Brilliant! Original! Genre-busting! “Adaptation” is a movie whose blurbology is written into its DNA, even as it proves to us, over and over again, how winkingly aware it is that every aspect of the movie business, from the ministrations of ass-kissing development execs to the false approbation of critics’ blurbs, is meaningless. But there’s one very meaningful blurb that could be applied to “Adaptation,” one that wouldn’t help sell it to audiences (wouldn’t want that, would we, Messrs. Kaufman and Jonze?) but that would chop straight to the core of what “Adaptation” is, and what it’s proud of being.
Cowardly!
But you won’t see that in any newspaper ad.
“Adaptation,” with its gee-whillikers approach to the bloody hard work of making art, may pretend to be unassuming, but it’s fully cognizant of the power it dangles over its audience. Self-referential to the extreme, it’s the most meta of meta-movies. You might call it meta-macho. If you’re not meta enough to see how meta “Adaptation” is, then you clearly haven’t spent enough time, as Kaufman and Jonze have, examining the unexaminable. (You’re probably the type of person who still uses the word “postmodern.”)
And if you’re so meta that you’re completely unimpressed with how meta it is, then you’re only reinforcing the movie’s point: You’ve become so meta-consumed by metaculture that you’re no longer able to take pleasure in art, to laugh at your own foibles, to appreciate true brilliance (that is, the brilliance of Kaufman and Jones). Meanwhile, “Adaptation” is a movie that eats itself whole and leaves the audience with nothing, and we’re supposed to go home happily, clutching our little souvenir naughts as if they actually added up to something.
But just for kicks, let’s do something adamantly un-meta and put “Adaptation” in context — specifically, in the context of the unusually large number of fine, or at least interesting, movies that have been adapted from books, short stories or plays this year. That list includes (but isn’t limited to) the Weitz brothers’ “About a Boy,” Neil LaBute’s “Possession,” Lynne Ramsay’s “Morvern Callar,” Steven Shainberg’s “Secretary,” Phillip Noyce’s “The Quiet American,” Clare Peploe’s “Triumph of Love,” Michael Apted’s “Enigma,” Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” and Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris.”
There’s also a secondary list of movie adaptations that don’t work — “Nicholas Nickleby” and “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” for example — but that at the very least show an awareness on the filmmaker’s part of what it means to turn words into movies. In a year when so many filmmakers struggled, successfully or otherwise, with what it means to translate a book to film, Kaufman and Jonze took the easy way out, choosing instead to make a cheap in-joke that pretends in only the most cursory way to wrestle with the notion of what it means to infuse a movie with beauty and meaning.
“Adaptation” wheedles the audience into its confidence, urging us to congratulate ourselves for being hip enough to get the message. The movie’s Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) wrings his hands over the kind of movie he doesn’t want to write: One with a character arc, with car chases, with gratuitous or, it seems, any other kind of sex. (There’s sex in “Adaptation,” but it’s not particularly sexy — in this movie as well as their first, “Being John Malkovich,” Jonze and Kaufman don’t bother with sex much at all. They’re like frat boys who just want to get it over with.)
The movie’s Charlie Kaufman is frumpy, balding and awkward, with a propensity for beating off, though when it comes to the movies he writes, he sure is principled. Yet he’s not challenging the audience to understand him, but to pat itself on the back for grasping how he can’t possibly harness his talents in the service of that harsh, tarted-up mistress we call Hollywood. We commend him for not being a whore, for refusing to play the game.
Although the movie’s Charlie Kaufman isn’t the real Charlie Kaufman, he’s obviously being used as a mouthpiece for something the real Kaufman struggles with. But for all his self-involved hand-wringing, has the real Kaufman actually told a story that we care about, one that serves its characters above all? Or has he told one that is simply designed to flatter us? The refusal of Kaufman (the real one or the meta one) to bow to stupid Hollywood standards is both a kind of withdrawal and an avowal of superiority. The unspoken message seems to be: “Leave it to hacks like David Lean and John Huston to actually do the work of bringing books to the screen.” Jonze and Kaufman are too good for it, and “Adaptation” is their assertion that the most interesting movie they could possibly make is one that’s all about them.
Plenty of people have written passionately about the impossibility of bringing books to the screen, because it is, pure and simple, an impossibility. If we set out to judge an adaptation by how closely it approximates the visions that an author has already coaxed to life in our own imaginations, we’re bound to be disappointed: Filmmakers aren’t, and shouldn’t have to be, mind-readers.
So it’s easier, and more useful, to talk about the ways in which a movie adaptation is spiritually faithful to its source material. As the critic Robin Wood has said, himself apologizing for stating such a simple truth, “Literature is literature. Film is film.” He goes on to say that there is no such thing as a faithful adaptation, since “the greatness of [great literature] resides in the writer’s grasp of the potentialities of language” — subtleties that can’t be reproduced in film.
But Wood doesn’t elevate literature above film, or vice versa. “The notion of the faithful adaptation is equally insulting to film,” he writes. “It implies that film is the inferior art, and should be content (or even proud) to reproduce precisely what it can never hope to reproduce: the movement of the author’s words on paper. The filmmaker has every right to take what s/he wants from a novel (be it Mickey Spillane or Tolstoy), and make of it whatever suits her or his interests.”
“Adaptation” exercises those rights to the breaking point. Kaufman has decided he’s the most interesting thing about Orlean’s book, and he proceeds accordingly. While the movie’s Charlie Kaufman pretends to be enthralled by Orlean’s story, and even compassionately curious about her as a person, her story ends up melting away by the end of the movie, subsumed by his own neuroses.
The character of Orlean (as opposed to the real person Orlean), played by Meryl Streep, is a journalist who suddenly realizes she doesn’t feel passionately about anything; she has written a book, “The Orchid Thief,” about John LaRoche (Chris Cooper), a rare-orchid enthusiast in Florida who has gotten himself in trouble with the law for poaching rare specimens from the local swampland. But he loves these flowers; his intent is to protect them more than to profit from them. Kaufman doesn’t know what to make of LaRoche’s story as it has been told in Orlean’s book. He’s further frustrated by the fact that his layabout twin brother, Donald, has just sold a flashy screenplay that revels in all the elements (sex, car chases) Charlie has refused to use himself.
Donald is Charlie’s invention, of course, a way for him to acknowledge that he does have baser instincts without having to take responsibility for them. By the movie’s end, Charlie has become Donald as well, a kind of superscreenwriter for the new millennium — principled, but with a knack for what will sell. He’s going to do just fine for himself.
But what about us? “Adaptation” doesn’t offer us a real story, just a bloated thesis. The movie doesn’t reach out to anything or anyone; it’s most interested in its own pinched vision. The movie’s Band-Aid subtheme — the thing that gives its title a double meaning — is that human beings must adapt in order to grow. Life changes us a bit day by day, and we need to recognize those changes and act accordingly.
What a lofty and resonant idea! It may also be one of the greatest ass-saving constructs in the history of movies — a faux-grand concept that dazzles people enough to keep them from catching on to how completely self-indulgent “Adaptation” is.
If taking the time and care to adapt a movie into a script is such torture, then why have so many people pulled it off so well just in the past year, with barely a complaint? Strangely enough, one of the recent movies that made me angriest about “Adaptation” was one I didn’t even like: Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” is an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that connects the lives of two women (one in the present day and one in the 1950s) with that of Virginia Woolf, and also with one of her best-loved books, “Mrs. Dalloway.” Cunningham’s novel is a complex interlacing of motifs, structurally impressive but thematically dopey: It’s all about women finding themselves, as Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway did, in the smallest, most fractional moments of their lives.
Many people have been struck by the novel’s depth and beauty, but I couldn’t help seeing it as a hyperintellectualized and artsified version of those old “Calgon, take me away!” ads — a well-intentioned, sensitive scrutiny of how hard women’s lives are, and what dangerously misunderstood creatures they can be, but one that fixates on the molecules of pain and suffering and joy that constitute those lives instead of actually developing characters.
But say what you want about it: In movie terms, “The Hours” would seem to be a wholly unadaptable book. Daldry’s film version — the script is by David Hare — takes itself very seriously, to the point that Daldry loads every moment with equal weight. Since everything is weighed equally, “The Hours” has no real rhythm — it’s loaded with more stones than poor Virginia’s pockets when she wades into that river at the end of her life. The camera will shift from an actress’s face to the sight of an egg being cracked against a bowl, accompanied by a sharp smacking sound. Over and over again, a camera movement or a sound will demand our attention: We are commanded to note the importance of that breaking egg! In “The Hours,” eggs are broken in the late teens, the early ’50s, and the year 2000 — a symbol of the fragility of women’s lives dashed against the constraints of society, I suppose.
“The Hours” has its problems as a piece of filmmaking. But it’s impossible to ignore the obvious care Daldry and Hare took in shaping this most unruly book into a picture whose seemingly wayward narratives interlock into a seamless story. (In fact, Daldry and Hare may have improved on the structure of Cunningham’s book; a fellow critic who didn’t much care for the movie nonetheless admitted that its careful construction made him more critical of the novel.)
An even more stunning example of translating a strange and subtle book to film is Lynne Ramsay’s soon-to-be-released movie version of Scottish novelist Alan Warner’s “Morvern Callar.” In “Morvern Callar,” a young Scottish woman (played by the astonishing Samantha Morton) deals with her boyfriend’s suicide by not dealing with it. Morton goes about her business — going to her dull job at the supermarket, going out to dance clubs with her best friend — as if her boyfriend’s lifeless body weren’t cluttering up her flat.
Everything Morvern feels is suggested, not spelled out. Warner’s book is bizarre and wonderful; there’s a vaguely hopeful fierceness to it, but mostly it’s a hymn to the strange process of riding out grief and melancholy. Ramsay’s movie (she and Liana Dognini adapted the book) is equally elliptical and suggestive — it doesn’t so much tell a story as lay out the shifting colors of mood beneath that story. It’s one of the most beautiful examples of a novel turned into film I’ve seen in years.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
The only people who really know what it’s like to adapt a book into a movie are the people who have done it. But I imagine it takes a measure of self-effacement: Your mission is to use your instincts and your intellect to decide what should stay, what should go and how it all should be reshaped and dramatized, but you must all the while put yourself in the service of the work at hand. Done right, it’s a peculiar sort of master craftsmanship: You’re using someone else’s raw materials to create something that is mostly them, but will of course also be a little bit you.
There are plenty of people who disliked Neil LaBute’s version of A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” claiming (among other things) that it destroyed the essence of the book by making one of its lead characters American instead of English, and that it sliced out major chunks of Byatt’s artistry — for one thing, the heaps of poetry. The poetry in Byatt’s novel is pitch-perfect, the ultimate mimicry of Victorian-era verse. It’s astonishingly clever at first, but before long comes off as mostly a stunt.
Of course, including poetry in movies is extremely difficult, since it usually demands that a filmmaker use the dreaded voice-over. But even beyond that, LaBute’s “Possession” represents a range of choices on the filmmaker’s part (he co-adapted the book, along with David Henry Hwang and Laura Jones), some of them personal and some of them purely cinematic. Roland Michell, the character who was changed from English to American for the movie (played by Aaron Eckhart), is a better character for the movie because of it.
Making Roland an American intensifies the dynamic between him and the passionate but restrained British professor played by Gwyneth Paltrow. As Byatt wrote Roland, he was passive to the point of being recessive. (Byatt herself told LaBute that, as she’d written him, Roland wouldn’t work as a movie character; he’d be too much of a drip.) Roland, as LaBute has reimagined him, still has some of those low-key characteristics — he is a relatively quiet, polite American, after all, and like Roland, he’s a genuinely passionate academic.
But we know that, deep down at least, he has an American’s innate brashness (brash as far as the English are concerned, that is). His staunchly American qualities give Paltrow’s character, who is sometimes a bit scary in her resoluteness, more to stand up to; they heighten the challenge. She and Roland are foreign to one another in more ways than one, but they connect across that chasm.
Even though movies are never a replacement for the written word, there are times when a film version of a book is sharper than the book itself. Nick Hornby’s “About a Boy” was highly entertaining, but it also seemed a bit shambling and aimless. The screenplay adaptation (by Paul and Chris Weitz and Peter Hedges) gave the story more drive and momentum. There are cases, too, when an adaptation is a different creature altogether. Erin Cressida Wilson’s screenplay for “Secretary” took a very short and very pointed story by Mary Gaitskill, about a young woman who discovers she has a predilection for being spanked, and elongated it in some places and rounded it out in others. “Secretary” the movie is a sexual fairytale about love between misfits; Gaitskill’s story is darker and less expansive, but startlingly direct. Director Steven Shainberg took some liberties with the tone of the story, but he understood Gaitskill’s essential notion that there are certain kinds of understanding between people that can’t be spelled out or neatly corralled.
It’s doubtful that the process of turning a movie into a book is ever easy: If you mapped the screenwriter’s psychic trail from beginning to end, it would most likely be a bloody one, dotted with huge crimson splotches where seemingly essential scenes or wonderful exchanges that just didn’t fit had to be excised ruthlessly. And then there are the ghosts of the books that were adapted badly: Think of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Dreamnovel” howling across the plains, misunderstood and forlorn, having been botched by Stanley Kubrick in “Eyes Wide Shut.”
So where does that leave Susan Orlean’s “Adaptation” — a book that obviously means something to Orlean and to the many people who read and enjoyed it? In interviews Orlean has claimed to be happy with the movie. And the reality is, she sold the book and accepted that it was out of her hands. But I still wonder what, in her heart of hearts, she thinks of what Kaufman has done with her book. I didn’t write “The Orchid Thief” — heck, I didn’t even read the whole thing — and even I feel somewhat protective of it. What does it mean when a book’s essence becomes subsumed by a screenwriter who thinks his insecurities are more interesting than anything another writer has come up with?
And what should we make of a screenwriter who thinks so much about the process of making something that he only drains himself of the energy to actually make it? Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt” — itself an adaptation of an Alberto Moravia novel — begins with a credit sequence in which, in voiceover, Godard introduces his actors, his cinematographer, his screenwriter and, last and most humbly, himself. Occurring even before the movie has begun, it’s one of the movie’s most touching moments — touching because it reminds us that a human being made this movie. It’s a careful arrangement of choices, a nonmathematical formula of thought and feeling that he hopes against hope will add up to something.
On the face of it, it may seem as if Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze are doing something in “Adaptation” that’s similar to that credit sequence — breaking down that barrier between the people who’ve made a movie and the people who sit in the audience watching it. But they’re essentially throwing up a different kind of barrier between filmmakers and audiences. They’re using their smug gimmickry to distance us from our deepest emotions rather than lead us straight into battle with them. Kaufman the beleaguered screenwriter is the star of the show, and its hero. He wants every civilian out there to know that writing, like war, is hell. He should tell it to the Marines. Or maybe he should just tell it to Susan Orlean.
“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.
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" 
