Joss Whedon’s feature-film debut, the science-fiction western “Serenity,” is beautifully made, written with more wit and intelligence than we get from most contemporary movies of any genre, and features an ensemble of actors whose rhythms are almost supernaturally in tune. There’s only one problem with “Serenity”: It’s not “Firefly,” the TV show that first gave these characters, and this story, life in autumn 2002 on the Fox network.
Both “Firefly” (which is available on DVD) and this new movie incarnation of it detail the adventures and tribulations of a loner-rebel named Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and the ragtag crew of his space vessel, Serenity. Their story unfolds in a future world — the 26th century, to be exact — in which humans have left an uninhabitable earth to populate a new-old, way-out-there solar system. More Sam Peckinpah than “Star Trek,” this isn’t a shiny, sleek vision of the future: For one thing, the various planets in this new world have been recently divided by a brutal civil war, and the winning side — the Alliance — is now trying to gather all the outlying hoi polloi planets under its rule. Many of these planets are hardscrabble frontiers whose citizens still ride horses, use old-time firearms, and even, occasionally, wear sunbonnets. The idea isn’t just that civilization as we know it has largely disappeared, but that people have been so buffeted by hardship that they’ve had to start practically from scratch.
The “Firefly” episodes burn slowly at first, but their emotional heat intensifies as you learn to live, and breathe, with the show’s characters. That’s an ancient narrative strategy, and one that Whedon had clearly mastered with his earlier series, the magnificent “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its less resonant but still deeply enjoyable spinoff, “Angel.” But apparently, this newfangled mode of storytelling intimidated Fox executives. They pulled the plug on “Firefly” after airing only 10 of the 14 episodes Whedon and his cast had completed — and broadcasting them out of sequence. “Firefly” was seen by almost no one when it aired, partly because even those who desperately wanted to watch it — namely, the many fans Whedon had earned with his previous series — couldn’t even find it when they turned on their TVs at the appointed time: The episodes were shown in fits and starts, several of them having been preempted by the World Series.
That’s probably the worst thing you could do to a Whedon show, considering that he builds his narratives with the dramatic precision of 19th century novels. They don’t always grab you with the first episode — they’re not made that way. Whedon prefers to reel us in gently, first setting the scene and then, week by week, drawing us into a web of complex character relationships that become a kind of home for us. Fans of Whedon’s shows are the modern-day equivalents of those readers who so long ago got hooked on Dickens, people who would wait on American docks for the next installments of his newspaper serials to arrive on these Godforsaken shores. (Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson recounts how “waiting crowds at a New York pier shouted to an incoming vessel, ‘Is Little Nell dead?’”)
That’s how it should have worked with “Firefly.” The show finally did find its audience when it was released on DVD in late 2003, and Whedon, who had never given up on the show and its extraordinarily well-matched cast, sought ways to spin its posthumous success into another project. And almost against all odds, a major movie studio, Universal, put its money (perhaps not a whole lot, but enough) on a show that had earned lots of love but not a whole lot of cash.
“Serenity” — which Whedon wrote as well as directed — is both a primer on “Firefly” and an extension of it, a picture carefully calibrated to satisfy fans without leaving newcomers stranded. Whedon sets up the back story neatly at the beginning, introducing all of his characters in a few fleet scenes. Their dialogue comes off as casual, but it’s really tightly scripted, a compressed guidebook to who these people are and how they relate to one another: Mal, a veteran army captain from the losing side of that devastating civil war, now roams the postwar universe in an old jalopy of an interplanetary craft he bought, refurbished and peopled with a loyal crew.
Serenity is a transport ship, a flying crate loaded with nooks and crannies, the better to hide the smuggled, and sometimes stolen, goods from which Mal and crew make their money; she’s fast and scrappy, but not exactly state-of-the-art — there are always bits falling off her, or engine parts that wear out and need replacing. But for Mal and his core crew — including country-girl mechanic Kaylee (Jewel Staite), who understands that machines have souls; weapons expert Jayne (Adam Baldwin), a gun for hire whose brawn sometimes crowds out his brain; a pilot, the good-natured, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Wash (Alan Tudyk); and Mal’s second in command, Zoe (the extraordinary Gina Torres), a curvaceous warrior who redefines womanliness as if it were a newly discovered muscle — Serenity represents freedom, a place where there’s no authority to answer to as long as this bunch can keep those pesky Alliance ships off their tails.
Mal and his crew roam the universe — they call it “the ‘verse” for short — in search of odd jobs and easy money, bending the rules when necessary but, in best outlaw tradition, always hewing to a code of honor. And along the way they pick up various travelers who also become part of the ship’s life: Shepherd Book (Ron Glass), a man of the cloth with a shadowy past; the regal Inara (Morena Baccarin), who plies her trade as a “companion,” essentially a cultured and highly respected futuristic courtesan, from a Serenity shuttle she rents from Mal; and Simon (Sean Maher), a young doctor who has smuggled his even younger sister, River (Summer Glau), aboard Serenity, after having rescued her from unscrupulous Alliance authorities.
Summer is a weirdo teen in wispy dresses, both a fragile presence and a strong one. She’s also, unfortunately, a schizophrenic mess: Through a series of horrible experiments, the Alliance has been exploiting her extraordinary intelligence and psychic abilities for their own nefarious purposes, and they’re desperate to get her back.
“Serenity” introduces two characters who didn’t appear on the show: The first is a creepily dignified Alliance zealot known only as “the Operative” (played, with Shakespearean elegance, by Chiwetel Ejiofor), who has taken it as his personal mandate to find and kill River. The second is an interplanetary media geek who goes by the humble nickname Mr. Universe (the expressively eyebrowed David Krumholtz), who plays an instrumental role in the increasingly weighty mission that the Serenity crew undertakes.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with Whedon’s means and methods knows that “Serenity” is only partly about a bunch of colorful characters flying around and exploring new worlds. “Serenity,” like “Firefly” (and like “Buffy” and “Angel” before it), is an exploration of the meaning of community, maybe even the meaning of democracy. (Is Serenity a metaphor for our own country — a falling-apart vehicle that we love to bits and steer as well as we can, desperately trying to protect it from the creeps who don’t even understand how to drive it, much less understand how it actually works?) And there are spiritual quests in “Serenity” that go much deeper, and are far more unsettling, than the mere question of whether or not God exists. There are moments in which good men do unspeakable things, and malevolent men do noble things. And characters we care very much about are allowed to die.
“Serenity” has everything going for it: Whedon has a cinematic eye, and to help make his vision work on the big screen he’s enlisted frequent Clint Eastwood collaborator Jack Green as his cinematographer. Even though this is a space-adventure story, the most intense action takes place within the deep space of the Serenity itself, and Whedon and Green capture both the coziness and the unknowability of the ship — this is a place where something can always go wrong, and yet the haven of its common area is a constant: It’s a nook furnished, like a student apartment, with 20th century castoffs like patterned shag rugs and tacky mustard-leather couches. The big screen also reveals details of Serenity that aren’t so apparent on the small one: We see how the whole thing is jury-rigged with old cables and bits of tubing, held together with soldered globs of metal and, possibly, duct tape; the stenciled words “Resealable container, do not destroy” are clearly readable on a big metal canister.
“Serenity” is a trim little picture of epic proportions. The combat sequences are brutal and ingenious, and many of them feature River, who, it turns out, possesses special skills beyond her psychic ability: She’s a balletic nymphowarrior capable of taking on the most ruthless inhabitants of the ‘verse, a tribe of cannibal-rapists known as the Reavers. (The movie’s climax includes an unforgettable image of this petite powerhouse silhouetted in a doorway, wielding a giant blade in each hand; it’s a noble image in itself and also a nod to Whedon’s first great heroine, Buffy Summers.)
Violence isn’t an abstraction for Whedon. But even though his characters, male and female, get tossed around — a lot — he never presents violence for our delectation. When the Operative hurls Inara, a seemingly delicate creature who’s actually capable of matching wits with generals, against a wall, we feel it in our own bones. This isn’t violence against women presented for kicks. It serves a purpose beyond the moment, and it also sets up a spectacular rejoinder, a way for Inara to assert her dignity over any pathetic creep who would dare assault her.
So if “Serenity” is this good — and as a piece of filmmaking, I’m hard-pressed to find much fault with it — why am I still feeling the strong pull of those “Firefly” episodes? Whedon knows what he’s doing here: When he puts lines like “I got no rudder. Wind blows northerly, I go north” in Mal’s mouth, he does so for a reason. Everything in “Serenity,” including the delicate shorthand used to delineate the relationship between Wash and Zoe, who are husband and wife, is part of a meticulously worked-out plan, a way of cluing us in to the hearts and minds of these characters, fast.
But some “Firefly” characters, most notably Shepherd Book, are accounted for but get lost by the wayside. And when certain characters die, those deaths are likely to hit “Firefly” fans much harder than they do “Firefly” novices.
That’s understandable, but I still feel some anxiety that “Serenity” will be viewed by audiences unfamiliar with Whedon’s work as just another sci-fi-geek enthusiasm. My problem, I think, is that “Serenity” dredges up some of the same feelings I have when a movie adaptation of a book I love just doesn’t measure up. I’m so used to “reading” Whedon in the long form — so used to riding the rhythms of his television series, rhythms he sustains beautifully week after week, season after season — that “Serenity,” as carefully worked out as it is, feels a bit too compact, truncated. That’s less a failing on Whedon’s part than a recognition of the way TV, done right, can re-create for us the luxury of sinking into a good, long novel. I hope Whedon makes many more movies (and there’s the enticing possibility that “Serenity,” if it does well, will be the beginning of a franchise). Faced with a big screen, Whedon knows exactly what to do with it. But the small one needs him, too. Of all the pleasures TV watching has to offer, he has perhaps tapped the greatest one: that of waiting on the docks, anxious to find out what happens next.
“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" 
