Beyond the Multiplex

Hey, what's with the overstuffed Oscar fodder in June? Redgrave, Streep, Close and a glowing Claire Danes in "Evening," some classic Belmondo, and more.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Movie Reviews, Claire Danes, Independent Film, Beyond the Multiplex

Photo: Focus Features

Barry Bostwick, Glenn Close, Sarah Viccellio and Claire Danes in "Evening."

June 28, 2007 | Ah, the signs of summer in North America. Wild strawberries appear along the roadsides, snakes bake dreamily on exposed shelves of rock, biting insects of all sorts are born and pursue picnicking humans with Mitt Romney-like efficiency. Fluffy "prestige" pictures crowded with respectable adult actors and lovely scenery fill the theaters, children dream of ice cream sodas and fireworks, and ... hey, hang on a second! That's not right.

No indeed -- Oscar-hungry confabulations like "Evening," an upper-middlebrow weeper that packs Claire Danes, Vanessa Redgrave, Glenn Close, Hugh Dancy, Patrick Wilson and Meryl Streep into the world of 1950s blue-blood privilege that the L.L. Bean catalog labors to evoke, don't belong in summer, at least not according to the venerable conventions of film distribution. But as a recent article by New York Times reporter David Halbfinger made clear, summer is the new beachhead for serious flicks aimed at grown-up audiences.

This used to be known as "counterprogramming," as in giving the parents something to watch while the kids suck down frozen artificial flavoring in front of the latest $800 million repackaging of some '60s comic-book franchise. (When will Swamp Thing and Doctor Strange make it back to the big screen? I've been waiting.) But the cardinal rule of classic summer counterprogramming, according to Halbfinger's thesis, was simple: Sex. Mom and Dad are feeling randy, too, come beachy weather (or so goes the thinking), and are eager for a little upscale skin. He reaches far and wide for examples: François Ozon's "Swimming Pool," Wong Kar-wai's "2046," Eric Rohmer's "Pauline at the Beach" (which was a hit 24 summers ago).

Like most trend stories about the movie business (or about anything else), Halbfinger's article assembles miscellaneous evidence to support a conclusion already arrived at. But he's clearly right that things have changed. This summer is being flooded with the kinds of serious-minded pictures that used to appear almost exclusively between Labor Day and Thanksgiving: "Evening" is joining Michael Moore's "Sicko," Michael Winterbottom's "A Mighty Heart," Olivier Dahan's "La Vie en Rose," Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley" and numerous others yet to come. Of all those, only the last delivers any significant nudity, and that comes in the service of a poetic, earnest, almost puritanical film.

Let me save you the trouble of complaining, gentle readers, by doing it myself: Why do I spend so much time talking about the marketplace? You don't care about the business, you care about the movies. One answer is that, for better or worse, we live in a culture of ubiquitous insiderism, where box-office grosses and production deals are news stories all on their own. A better answer, I think, is that some movies cannot be isolated from their marketplace function, and for all its pictorial elegance and literary pedigree, "Evening" is one of them. It helps me to approach "Evening" with a minimum of eye rolling and exasperation if I remember that it's clearly filling a need (which doesn't happen to be mine).

Beyond the grand edifice of "Evening," we've got some counter-counterprogramming, headlined by a devastating and already controversial documentary about gangsters in the most lawless districts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which is to say the most lawless places in the world. For fans of classic hard-boiled crime cinema, nothing all summer will compete with the crystalline new black-and-white print of "Le Doulos," the great Jean-Pierre Melville's most influential film. If a bunch of French guys in supersharp threads smoking and shooting each other won't cheer you up, I can't help you.

Next page: Claire Danes finally arrives -- but her vehicle breaks down