"A Memory of a Memory": The Secret in Their Eyes (2009)

If there’s one thing the movies have a unique capacity for conveying, it’s memory. Whether good or bad, recollections of the past tend to stress the emotional, the visual, and the visceral—often at the expense of the truth of what really happened—and what more concise summation of the cinema is there than that? In its better moments, director Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret in Their Eyes proves this sentiment quite elegantly. This is a film that is haunted by memory; a film where the triumphs, tragedies, and missed chances of years prior serve as the backdrop for a mystery that has burdened the characters and helped shape the people they’ve become when the story opens. The main character’s decision to reach into the past and try to get closure makes for some truly compelling, wonderfully cinematic drama, and it’s only the filmmakers’ compulsion to neatly tie up every loose end—to remember every detail—that ends up making it all just a bit too clever for its own good.

The film follows Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin), a retired Argentine court officer who reopens a long-abandoned case with an eye toward writing a novel about it. Through some excellently framed flashbacks, we’re taken back to 1974, when then-federal justice agent Esposito was assigned to the rape and murder of a young schoolteacher. Campanella has a gift for plotting the police procedural aspects of the story, and it’s entrancing to watch how the young Esposito, along with his supervisor, Irene, and his perpetually drunk colleague, Sandoval, got sucked into the case. As the evidence piles up, the story unfolds as part thriller, part fugitive chase story, and (rather unnecessarily) part history of Argentina’s transformation into a military dictatorship. Throughout it all, the film continually flashes back to the present day, as Benjamin tries to consult Irene, now a judge, on his book, all the while skirting around the prospect of rekindling the latent relationship they let slip their fingers years before.

The Secret in Their Eyes was the surprise winner of last year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language film, and it’s easy to see why: it’s got the slick production values of a Hollywood film (Campanella is best known for directing American dramatic television) and a nuanced, literary story adapted from a book by Eduardo Sacheri. But where the film really succeeds is in the powerful performances of its main actors. The most prominent is surely Ricardo Darin, a renowned actor who seems to be Argentina's answer to George Clooney, but he’s matched by Soledad Villamil, who plays Irene with a tenderness and intelligence that helps her steal more than a few scenes. As Sandoval, the excellent Guillermo Francella is often used for comic relief, but his performance is helped by the script, which provides more than a few scenes that elevate him from just the boozy office jester to perhaps the most sympathetic, tragic character in the whole of the film.

Campanella, who is otherwise a bit guilty of making his presence known with his flashy camerawork, allows these great performances to speak for themselves. You could easily picture a lesser production having a stilted narration to help describe the emotions Esposito experiences during the lengthy flashbacks, but Campanella is confident enough to let his actors tell us all we need to know with awkward pauses, nervous laughs, and fleeting glances. This is especially true of the platonic romance between Irene and Esposito, both in the flashback scenes and in the present day. It’s to Darin and Villamil’s credit that they’re able to make the regret of the years spent longing for one another feel palpable—and even with some pretty egregious old age makeup holding them back.

The Secret in Their Eyes moves along like a dynamo during the flashback scenes, and while they’re still building, even the present day stuff doesn’t feel intrusive. But like so many films that start in medias res, it is a little jarring when the tale set in the past reaches its peak and the audience suddenly finds itself thrust back into the present day. It’s a tough way to plot any story, since the writer is essentially forcing two separate endings into the same script. Ironically, things here aren’t helped one bit by the fact that the climax to the flashback story seems entirely fitting and complete. Once we’re left with just the present day story, Campanella tries to get around any dramatic letdown by saving his biggest and most absurd plot twist for the last few minutes. You’re not likely to see it coming, but you are likely to think it belongs in a different movie.

Fortunately, this tendency is only peripherally present for the rest of the film, and whenever the plot drifts too perilously close to more tired dramatic territory, it’s saved by its performances and it’s director’s unabashed love for visual storytelling. For better or worse, Campanella never wastes an opportunity to embrace a filmic moment, whether an engrossing (though admittedly far-fetched) interrogation scene, or a foot chase at a soccer match that unfolds through a mesmerizing, 5-minute long tracking shot that, no doubt with the aid of some digital stitching, moves from helicopter shot, to crane shot, to steadicam—and all in the middle of a packed stadium of extras. Does such a sequence have any right showing up in this kind of movie? Probably not, but like so much of The Secret in Their Eyes, there's also no denying that it's engrossing, classically entertaining filmmaking.

Dennis Hopper and the "Russian Suicide Chair"

As a tribute to the recently departed Dennis Hopper, here he is in 1983 performing a stunt sometimes called the "Russian Suicide Chair." The idea is that if you set up dynamite in a perfect circle and blow it all up at the same, the explosions create a safe zone in the middle where a person can sit and be unharmed. It's a perfect example of the one of a kind character we just lost in Dennis Hopper. The explosion is at 1:50 if you just want to skip to the good stuff.

Gangster Theatre: 44 Inch Chest (2009)

Malcolm Venville’s directorial debut 44 Inch Chest plays like a 70s British gangster movie that’s been converted into a stage play. Save for the opening scenes and a few flashbacks, the film takes place almost entirely in a rotting building on the wrong side of London. Spurned car dealer/gangster Colin Diamond and four of his friends have gathered there with the intention of torturing and killing Diamond’s estranged wife’s boyfriend, who they’ve kidnapped from a posh downtown restaurant and stuffed in a wardrobe. But the overemotional Colin, still reeling from being dumped by the love of his life, is hesitant to do the deed, and needs some psyching up from his pals. This sets the stage for some of the most delightfully profane criminal shop talk since Sexy Beast (which, as it so happens, was written by the same duo--Louis Mellis and David Scinto), all of it delivered by an all star cast of British talent including Ray Winstone, Ian McShane, Tom Wilkinson, Stephen Dillane and John Hurt.

Like the best of David Mamet’s work, the high points of watching 44 Inch Chest (the title is never explained, but it somehow just feels right) all stem from seeing these great actors deliver such powerful language. Part of what made Sexy Beast such a perverse joy to watch was the way Ben Kingsley was able to wield dialogue like a weapon, spitting out insults and expletives like they could make a visceral, physical impact. Mellis and Scinto achieve a similar feat here, especially thanks to Dillane and Hurt, both of whom really seem to be enjoying themselves as the two more unbalanced members of the crew, Mal and Old Man Peanut. Wilkinson plays Archie, the straight and narrow of the group, while the always wonderful McShane is slyly funny as Meredith, a gay high roller with an ultra-cool demeanor and impeccable sense of style.

These characters all fall into neatly framed archetypes around the emotionally shattered Colin, who’s played with an endearing desperation by Winstone. In fact, enough of the film takes place in Colin’s head (in flashbacks and fantasy sequences) that it’s tempting to hypothesize that his buddies might not exist it all, but rather work as projections of his own fractured personality. Either way, they all form a great group dynamic, and their rambling dialogue, which tackles everything from Meredith’s sexual proclivities (Peanut makes a point of regularly calling him a sodomite) to the biblical tale of Samson and Delilah, ultimately forms one of the more elegant explorations of masculinity that has been offered up at the movies in some time. It’s rare that you get a movie that goes this deep into the emotional and romantic troubles of such hardened characters, and the fact that it’s coming from such an unexpected source makes a lot of the more tender dialogue have that much more of an impact.

This colorful dialogue and excellent grasp of character and theme is no doubt what drew such exceptional talent to this film, and rightfully so. But where 44 Inch Chest suffers is in the way of plot. All the great language and character dynamics can only take you so far--at some point we need to see these people actually do something. Throughout the film I kept thinking about what a wonderful play this story would make: take 5 total badasses, put them on a stage, and let them devour scenery for ninety minutes. Unfortunately this same approach doesn’t work so well on screen. We need to see these characters act on the impulses they set up so elegantly through dialogue, but director Venville never gives them the chance. This decision relegates 44 Inch Chest to being more of a showpiece for great acting than great filmmaking, but given that the acting is so superior it’s enough to keep the movie snappy and somewhat entrancing, even at the same time that it’s all nowhere near as rounded as it should be.

That Evening Sun (2009)

One of the most celebrated stylistic devices in literature is the trick of the unreliable narrator, where the reader comes to learn that the character relating the story cannot be trusted. This kind of plot point has been translated to the movies in countless ways, but it’s most often employed in films like Fight Club, where we only learn in the last few minutes how batshit crazy our main character really is. Plot-wise, 2009’s That Evening Sun might be about as far from a movie like Fight Club as you’re likely to get, and it doesn’t even use narration. But thanks to some sly, wonderfully moving storytelling and a towering performance from Hal Holbrook, it’s able to achieve a similar effect—not through wild twists and fractured narrative, but through the revelations provided by living, believable, and tragically flawed characters whose complexities only build and unfold as the story progresses.

The film follows a man with the delightfully Southern name of Abner Meecham (Holbrook), a strong-willed, ill-tempered, 80-plus year-old Tennessee farmer who might as well be the Dixieland version of Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski from Gran Torino. As the film opens, Abner’s just busted out of the nursing home he was committed to and walked the 20-plus miles back to his sleepy tract of land. He arrives to find his house inhabited by Lonzo Choat (Ray McKinnon), a local ne’er-do-well who rented the place from Abner’s son with the intention of becoming a farmer and turning life around for his wife and daughter. We’re never told just how well Choat and Abner know each other, but it’s hinted that their families have a past. Whatever the history, the two immediately clash: Abner is furious that the homestead he tended with his late wife has been taken over by a “white trash…loafer,” while Choat carries a grudge about the way he’s always been treated by Abner, whom he sees as a stubborn, bitter old man. After his son (Walton Goggins) is unable to convince him to leave the property, Abner sets up camp in some old slave quarters located in a ramshackle cabin mere feet from the main house. He and Choat start doing their best to make each other's lives miserable, setting the stage for a Southern Gothic feud that’s destined to turn violent.

The biggest pleasure of That Evening Sun is the way the narrative and the characters unfold as leisurely as the humid Tennessee afternoons depicted in the film. Each player is like an onion where the layers are slowly peeled away to reveal new traits and elements, which keeps our view of them in perpetual flux. Director Scott Teems does a magnificent job of building the drama by continually setting up character roles and then immediately subverting and complicating them. We’re led to believe that Abner represents the proud, gentlemanly Old South and Lonzo the slovenly, troubled redneck, but as the story progresses and the themes of manhood, familial responsibility and redemption start to build, we come to realize that each man is not so easily pinned down. What’s more, they’re probably more alike than either would like to admit.

This is most apparent in a key scene late in the film, where a line from Abner’s son suddenly throws into doubt nearly everything we know and believe about him and his idealized relationship with his wife (played in some artfully handled flashbacks by Holbrook’s actual spouse, the late Dixie Carter). Rarely is there a film where the viewer’s total understanding of characters and themes is so radically changed simply by the utterance of a single, seemingly innocuous line, but that is exactly what happens here. (One person in the nearly empty theater in which I saw it actually gasped aloud when they heard it.) It’s a subtle moment, and Teems, working from a short story by the celebrated writer William Gay, wisely underplays it to the point that I’m sure that no small amount of viewers will miss it entirely.

Of course, none of this would work so well if it weren’t for a universally excellent cast led by Holbrook, a criminally underrated actor who turns in what might be one of the very top performances in a long and storied career. He doesn’t deliver a false line in the entire film, and every word he speaks feels like it has the weight of a full lifetime of love, loss, and hardship behind it. Still, at the same time that Abner is a flawed and fully realized character, we are consistently—and wisely, I might add—kept at an arm’s length from him. We’re not told why he was put in the home or how his wife died for a good portion of the film, and when these revelations come, they act as the major catalyst for the way our understanding of the conflict is refigured and reinterpreted.

Holbrook gives the standout performance, but he’s nearly matched by McKinnon, a deeply talented actor whose chameleon-like qualities have established him as a phenomenal artist at the same time they’ve kept him effectively hidden from the mainstream. He’s as hyperbolically good as ever here, turning in a performance that wouldn’t have been out of place in his 2004 directorial debut Chrystal, another languidly-paced Southern drama that’s similar in tone and style to That Evening Sun. Carrie Preston is understated and touching as his long-suffering wife, while Mia Wasikowska (of Alice in Wonderland fame) has an equally interesting turn as his daughter, a shyly sweet girl whose bemusement with the ornery Abner makes for a few quite funny scenes. Rounding out the cast is the great Barry Corbin as Thurl Chessor (this film deserves an award for colorful character names), Abner’s charmingly detached neighbor. You might remember Corbin as Ellis, the cat-keeping philosopher-hermit that Tommy Lee Jones visits at the end of No Country for Old Men. He was great in that film, and he brings a similar kind of homespun wisdom and pitch-perfect diction to his role here.

Teems’ direction is unobtrusive and understated throughout—he realizes how good his cast is—but he deserves credit for the way he manages to build mood and atmosphere through his gorgeous widescreen landscape shots and slow camera moves. His fleeting cutaways during Abner’s reveries about the past are also exceptional and wonderfully staged. This preoccupation with the lyrical does make for the film’s one noticeable flaw—an ending that is perhaps a bit too unfinished for its own good—but this kind of philosophical open-endedness should always be appreciated, especially in a film that is otherwise as narratively straightforward as this. That Evening Sun is haunting, thematically complex, character-driven, and literary in the best since of the word—all of which make for an experience that is truly moving. Most important of all, though, it achieves it all without ever sacrificing one ounce of authenticity. And that, simple as it may sound, is not something you see too often.

Flame and Citron (2008)

Most people in the U.S. probably haven’t heard of the film Flame and Citron, but in its native Denmark it was a cultural phenomenon, as it backed up its sprawling story and record-breaking budget with an equally epic take at the Danish box office. It’s a moody, noir-ish tale about two reluctant heroes of the Danish Resistance (something else we’re not familiar with stateside) who went by the code names Flammen (Flame) and Citronen (Citron, or Lemon). Together with a small but dedicated group of underground freedom fighters, the duo became notorious for “liquidating” Nazi officers and the Danish traitors who collaborated with them. As Flame says at one point: “all we can do is shoot them one by one, until there are none left.” And indeed they do. The resulting film is an entrancing drama that plays like a lovingly crafted historical portrait with a dash of Leon: The Professional thrown in for good measure.

Getting the information, manpower, and materials to perform these assassinations often proves to be a Herculean effort, and makes up a good part of Flame and Citron’s storyline. Back room deals are made, documents are forged, equipment smuggled. We learn about it all through a narration provided by Flame (real name: Bent), a headstrong 23-year-old with a shock of red hair and a deadly serious demeanor. He’s the triggerman on the jobs, while Citron (Mads Mikkelsen, in the film’s best performance) is usually the driver. Citron, we’re told, has been in the resistance since its early days, and to look at him, with his perpetually greasy hair and weary pallor, you’d think he carries the weight of its success on his shoulders. He and Flame are the two stars of the resistance, and while their whole outfit is built to run like a Swiss watch, mistakes are often made: innocents are shot, trusted allies turn traitor, and Bent’s girlfriend, a femme fatale-ish secret agent, proves to be both his worst enemy and the only person he can trust.

This murky atmosphere, where bonds are tenuous and people must be taken at their word, provides Flame and Citron with many of its best moments. Among these is a conversation Bent has with an erudite German whom he is sent to kill, and who may or not be on his side. In a nice twist, the man goes on a rambling Socratic dialogue as a means of talking Bent out of pulling the trigger, and in the process touches on many of the film’s major themes. For these, director Ole Christian Madsen takes a page from Jean Pierre Melville’s legendary 1967 eulogy for La Resistance, Army of Shadows, in examining wartime morality and what is won and lost in the process of resorting to evil methods to combat evil. Likewise, the inner politics of the resistance movement are also highlighted, though perhaps with less subtlety: each meeting between the duo and their bosses in Sweden plays less like a historical document than it does like an action movie prerequisite, with Flame the loose cannon who would much rather reach for a Sten machine gun than a peace treaty any day.

Still, Flame and Citron is ultimately less about the inner workings of the Resistance than it is about the plight of its two main characters. Thankfully, Mikkelsen and Thure Lindhardt, as Flame, are up to the task of really carrying the dramatic heft. By this same token, the script manages to pile on just enough character development that when the action scenes do come—most notably a Scarface-esque last stand that has to be seen to be believed—they actually mean something. This is not to say that the film doesn’t occasionally veer into the kind of treacly territory native to both the historical drama and the action movie, but thanks to the strong performances, it does manage to largely stay grounded in the more honest, human drama. All flaws aside, Flame and Citron is well worth watching. It‘s more carefully crafted and thoughtful than most movies of this genre, and it provides a cutting look at an underground battlefront of WWII that most North Americans (myself included, I must admit) probably weren’t aware existed.

A Serious Man (2009)

The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man is undoubtedly their most difficult film to date. Not only is veiled beneath so much Jewish dogma as to be nearly inaccessible to a goy such as myself; not only does it feature a throwaway fable set in the 19th century as its opening scene; not only does it pile on one theme and allusion after another; but it seemingly makes no suggestion about how we’re supposed to interpret any of it. Nowhere in the film is there any overt evidence of an authorial guiding hand as far as theme is concerned (what do these guys really think about religion, anyway?), which is something of an accomplishment in and of itself. The end result is that the viewer ends up feeling just as overwhelmed and beleaguered as Michael Stuhlbarg’s Larry Gopnik, the Minnesota physics professor at the center of the film whose entire life unravels over the course of a few days.

This existentialist approach to storytelling has been the driving force behind all the critical discourse on the film. Theories were proposed left and right, but all it takes is to read a few of the notices of the movie (like Roger Ebert’s surprisingly rambling mess of a review) to see that a lot of critics simply didn’t know what the hell to make of this thing. They seemed to split evenly into two camps. There were those who stood in awe of the film’s narrative complexity and technical precision, like Ebert; but there was also a small but vocal group, including the Village Voice’s Ella Taylor, who wrote it off as jumbled and nihilistic. Both of these strike me as pretty lazy positions to stake out, but when a movie is this perplexing it usually ends up driving people to extremes. The shock and awe crowd made a lot of vague references about the story’s relationship to Kabbalah and the book of Job. Just how similar the two really are is beyond me, but I doubt I’m much different in this regard from most of the people who’ve offered their opinion—truth be told, the whole Job-referencing business smacks of being the kind of critical thread that gets appropriated an repackaged to the point of irrelevance. As for the nihilism folks, they’re missing the point entirely. Sure, the Coens do take a sadistic delight in putting their main character through hell, but that’s something they’ve been doing throughout their entire career. Haven’t these people seen Fargo or No Country For Old Men or even The Big Lebowski?

In saying this I’m making it sound like I have some great understanding of what this movie is really getting at—which, of course, I don’t. Like the anecdote Larry’s Rabbi tells him at one point in the film, there may not be any true answer about what it all means. And maybe that’s the point. You bring to this kind of film what you will, and while I could ramble about what I think the film is saying about fate and goodness and the ways one’s morals can be compromised by circumstances outside their control, it’s hard to say if anyone else would understand or agree with me.

What I can say for sure is that there’s no doubt that the Coens, whatever you think of them, are as masterfully controlled and aesthetically aware here as they’ve ever been—on this count I guess I’m with the “standing in awe” crowd. I’ve never been their biggest fan—which is why I’m writing about this thing now instead of six months ago—but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who said they were gifted filmmakers. No Country For Old Men was, for me, one of the most technically perfect movies I’ve seen in the last few years, and A Serious Man matches it shot for shot. Every angle, ever cut, every musical cue bespeaks two filmmakers at the top of their game. That it’s all in the service of something so frustratingly indeterminate is no doubt what’s turned some people off of it. Still, the fact remains that, difficult though it may be, this film is utterly hypnotic. If you can latch onto its visceral, concrete aspects, then the philosophical riddle wrapped up in an enigma at the center of it just becomes icing on the cake.

Variety’s Todd McCarthy (no longer, as of a few weeks ago, it seems) wrote in his review that A Serious Man is “the kind of movie you get to make after winning the Oscar." True enough, but considering the film’s paltry $15 million at the box office, you have to wonder if it’ll take more gold statues before the Coens can go this deep again. For the sake of film culture, lets hope it doesn’t take too long.

Save the Tiger (1973)

After letting it languish on my Netflix queue for several years, I finally got around to watching 1973’s Save the Tiger, the film for which Jack Lemmon won his Best Actor Academy Award. The film follows two days in the life of Harry Stoner, an L.A. clothing company owner who’s knee deep in a midlife/financial crisis. It’s the kind of gripping, personal film that I wish got made more often, and beyond being as shining an example of the old “character over story” adage as you’re going to get, it’s proof of a few things:

1) That the early 1970s were the last truly great period of American cinema. It was a time when the country was getting over a war, directors had insane amounts of freedom, and movies like this seemed to be the norm. So many of my favorite films, from Five Easy Pieces to The Long Goodbye to The Conversation, came out between ’70 and ’74, and Save the Tiger might as well be slotted right into that list. This a movie that’s as inextricably tied to its particular milieu as Easy Rider, and it tackles a subject matter and a kind of character that movies of the time just weren’t addressing. Lemmon’s character is a WWII vet, well into his forties and stuck between the old guard (represented by his business partner Phil, who’s played to perfection by the great Jack Gilford) and a counterculture that’s still in full swing. He can’t seem to find satisfaction in either one, and he’s been reduced to musing about the good old days of his youth, when he played in a band and big league pitchers still used a wind up—a preoccupation that’s played to perfection in the movie’s final scene.

All of this is expressed in a style that’s almost literary (the film’s adapted by Steve Shagan from his novel) at the same time that it’s got some clever stylistic touches, like the dead soldiers from Harry’s past who materialize in the crowd when he gives a speech at one of his fashion shows. It’s hard to pinpoint, but movies from the seventies seemed to briefly exist in a happy medium where they were able to tackle edgy content and present imperfect characters, but still do it in a classical style that allowed actors of Lemmon’s caliber to really light up the screen. I’m not sure when that died out, but the last great example I can think of is Network, from 1976.

2) That Jack Lemmon was one of the greatest screen actors of that or any era. It’s a shame that a whole generation—my generation, as it were—remembers this guy best from the Grumpy Old Men movies, because he truly was one of the most singular screen presences of all time. Who else could claim as varied and universally excellent a resume as Some Like it Hot, The Apartment, Days of Wine and Roses, The Player, The China Syndrome and Glengarry F-ing Glen Ross? He won the Oscar for Save the Tiger, and thankfully it might be one of the few cases where an actor actually won an award for his greatest role, and not for some phoned in performance a few years before he died. Lemmon is simply pitch perfect here, and even though he’s spouting off heaps of dialogue in every scene, he never once strikes a false note. He was always the kind of actor who could chew up scenery and completely mesmerize an audience when he wanted to, but he also knew when to dial it back. This is exemplified perfectly in a late scene where Harry talks to one of his craftsmen, a holocaust survivor played William Hansen, who tells him of how he’s content in his life as long as he has his wife and a job he’s good at. It’s maybe the best scene in the movie, and even though Hansen’s stealing it right out from under him, Lemmon’s smart enough to just sit back and let it happen. Few great actors would’ve been willing to do that, but Lemmon clearly believed in this story, enough that he was even willing to waive his fee and work for scale.

3) That John G. Avildsen is one of the most unique and unsung filmmakers of his generation. Sure, he made the Karate Kid movies and Rocky, but he has never been hailed as a legitimately great director. This a shame, especially when you consider that with Save the Tiger and Joe, he made two of the defining films of the early ‘70s. At the time, the culture was so divided that it was hard to make something truly subtle—you were either on the side of Midnight Cowboy or The Green Berets—but Avildsen explored a strata of American society that just wasn’t being talked about. He hasn’t done much later in his career (his last film was a Van Damme action flick), but in the early ‘70s he was bookending these hippie zeitgeist death-of-the-American-dream character studies with Troma films. Troma films! Now that’s what I call range.