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Feeling
the weight of history: (l-r) Friedel and Benesch in
The White Ribbon.
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In
Germany Before the War
By
John Rodat
The
White Ribbon
Directed
by Michael Haneke
The
White Ribbon centers around a series of strange, increasingly
dire events that take place in a small village in Northern
Germany, just before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand
and the outbreak of the first World War: The village doctor
is injured in a fall from his horse, which has been deliberately
tripped up with a wire strung in its path; the village steward’s
son takes ill when a window is left open in the infant’s room;
both the Baron’s fair-haired boy and the midwife’s developmentally
impaired child are brutally abused by unknown assailants.
A mystery is, indeed, afoot.
But The White Ribbon is by no means a simple period
who-done-it, nor crime drama. Though the village’s young schoolteacher
(Christian Freidel) does make an attempt to discover the cause
and/or reason behind the attacks, no full and tidy answer
is forthcoming. And The White Ribbon is all the more
satisfying for that lack.
The forces at work in the village, and in the movie, are those
of time and history. The mystery is, therefore, one that can
only be understood in retrospect, and, then, incompletely
via recollection, conjecture and hearsay—as stated explicitly
by the schoolteacher as he introduces the movie as extended
flashback.
The village is, essentially, the tiny society built up around
employment on the Baron’s land. The Baron (Ulrich Tukur) and
Baroness (Ursina Lardi), their nanny Eva (Leonie Benesch),
the schoolteacher, the steward Georg (Enno Trebs), the doctor
(Rainer Bock), his assistant/midwife (Susanne Lothar), a pastor
(Burghart Klaussner), their families, and a small host of
tenant farmers, comprise a microcosm. It’s a world traditionally—but
only temporarily—detached and independent from the larger
world. The effects of such insularity are rendered both deftly
and starkly by director Michael Haneke and cinematographer
Christian Berger.
The film is shot absolutely beautifully in black-and-white,
and its composition and pacing evoke equally a pastoral nostalgia
and provincial severity. The community may seem superficially
idyllic to jaded post-industrial eyes; but it is founded on
a feudal, Teutonic rigor and piety that are positively scourging.
Haneke presents this community in so nonjudgmental and balanced
a way as to be almost documentary. It’s more portrait than
pronouncement. The crimes committed in the village, and the
very cruelty and perversion of the acts, have a kind of sado-masochistic
logic to them. They are inseparable from that place, that
time. They are of that moment: to solve them would be to solve
June 27, 1914—a compelling impossibility.
Through
the Looking Glass
Bad
Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Directed
by Werner Herzog
The first moments of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
feature a water moccasin swimming through the roiling waters
of the title city, right toward a forgotten jailbird, just
as Hurricane Katrina is hitting land. Initially, cops Terence
(Nicolas Cage) and Stevie (Val Kilmer) make wagers as to whether
the con will make it, before the former suddenly dives into
the muck and ruin. He saves the dude, but gets a major promotion
and develops a major coke addiction to ease the pain of the
back injury he sustained in the rescue. All this happens in
mere minutes, and all I can think is “WTF’s happened to Nic
Cage and Val Kilmer?”
That these two former bad/pretty boys have aged so visibly
not only reminds we of the Brat Pack generation of our own
mortality, but serves director Werner Herzog in underscoring
his pet theme of exploring man’s limitations within the greater
cosmos. So, too, does the movie’s NOLA setting, psychologically
just minutes post Katrina. Stevie and Terence roam a city
that’s been brutally battered, is still eons away from recovery,
and yet remains inextricably linked to its own haunting, otherworldly
past. The former is known to pop a suspect he’s questioning,
a practice Terence eschews in favor of the more subtly old-fashioned,
quid pro quo approach. Terence, whose father (Tom Bower) was
a cop, is of the school that thinks if there’s no property
voucher in existence, there’s no theft or missing evidence;
and that speeding tickets can be shredded without a hiccup
in the workings of everyday life. Unfortunately for him, times
are changing, and the NOPD is supposed to be operating at
a higher ethical and professional level.
There’s another thing working against Terence, as he sets
about investigating the murder of a Senegalese family whose
heroin-selling patriarch was encroaching on the territory
of biggy Big Fate (Xzibit). Namely: his growing dependency
on just about anything narcotic. Cage plays Terence as a walking
raw sciatic nerve, one shoulder lurched up to his ear, his
gait shambling; at times, his lips and eyes twitch in gargantuan
pain. The relief he gets from sniffing a bit of coke, or the
almost transcendent joy he experiences while, high on crack,
banging a college hottie against her boyfriend’s car—while
said boyfriend stares on in disbelief—is strangely invigorating,
like that first cup of coffee after a punishing night. For
all his lurid crimes against those he’s entrusted to serve
and protect, Cage maintains a manic likeability. Punished
for unspeakable harassment of an elderly patient (who was
revealing the hiding place of a key witness), he’s demoted
to the property room, the very place where Terence scores
much of his haul; the subsequent “oh, sweet Jesus!” look of
joy he furtively displays is akin to what a kid who hates
the winter must think when the teacher grounds him from recess
in February. Somehow, we get it.
The actual mechanics of the murder mystery are relatively
pedestrian, except to show occasional glimpses of Terence’s
brilliance. Or is it madness? He clearly gets off on the thrill
of outwitting the hoodlums, as when he surprises a suspect
by sneaking in through the back door. There are side streets
of narrative, notably Terrence’s relationship with high-rent
call girl Frankie (Eva Mendes), his mix-ups with a variety
of nefarious thugs, and his prickly relationship with his
dad and stepmother (Jennifer Coolidge). You never really know
what’s going to happen, especially when Herzog heightens the
icky critter factor by featuring alligators wreaking havoc
on the highways and iguanas piping out Johnny Adams’ “Release
Me.” But whatever it is, you can’t take your eyes away, especially
from Cage. The scenes in which Cage rides with Big Fate and
his crew are dizzying, hilarious and yet fraught with real
danger. A cracked up Terence pulls a gun on the drug kingpin,
before laughing hysterically and recounting a story about
an antlered football player. “To the break of dawn!” he croaks
in sublime exhilaration, and the bad guys, and the audience,
can’t help but be pulled into the weird and wild wonder that
is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
—Laura
Leon
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Down
there? Again? Wasikowska in Alice in Wonderland.
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Go
Ask Someone Else
Alice
in Wonderland
Directed
by Tim Burton
The talking creatures and demented denizens of Wonderland
are not convinced that Alice—the teenage blonde girl who falls
into their realm via a rabbit hole—is their Alice.
Audiences will wonder the same thing, since Alice Kingsleigh
(an appealing Mia Wasikowska) is not only older, but has a
different story than the one written by her creator, Lewis
Carroll. Alice in Wonderland is more Alice Through
the Looking Glass of those other Oxford fantasists—J.R.R.
and C. S. But since this Alice is directed by Tim Burton,
the Tulgey Woods is lysergically tulgey, and crammed with
curious sights to behold (quibbling flowers among them). Alice
muddles her way to a foretold destiny amid gnarly, Burtonesque
curlicues of flora and fauna, accompanied by a floating Cheshire
Cat who levitates in a surrealist ether. Alice is confusedly
and tediously reacquainted with other personages from her
previous adventure in Wonderland, which she remembers only
as a dream. But while she is being scrutinized by Dormouse,
White Rabbit, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and hookah-smoking
Blue Caterpillar, a galumphing Bandersnatch bounds to the
attack. The giant, doglike marauder is halted when Dormouse
wields a sewing needle and plucks out its eye like a martini
olive. Because this is Tim Burton in Underland (as it inhabitants
call it), the film is filled with more grotesqueries than
wonders.
The peculiarly flat opening sequences (the screenplay is by
Linda Woolverton, of The Lion King and Beauty and
the Beast) run further aground when Alice crashes the
Mad Hatter’s tea party. Johnny Depp’s rambling performance—he
intermittently channels Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd,
and other characters from his Burton collaborations—is hampered
by the green orbs that serve as the Hatter’s eyes, though
eventually, Depp manages to add some poignancy to the Hatter’s
heroics. It’s about the only heartfelt element in the inventively
bizarre but emotionally static landscape, although the thespian
voices of Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, and Stephen Fry manage
to make their CGI creatures somewhat personable. Helena Bonham
Carter is a hoot, and little more, as the monstrous Red Queen,
whose favorite command is “Off with their heads!,” and Anne
Hathaway is playfully but unconvincingly ethereal as the gentle
White Queen. Oddly enough, the liveliest character is Crispin
Glover’s evil Knave of Hearts, the Red Queen’s henchman and
sycophant.
It’s not until Alice retrieves the long-lost Vorpal Sword
and agrees to be the White Queen’s champion that the action
becomes more than a collage of set pieces—though it’s not
much of a compliment to realize that a standard-issue dragon
battle is the highlight, and that Alice’s return to stuffy
Victorian England is allusively anti-drug and pro-British
Empire.
—Ann Morrow
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