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In
Another Life
By
Laura Leon
The
Man on the Train
Directed
by Patrice Leconte
Who would have thought that mixing equal parts spaghetti western
with French elegy would result in such a sustained and satisfying
film as Patrice Leconte’s latest, The Man on the Train?
The unexpected merging of the two moods conjured by these
disparate styles works remarkably well in this tale of two
very different old men, each bound both by the appreciation
of time passing and by the desire, however fleeting, to be
in someone else’s shoes.
The iconic French pop star Johnny Hallyday plays the thief
Milan, who mosies into a provincial French tourist town off-season.
He’s shrouded in blue: smoke from a cigarette, steam from
the train, the cast of descending twilight shadows. Taking
a visual cue from Sergio Leone’s great Once Upon a Time
in the West, in which traditional good guy Henry Fonda’s
bright baby blues were a brutal contrast to his soulless persona,
Leconte makes great effect of Hallyday’s off-putting azure
eyes. It’s clear that Milan is not in town simply to purchase
headache medicine, but to meet some other, more sinister date
with destiny. He makes the acquaintance of a retired, loquacious
schoolteacher, Mansequier (Jean Rochefort), who promptly invites
him to stay at his lonely yet palatial home until Saturday,
when he, too, has a pressing engagement. In the week that
ensues (during which time we ascertain that Milan is, in fact,
planning a bank heist with some old cronies), the two men
form an initially awkward yet ultimately comfortable understanding
of each other—an understanding that is often as humorous as
it is touching.
Whereas Milan is the kind of cinematic American archetype—rootless,
rugged, alone—whose appeal goes well beyond westerns, Mansequier
is his antithesis. Despite a stated desire for a home grounded
in Zen minimalism, he nevertheless remains in his childhood
estate, an aging beauty furnished with the overstuffed furniture,
artwork and mementos of bygone eras. He is shy and risk-averse,
a man who wishes he could get in a fight, or at least have
an argument with the clerk at the bakery. While snooping through
Milan’s things, he dons the other man’s fringed leather jacket—again,
another American archetype—and pantomimes being Wyatt Earp
by way of an old-time western. He spies a decades-old photo
of Milan that conveys a James Dean-like quality, and his enchantment
is complete. Meanwhile, Milan seeks more tranquil favors from
his benefactor: the words to a poem, a shared glass of wine,
his very first pair of slippers. At various moments, each
man sort of becomes the other: Milan pinch-hits for Mansequier
when the teacher misses an appointment with a pupil, and Mansequier
steps in to settle a bistro brawl. The results of both are
highly amusing and deeply revealing.
Leconte and screenwriter Claude Klotz rely on the audience’s
ability to fill in the story’s gaps, psychologically, by way
of those aforementioned archetypes, a device that illuminates
the movie’s subtext of desire and fantasy. The idea of going
back, making different decisions with one’s life, and perhaps
in the process becoming a very different person, has universal
appeal; and when we see what we might have been in the persona
of another, that vision is largely derived from what assumptions
and associations we make about that other person’s life. The
script also benefits from composer Pascal Estive’s brilliant
use of music to illustrate the differences in each character;
whenever Milan appears, we hear a twangy guitar reminiscent
yet again of Leone and those other countless westerns, whereas
we associate Mansequier with thoughtful, poignant fugues.
It’s a beautiful movie, one that continues Leconte’s fascination
with parallel lives while expanding his reach into a realm
approaching the sublime.
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Monster
mush: the CGI green guy in The Hulk.
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You’ve
Changed
The
Hulk
Directed
by Ang Lee
Even if the fusion of deep- feeling director Ang Lee (The
Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and
comic-book genius Stan Lee struck you from the get-go as dismayingly
incongruous, you still may not be prepared for just how mishmashed
and ill-conceived the big-screen adaptation of The Hulk
is. Drawn out to a punishing length, this biopic on the gigantic
green brute tries to outdo the usual id-level psychology of
superhero movies, with a result not unlike babysitting a cranky
5-year-old while simultaneously cramming for a grad-school
exam on Sophocles.
The backstory begins when the future one-man demolition derby
is just a gleam in the eye of his scientist father. Papa Banner
(Nick Nolte) conducts secret experiments in tissue regeneration
for the U.S. Army, until something goes horribly wrong—and
that something turns out to be his toddler son, Bruce. Updating
Marvel comics The Incredible Hulk—created in the newly
nuclear 1960s—with today’s biogenetic nightmares is the film’s
most inspired motif; however, Lee goes overboard with the
evolutionary montages, filling in Banner Sr.’s lab work with
art-house-style shots of jellyfish, sunbaked mud flats and
giant sequoias. Later, the director switches to split-screen
gimmickry to mimic the look of comic-book panels, which doesn’t
succeed any better in enlivening the reams of exposition dully
cranked out by TV writer John Turman.
Fast-forward to Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) all grown up and
conducting his own experiments in molecular regeneration.
After he gets blasted by gamma beams, his inner mutation is
unleashed and then provoked into actualization by a hospital-bed
visit from his long-lost father, now a wild-haired madman
with a peculiarly aggressive pet poodle. Also on hand to cattle-prod
mild-mannered Bruce is a ridiculously venial rep (Josh Lucas)
for a biomedical corporation with a Pentagon contract. The
rep wants to acquire Bruce’s research in a hostile takeover,
along with Bruce’s ex-girlfriend, Betty Ross (Jennifer Connelly).
Betty broke up with Bruce because he is emotionally distant
due to a repressed childhood trauma, but she falls for him
all over again at the first sign of freakishness. Pity must
be saved for the youngsters trying to absorb all this generational
dysfunctionality simply to get to the parts where a bouncing
green giant leaps into the air in a CGI approximation of childhood
flying dreams.
Those sky-high bounces aside, the Hulk is an anachronism in
his own movie, a cartoony wrecking ball without an eyeblink
of personality (King Kong is Shakespearean in comparison)
set upon a landscape of luminous realism. His Freudian temper
tantrums don’t carry much weight, since his human incarnation
is as bland as a laboratory mouse: Bana, who got by on his
smoldering eyes as the special-forces sniper in Black Hawk
Down, doesn’t have anything more to offer here. Confusing
the Oedipal issue is Banner Sr., played by Nolte as a one-man
Eugene O’Neill production, complete with a grandstanding soliloquy
that will exhaust the patience of experimental- theater buffs,
not to mention the average moviegoer looking for some pop-art
mayhem. And judging by the results of Banner’s scientific
evildoing, his research was based solely on the special effects
of Terminator 2.
Only Sam Elliot, as Betty’s ramrod Army-general father, hits
the right note of comic-book exaggeration, perhaps because
his is the only character with comically sardonic dialogue.
“What if he has one of his little mood swings in a populated
area?” says the general after siccing the entire armed forces
on the waywardly bouncing Hulk, who is subjected to an apocalyptic—and
seemingly endless—array of hostile maneuvers. Since the Hulk
isn’t noticeably good, bad or sympathetic, and since everyone
else is mired in psychological ambivalence and inconsistencies,
it’s left to director Lee to serve as the Marvel-style villain:
a force of nature brought down by his own overblown hubris.
—Ann
Morrow
Just
My Imagination
Alex
& Emma
Directed
by Rob Reiner
What can be said about a movie that is oblivious to its best
joke? In Alex & Emma, Alex (Luke Wilson) is a writer
with 30 days to finish his novel and earn a promised $125,000
fee, or he will be killed by the Cuban gangsters to whom he
owes most of that amount. Emma (Kate Hudson) is his faithful,
tart-tongued stenographer. The story Alex dictates is a Gatsby-esque
tale of love, money and crushed dreams—and it’s spectacularly
awful. Alex is a hack writer with a tin ear, but the film
presents him as if he’s a genius. It’s understandable why
screenwriter Jeremy Leven might be oblivious to this, but
director Rob Reiner should have noticed.
The film’s gimmick is that it goes back and forth between
Alex dictating to Emma, and the novel itself. The lead character,
Adam, is based on Alex and is also played by Wilson. He’s
a penniless tutor working for a beautiful upperclass widow
named Polina (elegant, sexy Sophie Marceau) on a vacation
island off the coast of Maine in the summer of 1924. (The
period settings and costumes are Masterpiece Theater-quality,
which means they have a genteel beauty that suggests the past
without ever truly evoking it.) Adam is torn between Polina
and the au pair, played by Hudson. This is the funniest part
of the novel section, as the character morphs from Swedish
to German to Spanish to American, and Hudson gets to deliciously
vamp it up in each guise. (Her turn as the German girl is
hilarious; she seems to have studied Peter Sellers’ diction
and timing from Lolita.)
If you accept the fact that the filmmakers were either distracted
or clueless, Alex & Emma isn’t a bad romance. Going
brunette for a change, Hudson brings the right working-class
touch to her role as the stenographer, and movie-star glamour
to the period scenes. Wilson is also good, though the character’s
hypochondria is one-note and unconvincing. The problem is
that while the romance in the novel is worked out satisfactorily,
its real-life counterpart is clumsy and obvious. When Marceau
shows up as Alex’s real Polina, the film screeches to a halt.
The rest of the picture is as unconvincing as Alex’s prose.
—Shawn
Stone
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