Three films from 2010

The King’s Speech 

Acting!  Well, they are really good.  Firth and Rush form a superb tandem, and there’s no end of really able support.  (Gambon!)  But the entirely assembly is pretty powerfully calculated.  And look—it worked!  Best picture of the year, apparently.  And we might as well admit that the film is reasonably intelligent, and really well-crafted.  We should enjoy it.  But we can resent it just a little bit too.  Truffaut’s dismissal of the Tradition of Quality (1954) was politically motivated and more than a little dubious.  But it was also at least a little bit correct, now as then.  Stuffy and smug go together very well, and we don't have to like it.  Also, the film's R-rating seems to be this year’s exception to the rule of being careful with your media intake.  (For the Strength of Youth and all, but you need to see Schindler’s List…)  Actually, the swearing scene seems fairly gratuitous to me, meaning that it’s just not necessary.  Even worse, it thinks it’s so funny.  (The final profanity is pretty funny though.)

On the other hand, let’s be fair.  This is an interesting historical episode.  There’s every reason that it will not only inform, but also whet people’s historical appetites.  Nothing wrong with that.  There’s a little glimpse of class and colonial hierarchy, the Australian stuff that looks a little bit like the writing on the wall.  Most significantly, there’s a second story going on here.  The terrific design, so dour and grey and oppressive, is the key.  It’s like the ring in the Peter Jackson films, which also turns out to be a poignant, powerful analogy of addiction.  So too the stuttering.  It stands in for every neurosis, every mild personality disorder or disabling fear that is so paralyzing for so many poor people.  And at the end our protagonist prevails, but realistically.  There’s always something good, isn’t there? 

The Fighter 

This is Rocky, which was the Chuck Wepner story, which is an optimistic take on the problems and possibilities of overcoming difficulty and making your dreams come true.  Of course this Rocky is decidedly more naturalistic than the original, which is almost completely an advantage.  

Manet, portrait of Emile Zola

Not everyone will agree with this estimation. The prudish might beg off, and so too will many people who combine circumspection with reasonable openness.  So that's fine.  Still, wouldn’t an actual Rocky Balboa talk this way, and see these things?  And couldn’t, shouldn’t we?  There’s a real sweetness in this film, and it’s enhanced by the grittiness of the frame.  Also by the directorial method, which lets things run, and actors act.  The result is that there’s lots of plot, but also lots of time for digressions and grace notes too.  That family!  The sisters are a scream, but look at that step-dad.  He is Long-Suffering, to a John Bunyan degree.  The fact that they contrive a general reconciliation out of all this, and that they make it plausible, is quite a feat.  It’s nice that Marky Mark wins.  It’s nicer that the Christian Bale (grandstander!) character reforms/conforms.  Hope, without denying difficulty!  This is why we have naturalism, after all.  The parents of drug addicts will see and hear every bit of this.  The friends of those parents, or of those drug addicts, should see and hear it too.  The little improvised epilogue is very moving, and then we get the real-life brothers in an epilogue to the epilogue!  Lovely stuff.

127 Hours 

I bet Mr. Boyle was partly motivated by a desire to wow us with his usual hyperkinetic mumbo jumbo, applied to this perverse or even impossible property.  This kind of thing can be really annoying, partly because it’s a motivation that basically gets the ultimate reason for art or even plain conversation—only connect! (E.M. Forster, 1910)—wrong, or at least backwards.  Isn’t there enough narcissm and self-importance/self-delusion in the world? 

Or are self-importance and self-delusion precisely what cause people like me to proclaim the ultimate reason for art and plain conversation?  I forget!  I guess we could remember that gleefully taking on tough things is exactly what brought us Rope (an interesting and worthwile failure) and Lifeboat (a moving portrait of privation that leads to a kind of triumphant apotheosis), and maybe even Hitchcock himself.  Let’s not even think of science and technology.  We might remind ourselves that show-offs, especially the ones who actually have something to show off, should occasionally be encouraged to connect in the way that they see fit.  Also, we shouldn’t make assumptions all the time.

Still, there is definitely ostentatious display here, and certainly the gruesomeness that you would expect next.  But you might not expect the thing that emerges most abundantly from Boyle’s concoction, which is gravity, and even reverence.  Speaking in the abstract it’s a natural consequence of responding respectfully to what happened to Ralston, and to how Ralston himself responded.  It’s the right response to anyone’s Calvary, whether it’s jaw-dropping like this one, or the more usual quiet desperation.  There’s joy in the utilization of the medium, but precociousness is always appropriately and substantially paired with something bigger. 

Craft, for instance.  As Franco’s character runs through the opening credits on the unknowing way to his extremity, we have some appropriate exposition.  Zooming and zipping, which is what the cameras and lenses are doing, aptly represents this character’s methods and motivations.  He’s trying to get away from the grind, and he’s become an estimable expert at doing so, but he zooms and zips through nature too.  The interlude with the hikers is bright and youthful and, as the kids might say, sexy.  This may be a litmus test: depending on viewer disposition you could criticize their frivolousness, or realize how, since we’re always on the brink of something, every bland thing might be surpassingly important. 

Conclusion, Bresson, Diary of a Country Priest

The title and our knowledge of the subject sure create suspense out of nothing.  The actual accident is pretty amazingly assembled.  After that, there’s a whole ton of movie left!  Let’s not rehearse the stations of this particular cross, but it’s quite admirable, quite amazing even how the cinematic razzle dazzle always insinuates or resonates itself into tradition and substance.  On a practical level, the potential limitations of the single actor in the single setting are quite easily surmounted by the fact that this turns into a more circumscribed version of Robinson Crusoe.  That means that dialogue and character conflict are quite adequately replaced by what we might call a MacGyver (My Side of the Mountain, Hatchet) component.  This situation is obviously enhanced, but it’s still basically a drama of the everyday, of chores and tasks and the work that dignifies and saves. 

Anna Karina, Vivre sa Vie

Returning to the idea of craft, and certainly of filmic tradition, we also have here a remarkably successful working out of Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of inner speech.  This is a deep, visualized, rhythmic kind of cinematic subjectivity, bringing the internal outside, making audible the silent speech of the soul.  This next idea might seem shocking, if you want to key overly on Shallow Grave and Trainspotting (though in these there are intimations…).  The burden of this inner speech is aptly and absolutely that of Everyman.  Ralston/ Franco’s various projects are beautifully and clearly communicated, but they’re definitely not all related to his physical self-preservation.  In the end this is a soul’s accounting, a pilgrim’s progress, a purging and purifying.  Anonymous and John Bunyan are properly referenced, worthily evoked here; it’s really stirring to see how this amphetamine assembly turns into something sacred.

He strategizes, he tries to free himself, he rests and thinks, he approaches his own death and in the end, regardless of the end, becomes a better person.  (The things about the women in his life are particularly lovely in their chivalric frankness.)  It’s almost always a stretch when talking about movies to say that we become better too, but the modeling components of the film, and the reforming possibilities for the willing viewer, are very, very considerable.  A vision of his own unborn son!  That is some amputation!  Could that “sproing!” sound be a bit nauseatingly gratuitous?  Probably, but let’s forgive them. 

At this point the physical and the spiritual, the fact and the metaphor are one.  We could compare this to Bresson’s A Man Escaped and both films would come out well in the comparison.  Ralston/Franco’s last descent through the canyons is heart stopping in the suspenseful sense, and heart-rending in a spiritual one.  The expressionism—we see what he feels—continues, and becomes very moving when he finally sees and catches up with someone, when that subjectivity, extremity, purification re-enters the public sphere.  Can he maintain this advancement?  Though only dimly apprehended—the guy is dying, after all—the empathetic horror of his unknown friends is most moving for precisely this reason.  Angels and ministers of grace defend us!

The documentary epilogue is modest, quiet, overwhelming.  There is Aron Rolston.  And there is Aron Rolston’s family.