THE MIAMI HERALD
MiamiHerald.com
INTERNATIONAL EDITION
MONDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2010
5B
ACCENT BY DAVID CARR
New York Times Service
NEW YORK — In a couple of weeks families across the land will open their local newspapers in the secular ritual of finding a Christmas Day movie that everyone can attend. This year there will be the cringe-inducing giggles of Little Fockers, the sci-fi splendors of the Narnia franchise, an animated picnic with Yogi Bear and True Grit, a western from those nice Coen boys, Joel and Ethan. Those would be the same brothers whose dark comedies and twisted genre spoofs turned them into a fetish object for a generation of critics. The ones who created a murderers’ row of cinematic sociopaths, including Anton Chigurh, who used a coin flip to decide the fate of his victims before dispatching them with a cattle gun in the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men from 2007. Both films are set in the West and feature vivid manhunts, but no one would ever mistake No Country, or any of the Coens’ other dozen or so films, for a Christmas movie. Loping in straight and true over the horizon comes True Grit, a classic western about a plucky 14-year-old who heads off into Indian country flanked by lawmen to hunt her father’s killer. How classic? The last time around, in 1969, True Grit won a bestactor Oscar for a guy named John Wayne. The Coens’ version brandishes wide-open adventures, grizzled hearts on the sleeve and a young heroine who is by far the biggest pistol in a film full of them. And judging by the late-in-the-year release date, the pedigree of the directors and its gilded cast — Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin — Paramount, the studio that is releasing the $35 million movie, is hoping that True Grit will be part of that other big gift-giving evening called the Oscars. Hollywood doesn’t revisit the western genre frequently, and does so at its peril. They made True Grit not as corrective to the movie featuring an eye-patched Duke wheeling around as
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VENGEFUL: True Grit is a classic western about a plucky 14-year-old who heads off into Indian country flanked by lawmen to hunt her father’s killer. Rooster Cogburn but because both brothers loved the book by Charles Portis that it was based on. The novel is narrated by Mattie Ross, a spinster who tells the story of her quest many years earlier to avenge her father’s murder by a no-account by the name of Tom Chaney. Her younger self stomps into the frame of the Coens’ film with a gift for language and figures, a vision of pigtailed precocity. In True Grit, the Coens never let go of the fact Mattie is a child, but they don’t make her movie-cuddly either. Mattie, played by a relative newcomer named Hailee Steinfeld, uses mostly bluster and bafflement to enlist Cogburn (Bridges) and a Texas ranger named LaBoeuf (Damon) in her quest, but with dollar signs in their eyes, they sneak off without her. She sets off after them but is temporarily thwarted when a ferryman refuses to carry her across a surging river as Cogburn and LaBoeuf watch in amusement from the other side. She heedlessly plunges
into the river on her little black horse, hanging on as it struggles to the other side. The music swells as she emerges, dripping but triumphant, now a made member of the ad hoc posse. Serious fans of the Coen brothers could not be blamed for waiting for another shoe to drop, an ironic twist or the pop of a balloon. It never comes (although Rooster expresses admiration for the horse, not the girl who rode it across). Fans who have become used to walking down lurid alleys full of portent and eccentrics who seem to come swinging out of nowhere may have some trouble orienting themselves among the open country and recognizable characters in True Grit. The Coens and their longtime cinematographer, Roger Deakins, work within visual parameters erected by John Ford, shooting a sprawling western with looming landscapes that etch the relative insignificance of the people riding across them. As in the book, the characters speak in
ornate, excessively civilized ways — they make the characters on Deadwood seem plain-spoken in retrospect — perhaps as a bulwark against the uncivilized matters at hand. In True Grit justice comes swiftly but fairly, and no one ends up dead who didn’t have it coming. It is, at bottom, an emotional, even ardent, film. “I don’t think they thought a lot about how the film might land,” said Brolin, who plays the dimwitted Chaney. “We all enjoyed ourselves. Except Joel. I don’t think that’s his specialty. But they have no pretense, no expectation, and they do what they like.” After sitting down with Damon, the first thing the Coens asked was whether he had read the book. “I hadn’t, but from the first moment I talked to Joel and Ethan, it was all about the book,” Damon said. “Once I read it, I understood, because the language is amazing. So much of the dialogue that is in this movie is right out of the book.” The brothers, who share
‘The Tourist’, a journey of cliches BY MANOHLA DARGIS
New York Times Service
It takes a big man to hold the screen level when Angelina Jolie is around — usually the whole thing just tilts in her direction as soon as she struts into the frame. Her partner in crazy-time fame, Brad Pitt, helped keep the balance in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, their only film together. And now Johnny Depp tries to do much the same in The Tourist. Going for muted, eyeliner- and nearly irony-free, he plays an ordinary U.S. citizen who bumbles into a Continental intrigue, which looks like a film you’ve seen before, because you have. You know that movie. It’s the one in which Cary Grant and Grace Kelly don’t just travel by train, they also trade knowing looks in the first-class dining car as the waiter fills their glasses, and a shady type secretly takes their photo. The people behind The Tourist would like you to flash back to 1955 — as Jolie’s wardrobe of long gloves suggests — a risky strategy, given that you actually might. The truth is that it takes an exceptional director to prevent an entertainment as flimsy as this from collapsing under its own weightlessness. Alfred Hitchcock pulled it off with Grant and Kelly in To Catch a Thief, a bauble that sparkles like a jewel because of the worldclass scenery, its stars included, and because of, well, the directing. Stargazing is the only reason bonbons like The Tourist are made, dreams of box office bonanzas aside. But stars need just the right setting and a director who knows how to make them shine, as Steven Soderbergh does with Pitt and George
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ON TRACK: In The Tourist, a train journey turns into a swashbuckling adventure when Ellise (Angelina Jolie), left, accidently meets Frank (Johnny Depp).
THE TOURIST • Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck • Written by von Donnersmarck, Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes • Director of Photography by John Seale • Edited by Joe Hutshing and Patricia Rommel; • Music by James Newton Howard • Produced by Graham King, Tim Headington, Roger Birnbaum, Gary Barber and Jona
Clooney in the Ocean’s franchise. The director also needs to hold his own, which, from the generic look and feel of The Tourist, clearly wasn’t the case with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. He does put personality into the occasional scene, including a mysterious, hushed interlude in which Jolie stands with her back to the camera as Depp creeps up from behind — lover or stalker, you’re not
initially sure which — before pulling her close for a hungry kiss. It’s a nice idyll among a wash of cliches that include Russian muscle in service to a big meanie, Shaw (Steven Berkoff), whose quest for stolen loot leads him to Elise Ward (Jolie). A mystery woman of rare ability (she can pick a lock and wear offthe-shoulder gowns), she eludes Shaw while dodging assorted law enforcement agencies, including Scotland Yard, where Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton curl stiff upper lips. Elise pauses long enough to slide into a train seat opposite Frank Tupelo (Depp), who, after gulping at his good fortune, explains he’s a vacationing Wisconsin math teacher (as if!). Dinner leads to drinks leads to complications, including hailstorming bullets and a few sluggish boat chases in the Venice canals. The main job of von Donnersmarck seems to have been to find new and flattering ways to shoot Jolie as she catwalks from Paris to Venice in soaring heels. He tries to invest this adoration with some self-conscious
wit, mostly by having all the men in the movie gawp at Elise as if she were as much a supernova as the one playing her. But all this genuflection — she parts one crowd as Moses does the Red Sea — feels forced rather than mischievous. It must be tough for Jolie to find roles that fit. Off screen she remains a fascinating presence, but on screen she now tends to overwhelm her roles and even her movies. Like every memorable screen star, she still has a face you can get lost in, with its push-pull of hard, jutting angles and well-endowed lips. It’s a face built for extremes, though early on she could also make it work for somewhat smaller, human-scaled roles that were nonetheless tricky for her. Superheroes and superfreaks have long been her truer calling, one reason that The Tourist seemed vaguely promising. When she first appears in a come-hither outfit and a small private smile, she looks ready for liftoff. She never ignites, and neither does the movie. Depp doesn’t fare better with a role that forces him to play meek and disappointingly mild, despite a few screenwriter-supplied tics. A brilliant character actor and accidental movie star, Depp has rarely been persuasive playing average. There’s no place for him to hide with Frank, so he stands around trying to look hapless as Jolie grabs the lead. There’s definitely some amusement in watching her come to his rescue, a role reversal the movie only flirts with. But oh how much more fun it would have been if Depp had really played the girl, eyeliner and all.
directing credits on all of their films, which include Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski and Fargo, said that they wanted an actual teenager to play Mattie and that despite having only minor credits on her resume, Steinfeld immediately demonstrated a mastery over the rococo dialogue. “It was apparent from the very beginning that Hailee was going to have no problem with the language,” Joel said. Bridges, who won a bestactor Oscar for his role last year in Crazy Heart and entered the pantheon of Coen antiheroes in 1998 as the Dude in The Big Lebowski, said he was charmed that the Coens had made a movie that families might line up for during the holiday season. “I guess I’m hoping that everybody sees it: western fans, Coen brothers fans, movie fans,” he said. “As an actor you want to be part of something that moves people, but is not just sentimental. I think people will be surprised to see Joel and Ethan doing a
movie like True Grit, but they believed enough in the book to just let the story speak to people.” There are some Coenesque touches amid the western classicism. Rooster and Mattie encounter a mountain man who has been roaming the hills for a long time, perhaps too long, and seems overly fond of the bear rug he wears as a coat and costume. And given that Rooster is in the habit of getting his man, usually with the assistance of a bullet, there’s a measure of retributive violence. But then again, no one is fed into a wood chipper as in Fargo. “The book is quite violent, but the level of violence was a consideration for us in a way that it has not been in the past,” Ethan said, in part because the PG-13 rating will open up the movie for audiences beyond their fan base. “Some level of violence had to be in there to demonstrate the implacability of what Hattie is up against at a very young age, but compared to what you see on HBO it’s quite tame.” Scott Rudin, who produced the film, said that its formal, reverent approach to the western, a place where quests are undertaken and adventures are had, is on the screen everywhere you look. “I don’t think that Ethan and Joel did this movie because they felt that they wanted to reinvent the western or remake another film,” he said. ” Joel Coen said it was apparent from the beginning that True Grit might land in a place where their other films had not. “When we first approached the studio, one of the things that they wanted to know was whether we could be finished in time for Christmas,” he said. “And after a while we thought to ourselves, if we do the movie the way that we were thinking about it, positioning it as a Christmas movie does actually make sense.” Or, as Ethan put it, “Yes, you can probably bring Grandma to this one on Christmas.”
A 1927 menage a trois takes an ugly turn BY STEPHEN HOLDEN
New York Times Service
The life and work of Ernest Hemingway have been notoriously difficult to translate comfortably onto the screen. For one thing, his signature spare sentences, when spoken by actors, often sound as affected as the most rococo effusions of Oscar Wilde. Beyond that, Hemingway’s chestbeating, rifle-bearing Papa Bear explorer persona seems overbearingly pompous if not creepily antediluvian in these post-feminist times. For all the cinematic crimes against him, there has been no book-to-screen translation of his work quite as atrocious as Hemingway’s Garden of Eden, directed by John Irvin from a screenplay by James Scott Linville. An adaptation of Hemingway’s problematic erotic novel, The Garden of Eden, posthumously published in 1986, it stars Mena Suvari as the meanest mean girl (pun intended) to spit venom in any film since I don’t know when. Her character, Catherine, a rich, bored heiress, is so unrelentingly cruel to her husband, David Bourne (Jack Huston), a shy young writer enjoying his first flush of success, that the now-frownedupon adjective “castrating” is the most appropriate printable word to describe her. The story, set in 1927 in the South of France and Spain, follows the rapidly disintegrating marriage of David and Catherine, who met in Paris. No sooner have they wed than she persuades him to experiment with sexual role reversal. During sex, she insists on being the aggressive top partner. Catherine cuts her hair to look more like a boy, and before long, both their heads
HEMINGWAY’S GARDEN OF EDEN • Directed by John Irvin • Written by James Scott Linville, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway • Director of photography, Ashley Rowe • Edited by Jeremy Gibbs produced by Timothy J. Lewiston and Bob Mahoney • Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. The film is rated R. It has sexual situations and strong language. are bleached identical shades of platinum. She lures Marita (Caterina Murino), an Italian beauty, to live with them as a menage a trois in their beachside house in La Napoule, not far from Cannes. After sleeping with Marita, Catherine pressures David to do the same. Catherine is so jealous of her husband’s writing that she impulsively incinerates his hot-off-the-typewriter short story, along with the clippings of his good reviews. As the movie crisscrosses awkwardly between David’s memories of the trip and his honeymoon in hell, it metaphorically compares his losses of innocence in the jungle and in the bedroom. Suvari’s Catherine is so extravagantly monstrous that Huston’s David, who provides a desultory narration, comes across as an inert nonentity. Of the many howlers in a film that has a sickly bleached palette and a soupy soundtrack, my favorite is Catherine’s haughty warning: “You must be careful about absinthe. It tastes exactly like remorse, and yet it takes it away.”
12/13/2010 5:23:08 AM