Once Upon a Time … When the Music Spoke

This is the fourth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

A great number of films strive for honest portrayals of love. Most of them fail and aim for lust instead — after all, sex requires far less talent and is so much more titillating. Here’s a film that presents us with two people brought together by a love so great there’s no room on the screen for it to manifest in the form of sex, or even an innocent kiss or warm embrace. Like Casablanca long before it, Once is about a man and a woman who, for reasons slightly beyond their control, can’t be together, but that doesn’t stop intimacy so profound that the film seems unprepared for the gravity of it.

Once is one of the more beautiful love stories of the cinema. It stars two people who were, at the time, falling in love themselves. They’re both musicians, which means their hearts are already tuned to love’s frequency. He is Glen Hansard, the singer and guitarist for the Irish band The Frames. She is Markéta Irglová, a Czech singer and frequent Frames collaborator. They essentially play themselves in John Carney’s musical fable set on a lovely Dublin street, where the only people we meet are musicians with unappreciated skills.

He is simply known as Guy in the credits, and she is Girl, although they are never identified as anything in the film. He is a street performer in a bustling plaza. He takes requests in the day, but at night he performs his own material, music that reveals the hurt, betrayed heart withering behind his battered guitar. She is a Czech immigrant selling flowers to tourists and she comes across his music at a vulnerable moment as he bleeds heartache during one particularly hurtful song. I love her entrance: the camera moves in slowly on his face as he sings the final lines of the song and as the camera pulls back there she is, as if materializing from a dream.

They become friends. He repairs her vacuum cleaner. She writes lyrics for a song he had long ago stopped tinkering with. She invites him to her apartment, where he finds out she has a daughter, an absent husband and three Czech neighbors who come over to watch football on her television set, the only one in the building. Abruptly and inexplicably, he decides to travel to London to get his girlfriend back and maybe get some kind of record contract. But before he goes, he wants to lay some tracks down in the studio now that he has a true collaborator and a backup band of other street performers. At times the film stops being a film altogether and nearly becomes a behind-the-scenes feature on a band documentary: there is lots of studio footage, candid music experimentation and playful moments on a beach during a break in recording. Even as the film wanders through these musical montages, though, the camera lingers on the budding romance between Guy and Girl.

Of course he loves her and he doesn’t want to leave. He respects her too much to force himself on her, even though that is a mistake he nearly makes in the film’s early moments. At one point he asks her if she loves her husband, to which she responds with several words in Czech. It’s a Lost in Translation moment and we’re not meant to know what she says, but the coy smile on her face suggests she might have answered, “No, because I love you.” The ending of the film is perfect, delicate and wonderful. A lesser filmmaker would have made it a tragedy, but Carney makes it a story of endlessly uplifting hope.

Once is a fairy tale. It’s also a musical. Music injects itself in every scene, and many of the plot developments are based on the actual recording or writing of the songs on the soundtrack. Consider a wonderful moment for Irglová: she’s in her apartment writing lyrics for Hansard’s song and her CD player runs out of batteries. She throws a jacket over her pajamas and walks down to the market for some double-As. On her return journey, in an unbroken camera shot on Dublin’s dark car-lined streets, she sings the song she just finished writing (“If You Want Me”). It’s a moving song that reveals the depth of her own pain and regret. In another scene, she sits at a piano and weeps as she ponders her own future in a mournful ballad (“The Hill”).

Once is filled with a number of poignant moments, but none quite like the singing of “Falling Slowly,” the song that won Hansard and Irglová an Academy Award. The scene takes place in a music store, where he teaches her how to perform a song he’s been working on. He runs through the verse, chorus and bridge, and she writes piano parts right there on the spot. After only several minutes they begin playing the song in a sequence too magical not to be a fairy tale. I love how the camera never leaves their faces; only once does it cut to a reaction shot of the store owner, who quietly nods his approval of the enchantment taking place behind him. To appreciate the scene more, we must leave the context of the film and visit the Oscar ceremony (see it here). After an emotional performance of the song live, Hansard and Irglová win an Oscar, but due to a misplaced musical cue only Hansard gets to make an acceptance speech. Later, after the commercial break, host Jon Stewart, in a classy move, stops the show and asks Irglová to come out to have her moment. Her belated speech should be considered part of the Once canon: “… Fair play to those who dare to dream and don’t give up. This song was written from a perspective of hope and hope at the end of the day connects us all, no matter how different we are.”

John Carney’s film is an uplifting picture made with considerable talent under what must have been difficult conditions using digital cameras in available light. Apparently it took like 17 days to shoot, which is as speedy as it gets. I object to the treatment of the DVD cover — where the movie poster is Photoshop’d so Hansard and Irglová are closer together and holding hands, and now wearing different clothes — but that’s hardly Carney’s fault. How he managed to get complex performances out of non-actors, musicians no less, is remarkable. And the statement he makes about love and hope is beautiful and pure.

I don't follow celebrity romances too much, but when I heard that Hansard and Irglová had broken up a year or so after their Oscar win, it hurt almost as much as the end of Once. It's our hope that the characters, and the actors playing them, can be happy forever. The film, though, provides the answer to that: love, no matter how fleeting, is an emotion that's always worth having, be it for 20 minutes or 20 years. Yes, Guy and Girl's love was short-lived, but once it's there it never leaves.

Requiem For a Nightmare

This is the third in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Addiction is a monster with an insatiable appetite, which is appropriate that Requiem For a Dream is more a horror film than anything else. This is not Trainspotting or Blow; there is no irony or humor in the destruction that drugs cause. Requiem bypasses all the winking drug culture acknowledgment and taps into the repulsion and the terror of addiction. It does it on the ground level with four people who have otherwise good souls with real hopes and dreams, real aspirations that float on the edge of the screen. And then addiction guts them from the inside out.

Requiem For a Dream is a horrifying film. Its dread can be almost unbearable. The first time I saw it the audience seemed relieved that it was over, as if its depictions were some form of emotional torture. Truly, though, it can be intense: the drilling music, the character’s pathetic conclusions, the unrelenting editing. It pounces on you and doesn’t let go. The effect is haunting and disturbing, yet provocative and strangely cathartic. It’s also deeply, deeply heartbreaking.

The film is directed by Darren Aronofsky, who wrote the screenplay from Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel of the same name, a novel that perversely exempts itself from basic grammar and punctuation. At the time of the film’s production, Aronofsky was a rogue independent filmmaker. He had done Pi on the fly without permits in New York City. After Requiem, in 2000, he would go on to do his long-delayed, nearly abstract science fiction film The Fountain and then his exploration of a deeply wounded has-been in The Wrestler, where his credibility to the masses was cemented in his careful direction of has-been Mickey Rourke. But Requiem For a Dream was his watershed moment in cinema. It defined his commitment to his material, specifically his characters, who he wasn’t afraid to bleed out within his plots.

Requiem’s four stars cover the gamut of addiction. First there’s Harry Goldfarb (Jared Leto), his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly) and his friend Tyrone (Marlon Wayans). The three of them, wander around Coney Island and Brighton Beach with no purpose. In time-lapsed montages we see them doing drugs: the fidgety boredom of marijuana, the wired energy of cocaine, and then heroine, their drug of choice, which makes them quiet and reflective as they stare at the ceiling and dream. They use the drugs to inspire them: Marion imagines owning a fashion boutique with her designs on the racks, and Tyrone and Harry want to buy some pure heroin so they can “off it” and settle into an early retirement.

The fourth character is Sara Goldfarb (Ellen Burstyn), Harry’s mother, who has to buy back her television set on a weekly basis after Harry sells it near the boardwalk for drug money. “When you gonna put an end to this and tell the police on Harry, Mrs. Goldfarb?” the profiteering recipient of the TV asks. She couldn’t turn in her only son, she says and then hauls her set back up to her apartment. Sara’s drug is her past, which she dwells on but can never gain back. Later, after a telemarketing hack convinces her she’s going to be on television, Sara starts taking diet pills so she can fit into a beloved red dress that signifies the happiness that was once so distinct in her now-indistinct life. Eventually, after only several days, the diet pills stop working and Sara begins popping them handfuls at a time. At this point in Requiem For a Dream, everyone is hooked on something and the downward spiral turns into a nosedive down into the void.

What happens next can only be described as a brutal, all-out assault on the senses, relentless and unflinching. Sara grows more paranoid as her uppers stopping sending her up, and her downers stop sending her down. Her sanity drifts in and out, and eventually she’s wandering the streets a drooling mess. Harry, now completely dependent on heroin, starts itching at an infection at his injection site on his arm. The wound screams at him for more drugs, yet each needle plunge assures his demise. Marion, unable to cop her fix on the street with money she doesn’t have, sells her body to Big Tim (Keith David), an upscale drug dealer who trades his product for sex or demeaning sexual performances. Tyrone gets off the luckiest with just jail time on a minor drug charge, although cleaning up in jail is no treat. The finale is meant to shock and offend — Sara getting electric shock therapy, Marion engaging a huge dildo at a sex party — because the effects of addiction are shocking and, yes, offensive.

I’ve given away some of the third act’s secrets, but the film can’t be described in text — it must be experienced. People talk about great editing in movies, like the famous baptism sequence in The Godfather, and those discussions should always include the entire last third of Requiem For a Dream, a virtuosic collection of sequences. By the time the third act begins, the film turns into a bleak, offensive opera of degradation: The jarring music, by electronic artist Clint Mansell and strings by the Kronos Quartet, becomes the wave the film rides on. The editing cuts relentlessly between our four characters. And the pace feels like an expression of panic or hyperventilation. Watch, too, how the three acts use color: summer uses warm golden hues, fall begins to incorporate more cold blues, and winter abandons all hope inside claustrophobic fluorescents.

The colors aren’t the only camera trick, either. Requiem utilizes a bunch of in-camera tricks, some of which were invented here and are now overused gimmicks in the industry. Aronofsky and his cinematographer Matthew Libatique (Iron Man) use time-lapse photography to show Sara cleaning her house, hanging and spinning cameras to show the falling dreams of Marion and Harry, and the famous “body-cam,” which is a camera attached to an actor’s body giving the impression of a purely subjective point of view. In one scene, the camera is attached to a vibrating motor that oscillates depending on the volume of the performance. In another scene, Sara’s grapefruit breakfast is eaten in still-life elegance with no hands in the frame. To illustrate the drug use, which is never shown in any broad detail, Aronofsky filmed dozens of close-ups: lighter sparks, heroin spoons, cotton swabs, needle pokes, veins loosening and pupils dilating. These quick shots — all added up to only a second or two of film — are strung together with appropriate sound effects to show the repetition and compulsiveness of drug use. Doing it this way, without drug paraphernalia laying in every shot, it allows us to watch the behavior of the characters and not the mechanics of the drugs.

Using all these tricks, Aronofsky has made addiction into a modern-day horror story, and he’s done it with the decade’s most underrated performances. Burstyn, in a fat suit for the first half of the picture, was nominated for an Oscar for her role (and famously lost to Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich), but the film didn’t get a single other Oscar nomination. No Leto, no Wayans and no Jennifer Connelly, who deserved a nomination and a win more than she did for her winning performance the next year in the completely forgettable A Beautiful Mind. These brave actors become these characters on such deep levels that their demise is painful, their hurt hurts us. By the time they curl up on their beds in those famous last images, the film has wounded us on a spiritual level — “What a waste,” we tell ourselves.

This is a frantic, ferocious movie and it cuts like a razor across the face of all that we hold dear, our dreams and our aspirations. Addiction is the very real monster that lurks out there waiting for us, and Requiem For a Dream is the monster’s exposé.

When burlap sacks save the world

When our world ends — like really ends — let’s pray that little burlap dolls aren’t left to fix our mistakes. Although, at that point it's unlikely anyone will be around to do any praying. Hell, at that point dolls or even rusty carburetors could be tasked with the cleanup and either way mankind wouldn't peep a single complaint.

I watched 9 keenly, absorbed by its post-apocalyptic detail and its well-choreographed action, but for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why six-inch-tall ragdolls were given the job of saving the world. Or why a scientist, who could inject his soul into anything, would choose forms so tiny and so incapable of preserving man’s dual legacy of hope and destruction. I question this part of the plot, but let that be my only complaint on this strikingly different animated film.

In 9, it’s the not-too-distant future and scientists have created artificial intelligence, which will be invented to be villains in movies like this or the Terminator franchise. Notice the “peacekeeping” machines that first roll off the assembly line: they all have chaingun turrets to, you know, keep the peace. Of course, the AI responds to man’s control with hostile force and eventually every city on the planet is a smoking crater of poison gas and brimming with the stench of death.

Living in the smoldering remnants of man are the nine little stitched dolls, each named in the order that they were made. 9 is the last one created and he awakes in confusion: what is his purpose, he wonders, as he claws through the detritus of splintered wood, powdered brick and decaying bodies. This movie is not shy with its treatment of death, and it rightfully earns its PG-13 rating; think twice before bringing little ones.

Eventually 9 (Elijah Wood) meets up with the other eight sack people, including fear-mongering leader 1 (Christopher Plummer), gadget guru 5 (John C. Reilly), sexy fighter 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and loony tune 6 (Crispin Glover). Their purpose in this apocalyptic landscape, they reason, is to hide from the last of the nomadic machines as it scours the cracks for things to kill.

Surely life has more purpose, free-spirited rebel 2 (Martin Landau) says. He’s proven right after 9 finds a thimble-like artifact that accidentally turns the machines of war back on after their battery life expired long ago. Before they could hide in fear, but with fresh smoke billowing from the factories of death, the nine now have to fight or be crushed in a second apocalypse. The movie never establishes the nine’s importance well enough that we can accept their role in ending this world-obliterating calamity, but the nine believe it and that counts for something.

I love the style and feel of this film. The sack people, with their zippered fronts and hand-stitched joints — apparently this is called “stitch punk” — are terrific, albeit outlandish, subjects. They have these can-like eyes with snapping little apertures for eyelids that allow for full, expressive emotions. The villains they fight, assembled from the rubble of the wasteland, are equally impressive as harpoon-tailed pterodactyls, wormy snakes that can cocoon victims in scarlet thread, and a robotic cat with a real cat skull for its head. The bombed-out landscape provides many opportunities for these two sides to battle, and battle they do on the crashed wing of a bomber, on the plains of the war-ravaged countryside, and on the mechanical arms of a brain machine.

Mostly I liked this film because it was completely original. When was the last time an animated film used the post-apocalypse as a setting? Or featured death in such a challenging way? Or had non-human characters that weren’t talking animals? You can answer all three questions with “never” or “almost never.”

Like Coraline before it from earlier this year, 9 presents a frightening story and tells it in an inventive, unforgiving way. Children need not be coddled so diligently in this day and age. If they can handle it, let them be a little scared with 9 and its unique burlap heroes.

And just because I love the 9 artwork, here's more:

Almost Perfection: Crowe creates a classic

This is the second in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Almost Famous is one the most pure collections of cinematic moments of the last decade. Its poetry is expertly directed, marvelously written and carefully acted out by performers who will strive for the rest of their careers to find better roles only to come up short every time.

The fact that it’s partially autobiographical for writer and director Cameron Crowe makes it somehow even more poetic: this story actually happened in some form, and it’s not just the whimsy of some distant Bach-loving writer.

Crowe, who gave us Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Say Anything, was only a teen when he traveled with the Allman Brothers and other rock greats as a writer for Rolling Stone magazine. He witnessed turmoil, success, groupies and drugs from the sheltered perspective of a rock journalist. He grew up, married a rock star (Nancy Wilson of Heart), wrote some film scripts and then directed a few; everything seemed to be building up to Almost Famous, Crowe’s very personal magnum opus. When he finally undertook the film, in that glorious year before 9/11, he was ready. He brought an authenticity to the film and the innocence of that teen-version of himself. No one else could have done it with this passion and insight.

The film follows 15-year-old William Miller (Patrick Fugit), whose dream to become a rock journalist is given some legs when Rolling Stone magazine, thinking he’s an adult, gives him an assignment: 1,000 words on Stillwater, America’s newest up-and-coming rock band. The film takes place in 1973, when great music is still emerging from the ’60s for rock’s “death rattle, its last gasp.”

Early in the film William meets Creem magazine writer Lester Bangs (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who extols some insightful wisdom to his young apprentice: do not make friends with the rock stars (“Friendship is the booze they feed you”), beware of the “swill merchants” at Rolling Stone, and don’t write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars (“They will ruin rock ’n’ roll and strangle everything we love about it”). Crowe might have been quoting the real Lester Bangs’ work, or he might have been offering his own editorial of the current state of rock. In any case, the film acknowledges in every note that the post-Woodstock pre-disco era was the golden age of rock ’n’ roll and Almost Famous captures all of its electric energy to the point that we sadly grieve its passing from the screen's edges.

Although music is this film’s lifeblood (more on that later), what really gives it its soul are warm, compassionate performances by Fugit, the floppy-haired “enemy” to the rock band; Billy Crudup, who plays Stillwater’s enigmatic guitarist Russell Hammond; Frances McDormand, who plays William’s paranoid mother; and, most famously, Kate Hudson as the beautiful Penny Lane, Stillwater’s resident groupie or “Band Aid.” Band Aids, we're told, inspire the musicians with their beauty and finesse, and never with sex — "Just blowjobs and that's it," one Band Aid says very matter-of-factly.

When the film was released in 2000, Hudson was an unknown. Almost Famous is what delivered the young actress, daughter of Goldie Hawn, to the masses and launched her entire career. Her Penny Lane is magical, the kind of character we fall in love with — a Grace Kelly performance. You simply can’t take your eyes off her. It’s a big, brave performance with a number of important scenes, including a Quaalude overdose, but watch the little scenes: Hudson shooing off other girls from the Stillwater guitarist in a crowded hallway, ironing clothes during a band fight, dancing on concert trash in an empty venue, her tears when she finds out she was traded to another band for a case of beer. It’s a total performance, and Hudson never stops acting or dials it down. At one point the film frames her eyes in a close-up that it has to be one of cinema’s most beautiful single frames ever photographed. We know what groupies will do for rock stars (anything), and I fear another actress would have made Penny Lane too sexual, whorish even, but Hudson gives the character dignity, morals and confidence, yet retains that sexual liberation and expression.

Hudson is absolute perfection, but so are many roles in this marvelous film. I love Jason Lee’s performance as Jeff Bebe, Stillwater’s Robert Plantish lead singer. “I work just as hard or harder than anybody on that stage,” he screams at the guitarist during a band meeting. “You know what I do? I connect. I get people off. I look for the guy who isn’t getting off, and I make him get off.” Or consider Zooey Deschanel — Zooey, glorious, Zooey — as William’s sister who has to sneak her Simon & Garfunkel albums into the house and later provides some good advice: “Listen to The Who with a candle burning and you will see your entire future.” And then McDormand as William’s mother, who believes “adolescence is a marketing tool.” She is one of the many poets of the film, and her warm compassion seems to counter-balance the icy distraction of William’s rock world. She has one of the bigger jokes of the film: outside a concert venue she instructs her son from the family station wagon, "Don't do drugs!" All the concertgoers, some plucking joints from their lips, turn and recite it back in a rowdy chorus, "Don't do drugs!"

The film casts these honestly written characters, and many others — including more Band Aids played by Fairuza Balk and Anna Paquin — in the film’s cross-country journey of concerts, after-parties and tumultuous band meetings in which the only thread holding Stillwater together is seemingly William, the writer who might get the band on the cover of “Rolling Stone fucking magazine.” All along the way he parties a little, falls in love with Penny and interviews the band members with the exception of Russell, who delays and delays until William has missed his high school graduation and driven his mother into a panic (“Rock stars have kidnapped my son,” she tells a classroom of college students). The film builds and builds until finally the tour is over, the Rolling Stone piece is done and the Band Aids have to disperse before the real girlfriends show up. And William returns home to collapse on his bed in defeat after Rolling Stone’s fact checker says the band denied 90 percent of William’s story. There’s more to it that I'm leaving out, of course, but I love the ending. It feels complete in every way.

I said I would get back to the music and here it is: music is 50 percent of the greatness of this film. Crowe, ever the music fan, knows how to pick appropriate tunes for his characters and scenes. If you’re like me you’ll see scenes of the movie when you hear these songs outside the context of the film: greats like Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,” Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” a number of Led Zeppelin songs including “Tangerine” and “Misty Mountain Hop,” and Cat Stevens’ “The Wind,” which is featured in the lovely scene of Penny Lane dancing on the concert trash. Even Stillwater, the film’s fictional band, has some wonderful era-appropriate music that they play during many of Almost Famous’ concerts. The music ascends past greatness in one scene in particular, a scene that has come to symbolize the power that music and film hold over us: Stillwater, on the verge of a split, rides through Kansas on the tour bus and slowly, one by one, the band joins in on singing Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” It’s an act of forgiveness and the music wipes the slate clean. It’s a moving, powerful scene and it represents the height of Crowe’s skills.

I must acknowledge here that Almost Famous is a very personal film to me. It hit me at a turning point in my life. I had just graduated high school, just started doing rock journalism (and movie reviews) and found myself in many William Miller-like band situations. Almost Famous is truth. It shows a teen with hopes and dreams. All too often teens are written into movies simply to exist in classrooms or at dinner tables with grown-ups. Here’s a film where the kid is as much of the story as any of the adults, and his desires, dreams and fears are given the weight they deserve. Almost Famous is not a perfect movie — few movies are — but it feels like one, especially when you consider your emotions when the film ends. If you're like me, you're floating on a cloud.