Million Dollar Baby This is an extract from a longer piece. Maggie idealizes a family that, in reality, cares very little about her. Unable—or perhaps unwilling—to confront that painful truth, she romanticizes both her family and her past. The moment when that illusion finally collapses is devastating. The disbelief in her eyes and voice when she looks at her mother and asks, “What happened to you, Mama?” lands like the silence after an argument. In that instant, the illusions of childhood and fairy-tale endings dissolve. We all see the world, to some degree, through the stories we have constructed about it. Removing those rose-colored glasses can reveal a reality we would rather not confront. Yet Million Dollar Baby suggests that seeing people as they are, however painful, may ultimately be more sustaining than living within our fantasies. Maggie is capable of making that transition. Frankie Dunn is not. Frankie’s guilt and his inability to forgive himself over his relationship with his own daughter deepen his attachment to Maggie, who gradually becomes a surrogate daughter. Yet instead of allowing this new relationship to release him from the past, he remains bound to it. He keeps all his daughter’s returned letters in a box in his hallway closet, perhaps preserving the fantasy that someday—at his funeral, perhaps, or when she comes to empty his house—she will finally read them. It is easier for Frankie to cling to the belief that, if only he had done something differently, he might somehow change the past than to accept the present as it is. Maggie eventually confronts reality; Frankie continues bargaining with it. By failing to forgive either himself or his daughter, he remains attached to the hope that someday their relationship will become what he wants it to be. We sense, even if he cannot, that it never will. Denial is a powerful thing. Frankie uses these defenses to protect himself from pain, but they also prevent him from forgiving himself—for what he believes he has done to others, including Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), and for what he believes his daughter’s rejection says about the kind of man he is. In this sense, Million Dollar Baby may be the Eastwood film that most deserves the title Unforgiven. Ultimately, the only letter Frankie’s daughter may ever read is the one Scrap writes to her—the letter that, through his narration, has been telling us Frankie’s story all along. And, of course, it is the only one worth reading.
Gravity Beyond its breathtaking images and extraordinary special effects, Gravity is a film about adversity, isolation, and perhaps our most elemental fear: dying alone. Alfonso Cuarón strips these enormous subjects down to the simplest of narratives—a human being struggling to survive. Since Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, filmmakers have looked to the stars as a place of fantasy, possibility, and fear. What better setting for a story about the will to live than outer space, where there is literally no one to save you? At the center of Gravity is a deceptively simple question: What makes us keep going when there seems to be no reason to do so? Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is not simply fighting the physical forces that threaten to kill her. Long before she is stranded in space, part of her has already withdrawn from life. Her journey is therefore not only about survival but about choosing to live. In the weightlessness of space, she can continue drifting, or she can find a reason to return. Cuarón explores these ideas visually rather than rhetorically, through some of the most beautiful and elegant filmmaking I have seen on the big screen in a long time. Even the title carries multiple meanings. Gravity is weight, seriousness, and the force that holds us to the Earth; “grave” evokes both solemnity and death. The film takes place in a world defined by weightlessness, yet its subjects could hardly be weightier. That tension runs throughout the film. What is particularly impressive is that Cuarón never allows the technology to become the subject. The technical achievement is extraordinary, but the technology serves the story rather than the other way around. The long, fluid takes—reminiscent of the extended shots Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki used in Children of Men—allow us to experience something of the disorientation of weightlessness. Camera, actors, and music seem to move together in a world without a stable up or down. The result has the fluidity of dance: everything appears effortless, concealing the enormous amount of work required to create that illusion. Yet for all the attention paid to the film’s technology, scale, and spectacular vistas, Gravity is ultimately more concerned with an interior landscape than an exterior one. Much of the film’s emotional force resides in Ryan’s face and voice. At moments, the images of her face framed through the helmet visor recall the expressive close-ups of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, or even Chaplin’s face in the final moments of The Tramp. The surrounding spectacle falls away, and a human face becomes the landscape that matters. Cuarón deepens that intimacy through his shifting use of point of view. At one moment, we are outside Ryan and Kowalski, watching tiny human figures struggle against the vastness of space. Almost imperceptibly, the camera moves toward Ryan until we find ourselves inside her helmet, looking through her visor and seeing what she sees. We move from observing her experience to inhabiting it. The distance between…
Blue Jasmine I loved this film, particularly the acting and especially Cate Blanchett’s extraordinary performance. But then, I love Woody Allen. I go to see his films for much the same reason I used to see Jean-Luc Godard’s—even the bad ones give me food for thought. Here, I had a bountiful feast. Blanchett’s performance is remarkable throughout, but it is the final scene that has stayed with me. I can still see Jasmine sitting alone on that park bench, her surroundings as forlorn as the devastation on her face. The moment is riveting precisely because so little is expressed overtly. Hopelessness registers in her empty gaze, in her isolation, and in the terrible stillness of a woman whose carefully constructed identity has finally collapsed. I was reminded of Emily Watson’s luminous performance in Breaking the Waves, in which her face seems capable of expressing the range and intensity of emotion we associate with the great performances of the silent era. Blanchett achieves something similar here. Her soul seems laid bare as the life she has constructed from something other than reality finally falls apart. The crumbling of her story becomes visible in her face. Jasmine has spent so long creating herself that, when the story collapses, there appears to be no self left for her to return to. That is what makes the final scene so haunting. It leaves us not only shaken by Jasmine’s fate but questioning the stories we believe about our own lives. Jasmine may be an extreme case, but the mechanism is familiar. Much of what we think of as ourselves is not necessarily a direct experience of reality but a continuous mental narrative composed of roles, desires, hopes, fears, memories, expectations, and the perceptions of others. Jasmine’s tragedy is that she has mistaken that narrative for reality. Her personal experience therefore becomes universal. Blue Jasmine has frequently been compared to A Streetcar Named Desire, understandably, because of the parallels between Jasmine and Blanche DuBois. But I found myself thinking instead of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which Alma and Elisabet struggle with identity, performance, and the stories through which the self is constructed. In all of these works, the boundary between who a person is and who she believes herself to be becomes increasingly unstable. This idea also recalls Byron Katie’s Loving What Is, in which she argues that much of human suffering comes from believing thoughts that conflict with reality. Whatever one makes of that philosophy, it provides an intriguing lens through which to view Jasmine. She does not merely lie to other people; she has built an identity that requires her to continually reinterpret reality in order to preserve it. When reality finally becomes impossible to evade, she has nowhere left to hide. In this respect, Jasmine also reminds me of Kirsten Dunst’s character in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Both women inhabit psychological worlds that profoundly shape their relationship to external reality, although the films take them in very different directions. Many people I…
Breaking the Waves Somewhere between a fable and a fairytale, this haunting melodrama lyrically dips into both your worst nightmare and your most sublime experience in a passionate tale where sexual love and religious fervor engage in a battle to the finish.Set in an isolated, coastal Scottish village in the 1970′s, this is the story of shy and sheltered Bess’s (Emily Watson) transformation by love. Repressed by her family and Calvinist upbringing, after marrying Jan (Stellan Skarsgard), an outsider to her community, she literally blossoms into a surprisingly passionate wife, falling in love with quasi-religious intensity.Unable to live without Jan once he returns to the oil rig, she prays fervently to God for his return. Proving that you need to be careful for what you pray, Jan indeed returns, but paralyzed from the neck down. Hysterical with guilt, Bess is convinced this is her fault, and resolves to do anything to save Jan’s life, even if it means destroying her own. The melodrama concludes, the nightmare begins.Knowing that sex is no longer possible for the two of them, in a strange twist to this already strange story, Jan asks her to take a lover as a means of rekindling what they shared, in a Job-like test of her love. So pure and unconditional is her love that she agrees, firm in her belief that her sacrifice will heal Jan.Under guise of a love story, this is really a film about faith. As she sets out for her hell on Earth, we too take that leap of faith, following down her path of martyrdom. This is not a whore, this is a saint. The bells in heaven confirm it, like the rays of sunlight that confirm Elizabeth Proctor’s (Joan Allen) goodness in another recent film about faith, The Crucible, where the good die for their faith, a theme rare in modern movies.Really more akin to the 1928 film by another Dane, Carl Dreyer, where a young woman also battles a lot of scowling church elders, both The Passion of Joan of Arc and Breaking the Waves owe their success in treating such difficult subject matter to the illuminating performances of their main actresses.Like Falconnetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Watson’s raw innocence, fervor and absolute belief in her character, have us on the edge, while her face radiates the whole range of emotions that only silent era characters displayed. Her soul is laid bare – reflected in her eyes, her quivering lips, her fearless trust, her innocence and the purity of her belief. This is genuine emotion, real passion. If cinema is emotion 24fps, Watson embodies this as she embodies Bess and makes her credible in this magical story that defies reality. She is the reason I take my leap of faith into believing this absolutely unbelievable story.Realizing his risky venture in concocting a brew of sexual love, religious faith, martyrdom, insanity, lurid sex acts, true love and 70′s rock music; von Trier uses cinema verite style camerawork to…