Marty (1955): Little Movie With a Big Heart

Marty is one of those films that a lot of us have heard about but not many nowadays have seen. It won four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actor, Director, and Screenplay) and was nominated for four more -  and 1955 was a pretty good year for movies. I myself had never seen it, and so the recent passing of its unlikely star, Ernest Borgnine, was reason enough to dig it up and take a look. I liked what I saw.  Marty is a small movie with a simple story - a little domestic drama about a lonely working class guy. But it packs a wallop because the story has so much compassion and a lot of heart.

Marty was a departure for Borgnine, who up until then was typecast as a bad guy, a heavy, a gangster type – in supporting roles. His Marty Piletti, on the other hand is a 34 year old butcher, an all around decent fellow, living with his Ma. All of his siblings are married; in fact just last weekend (as the story begins), Marty’s youngest sister got hitched in a big wedding; and the relatives  and  Marty’s neighbors are constantly asking, “So when are you gonna get married, Marty?” or worse, “Whatsa matter with you?.”  But Marty is self-consciously unsuccessful with the ladies, and has resigned himself to  a fated bachelorhood. Then of course he meets someone.

Borgnine is a heavy-set, Italian  guy with somewhat coarse features, and the story is set in an era, and a New York neighborhood, that extols machismo or perhaps cool suavity; but his Marty is a sweet, gentle, unassuming man. He is neither suave nor particularly cool; rather, he is unglamorous and plainspoken. We like him. His family and his buddies like him, too; they just don’t understand him. Marty feels no one understands him. Until he meets a girl a little like him.

Although the focus is clearly on the title character, Marty is also an ensemble work, and all the other actors, mostly relative unknowns, are excellent. The screenwriter, Paddy Chayefsky, gives them some great lines and wonderful set pieces to work in, and these scenes, along with Borgnine’s charm, are what set this picture apart, and are what you’ll remember and talk about after the lights come up. There’s the scene with Marty and his best friend Angie (Joe Mantell) where they’re trying to make a plan for Saturday night, knowing all along it’ll be as dreary and uneventful as all the other Saturdays.  There are a couple of boffo scenes with Marty’s cousin Tommy (Jerry Paris) and his wife Virginia (beautiful Karen Steele), one in particular where they are fighting about Virginia’s insistence that Tommy’s dreary, gloomy,interfering mother, Marty’s Aunt Catherine (Augusta Ciolli), move out of their home. And every scene with the two “old” widowed Italian sisters Aunt Catherine and Marty’s mother, Theresa (Esther Minciotti) is terrific. [Catherine to Theresa, complaining of being “thrown out” of her son and daughter-in-law’s apartment: These are the worst years, I tell you. It's going to happen to you. I'm afraid to look in a mirror. I'm afraid I'm gonna see an old lady with white hair, just like the old ladies in the park with little bundles and black shawls waiting for the coffin. I'm fifty-six years old. And what am I gonna do with myself?] [Theresa  to Catherine: Where you go, rain go.  Someday you gonna smile, we gonna have a big holiday!]

When Marty goes to the Stardust Ballroom and meets Clara (Betsy Blair), as unglamorous and ordinary looking as himself, there follows a magical sequence in which the two find common ground, dancing, walking, having a late supper at a diner, while the usually tongue-tied Marty garrulously, happily, excitedly pours out his life story to this wonderful new person, and she drinks it up like he’s the most interesting person in the world – which to her, in that moment, he undoubtedly is.  Marty’s exuberance, after taking Clara home, is so infectious, it brought a smile to my face. And, in the next scene, as Clara joyfully describes to her surprised parents how she just met a fellow, yet another smile snuck in.

There are complications. The course of true love never did run smooth, as the saying goes. But  here it’s also a journey of self-discovery for Marty, and a warmhearted lesson about what’s  truly important in life.

Marty’s a classic movie. Get it. Watch it.

On DVD, available from Netflix. Also available  from Xfinity OnDemand and Amazon Instant Video.

The Mill and the Cross (2011): Breugel Comes Alive

I’ve always had a thing for Breugel (i.e Peter Breugel the elder). A print of his painting The Peasant Wedding (c1568) hung in my in-laws’ kitchen for years: a score or more Flemish peasants dining at a long table in a large, simple room, plates of food being served, grog being poured, musicians playing, everyone having a good old time – just a colorful, homey, gemütlich (comfortable) scene. I recently had the pleasure of visiting Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches  (Historic Art) Museum  and got to see the original of that work, and  many other Breugels as well, among them the  fantastic Procession to Calvary (1564), which, coincidentally, just happens to be the subject of this film, The Mill and the Cross, a  fascinating work of art in its own right.

The Procession to Calvary is a fascinating painting in a lot of ways. Ostensibly, it is a depiction of a moment in the Passion of Christ, where Jesus, struggling to drag his cross toward Golgotha Hill, stumbles and falls. As depicted by Breugel, however, this event is barely noticeable. Instead, we are presented with a vast panoramic landscape, filled with hundreds of people: peasants, thieves, musicians, children, priests, red-jacketed soldiers, and their horses,  carts, livestock, a distant city, and an improbable mill, precariously perched on a dramatic crag overlooking the entire scene. A lot of the crowd are streaming in the direction of the execution event on the distant hill, not unlike crowds of our generation gathering for an outdoor concert. In the foreground are the distraught Virgin Mary and her retinue.  Everyone is garbed in contemporary (sixteenth century) dress, excepting Jesus himself, and possibly Mary, and the technology and other historical indicia are clearly intended to represent the present, not the biblical past.

The Mill and the Cross movie starts with a camera shot tracking across this picture. All is still, as we’d expect in a painting. Soon, almost like an hallucination, we notice that some of the people are moving about.  Then, in an extraordinary moment,  the artist himself appears, supervising some of the actors , arranging the tableau. What director Lech Majewski and writer Michael Francis Gibson are doing here is literally bringing a work of art to life. Along the way, we get some insight into Breugel’s methods, as well as his artistic, political and spiritual aims for the painting. On this level, watching the movie is a bit like getting a live action master class explicating a great work of art.

Perhaps more interestingly, Majewski selects a few of the individuals in various parts of the work and shows us their lives and how they got to this place at this time. He does this so realistically, through beautiful live action cinematography seamlessly  merged with 2D and 3D CGI, applying modern technology to the old master, that it feels we are watching a technicolor documentary somehow filmed five hundred years ago. The costuming, the environment, and  many of the scenes are just visually stunning, and, in some cases uncomfortably honest in their brutality.

For life in Flanders at that time was no picnic. The (red-jacketed) Spanish were in charge and did not hesitate to use force to keep it that way, and to enforce strict adherence to Catholic orthodoxy, just as the ideas of the protestant reformation were taking hold. As Jesus was persecuted by the Romans, so were the Dutch and Flemish by their overlords, as Majewski unwaveringly shows us. Domestic life was awfully primitive as well, by twenty-first century standards, and it is absolutely fascinating to peek into Breugel’s home, for example, as a new day starts, his many children tumble out of their bed (singular) and queue up for  a breakfast of milk and bread. As to the windmill perched high on the rocky crag, the camera takes us inside to see its gears and works, and the pattern of a country miller’s life.    

There is very little dialogue, mostly between Breugel (Rutger Hauer) and his wealthy patron Nicolaes Jonghelinckand (Michael York), and a voiceover by Jesus’ mother (Charlotte Rampling). Breugel describes what he is trying to do, and what various parts of his masterpiece will represent. Mary expresses a mothers anguish.

Aside from what I have described there is no real plot, and the pacing of The Mill and the Cross is leisurely, so I'd caution you not to watch this when sleepy or intoxicated. Nor will you enjoy it if you’re looking for action or romance. There are a few disturbing bits of violence, and you may have to close your eyes for a few moments if you are squeamish about such things. That said, the intellectual and sensual pleasures of this beautiful movie are many. It’s a wondrous, stimulating work of art about a work of art. You’ll feel invigorated, and perhaps even virtuous, after watching it. I  know I want to see it again.  A widescreen TV is recommended.

Available on DVD and BluRay, and streaming from Netflix.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012): No Masterpiece

If you are an inveterate fan of Masterpiece Theater and other high-end BBC  programming shown on PBS, congratulations! You’ve become a target audience. And The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is aimed right at you. It’s got a great cast of A-list stars, an A-list director, and an exotic locale. Indeed, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is a pleasant bit of fluffy entertainment, certainly good enough for an episode or two of Masterpiece Classic ™, or more likely, Masterpiece Contemporary ™, but, in my view, pretty thin as a feature film. If you like this sort of thing, you might want to wait for the dvd.

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that Exotic Marigold Hotel is the story of a disparate group of (relatively) elderly Englishpersons who go off to start new lives in India, lured by enticing ads extolling the beauty and luxury of the titular residential hotel “for the elderly and beautiful”, only to discover, upon arrival, that the place is a run-down dump. So, its stiff upper lip time, as our multifarious cast tries to cope with their new circumstances, amusingly for the most part, but also melodramatically at times.  It’s not just the “hotel” they must cope with, you see, but the whole wondrous (“exotic”) and somewhat alien cultural milieu in which they find themselves.  For example, it seems most of our travelers have never eaten Indian food before, and being Brits, it’s hard for them to come out and say anything about the level of attendant spicy heat. (How can one live in the modern UK and not experience Indian cuisine, you ask? Here and elsewhere,  you simply have to suspend disbelief.) Luckily, everyone in town speaks English.

There is the joy of watching great and beloved actors: Maggie Smith, Judy Dench, Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson are always terrific. The other voyagers, somewhat less well known in this country, include Penelope Wilton (Isobel Crawley in Downton Abbey), Celia Imrie and Ronald Pickup, all veterans of stage, screen and TV ( I remember Pickup as Prince Yakimov in 1987’s Fortunes of War). All do as much as they can with their characters, given the constraints of this production. Part of the problem, you see, is that Marigold Hotel labors mightily to give each member of the ensemble their due, with the unfortunate consequence that none really gets to do very much, and all are reduced to what might be called supporting roles; while no one really carries the picture. And the eccentricities of some of those characters, notably Maggie Smith’s “Muriel”, are overindulged by the writers ( I can’t blame Maggie).

It seems that the designers were also concerned that a story exclusively about oldsters might have limited box office appeal, so we get a secondary story as well, starring Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire) as Sonny, the hotel’s young earnest and energetic proprietor, Tena Desae as Sonny’s pretty girlfriend and Lillete Dubey (who played the mother in 2001’s excellent MonsoonWedding) as his meddlesome mother. This aspect of the tale is utterly predictable, and despite the attractions of the actors, pretty superfluous.

The other star of Hotel is India itself, the countryside, the marketplace, or, as Wilkinson’s character says, “the colour”. Definitely some travelogue in there.

Director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love (1998), The Debt (2011)) does the best he can with a thin, predictable screenplay. And there are some cute, funny lines. Many of these were loaded into the trailer, so, if you haven’t seen that – don’t.

In current release.

The Negotiator (1998): Taut, Smart Cop Thriller

 When a thriller is good, it catches you up, rivets your attention, quickens your pulse, and doesn't let go. Such is the case with 1998’s The Negotiator, starring Samuel L Jackson and Kevin Spacey, directed by F. Gary Gray. This is a story about cops, setups, double crosses, hostage taking, risk taking, and, as in any good thriller, honor.

As the title suggests, the protagonist is a professional hostage negotiator. Lieutenant Danny Roman of the Chicago PD (Jackson) is not only good at his job, he is fearless, as we see in the opening scene in which he parlays with an emotional man threatening to kill his daughter, risking his own life in the process. Then, Roman’s luck changes.   His partner - who had been investigating (secretly, because fellow cops were involved) the embezzlement of large sums from the police pension fund - is murdered, and Roman is circumstantially implicated in both crimes; in fact, he’s the prime suspect!

Overnight, Danny Roman goes from hero to heel; and worse, no one seems to listen when he claims that he’s innocent. He doesn’t know who the dirty cops are , so how can he trust his fellow officers to find the actual perpetrators? He realizes he has to do this himself, and soon. But how?

The frame-up claim has been a classic storyline for mysteries and thrillers forever. Seeking out the truth and uncovering the real bad guys is what most protagonists in these tales have to do. What makes The Negotiator particularly interesting  is how Roman approaches this challenge:   He walks into police headquarters and takes his own hostages, including the head of the Internal Affairs division and the deputy police chief. He figures these guys are the key to unlocking the puzzle. Roman knows exactly how such situations are supposed to be handled – he wrote the book on hostage negotiation. Now who’s going to negotiate with THIS hostage taker?

Enter Lieutenant Chris Sabean (Spacey) another professional negotiator. Now we’ve got two stars negotiating with one another in a life and death situation. Sabean is out of another district, and  Roman hopes he will be untainted by local police politics. On the one hand, Roman is playing for time, hoping to get his captives to tell him what they know; on the other hand,  he hopes the negotiations with Sabean will turn him into an ally. On the third hand, he realizes that his enemies will stop at nothing to silence him. While this is going on, the drama of a cop taking cops hostage at police HQ  goes viral: this story is all over the news, a huge crowd gathers on the street, a gazillion cops are on hand, spotlights play across the building, the FBI wants to take over, it’s a PR disaster, and pressure mounts inside and outside the building.

The contrast between Jackson’s overheated Danny Roman and Spacey’s taut, cool-as-a-cucumber Chris Sabean is wonderful to watch. Both are playing a game, and both are aces at it. We don’t know how it will turn out, or who’s in control. But we know we’re watching two great actors doing sparkling work. And just below these marquee performances, the rest of the ensemble keeps up nicely.  Of particular note are JT Walsh as  Niebaum, the Internal Affairs Division chief held hostage, with his cold, blue eyes revealing nothing, yet showing calculating wheels spinning in his head; Paul Giamotti as Rudy, a weaselly, ex-con and another hostage; and  John Spencer (a year before his memorable stint as Leo McGarry in The West Wing) as Chief Travis, trying to hold his department together amidst the chaos.

Director F Gary Gray keeps the tension building and the action moving throughout. The interior scenes, where most of the drama plays out, carry just the right amount of claustrophobia, with an intriguing hint of possible paranoia, to make us squirm a little. In fact, Gray is so sure handed at the helm of this picture ( he  also directed The Italian Job (2003) and Be Cool (2005)) one wonders why he hasn’t been given more opportunities. (He does have a new movie in production starring Bruce Willis and  Jamie Foxx, so we’ve got something to look forward to.)

If your taste runs to smart, action-thriller dramas you can’t do much better than this well written, well acted  little gem. Check it out.

DVD available from Netflix; also available for streaming from Amazon Instant Video.