The Mojave County Library now allows borrowers to take out fourteen videos at a time, but still only for a week. I'm here for about three weeks all told: first with my wife and her sister, then by myself; and we'll have a special guest juror for a small part of the time, as my former law partner Curtis is scheduled for a brief visit or two over the weekend(s). Naturally, as the sole author of this blog, I'm also the sole arbiter of film quality as reflected in the following reviews. I welcome the others' opinions, but don't promise to be swayed by them. You, dear reader, deserve the full righteousness of my own views on each film.
I doubt that we will get through all the videos that we've checked out this first week. I got ten myself, using my tried-and-true method of picking a shelf at random and taking the first ten movies that sounded interesting from the blurbs on the jackets. I had heard of (and, in fact, seen) one of them before. My wife took five or six, but hers include at least two television series videos, which are ineligible for inclusion in the film festival report. Nancy got seven or eight. Our choices for actual viewing are sort of random, and the reviews reflect that random order, rather than any kind of merit.
1. The Song of Names
Starring Tim Roth and Clive Owen
Directed by François Girard
released: 2020
This movie takes place in two times: 1951 and 1986. David Rapoport is a violin prodigy brought to London from Warsaw just before World War II begins; his father leaves him in the care of the Simmons family, who promise to do their best to develop Rapoport's musical skills. The father goes back to the rest of his family in Poland, and they disappear during the war.
Meanwhile, true to his word, Mr Simmons has done all he could for young David, including keeping the boy true to Jewish culture despite not being Jewish himself. Simmons' son, whom David calls Mottl, has become David's best friend.
At the start of the film, Simmons has arranged a grand concert for David on the strength of a well-received recording of the young man's playing. Simmons, unwisely, has not insured the concert ("I didn't think I need to.") and when David fails to show up for the event, Simmons loses everything. Two months later he is dead. His son Mottl ends up being a music instructor in Newcastle. Thirty-five years later, by chance, he witnesses an idiosyncrasy of David's being performed by another music student. This starts him along the path of tracking down David, to find out what happened to keep him from appearing at his big concert.
The drama of the story is wrapped up in the Holocaust and the sense of Jewish identity. David is an arrogant prick, and acts like it. Mottl tracks him down through 1980s London, Warsaw and New York to find out what happened, then sets up another concert for David as some kind of compensation to make everything better.
It's kind of hard, considering current political events, to keep from letting my view of this film be coloured, now that the State of Israel has lost all claim to any kind of moral high ground. (I'm not going to get into any arguments about whether it really ever had any such claims; suffice it to say that, growing up, I believed it did.) But by focusing on the Jews of London in 1951, I can appreciate the horrors they survived and the efforts they made to rebuild their society and culture. In that way, I can understand David's journey from the Simmons household to the final scene of the film. It is, in some respects, a sad journey, and his resolution is valid. But he's still an arrogant prick, and he still acts like it. He didn't deserve Mottl's friendship, and he doesn't really deserve our sympathy or respect as film viewers.
Animated; starring the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Jason Schwartzman, Bill Murray and Owen Wilson
Directed by Wes Anderson
released: 2010
My wife had this puppet show on some list she keeps of films that pique her interest. Having now seen it, she is unable to speculate on why it ever made it onto that list. Maybe it was because it's based on a book by Roald Dahl, about whom people tend to say nice things. At least she and I both got short naps during the film, which is intentionally so low-key as to be thoroughly boring.
Starring Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench
Directed by Kenneth Branagh
released: 2019
This was the one film that I had seen before, when it was in first run. I remembered it as an elegant film with a moving story. That's pretty much all I remembered about it.
I was right about that, though it wasn't the tour de force that I recalled from five years ago. The cinematography is glorious, and the performances are superb, as one would expect from two of the English-speaking world's greatest actors (not to mention Ian McKellen, who plays the Earl of Southampton in one outstanding scene, wherein his character manages to lift Shakespeare up and put him down at the same time).
The story concerns the final three years of Shakespeare's life, after his theater has burned down in a performance of what would be his last play. He goes home to Stratford Upon Avon to take up the frayed threads of his family life, learning what lies he has been allowed to believe in his absence. The events recounted in the film are fictional (not much is known about what really happened, despite four hundred years of intense academic speculation) but they make for a coherent tale in Ben Elton's script. The references to truth -- "All is true"; "Nothing is true" -- come fairly thick in the film, keeping that theme front and center in the viewer's mind, but in the end you can believe either that nothing is true, or that all is, in fact, true. And the gentle pacing of the film (which I would not call "slow") gives you time to consider the idea as you watch it unfold.
The single most enjoyable moment in the film is when Shakespeare turns on the local self-important snob and puts him down in a truly Shakespearean speech.
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4. Along Came Polly
Starring Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston
Directed by John Hamburg
released: 2004
The movie stars a ferret. That should be enough said.
Well, not really. Of course I picked this movie because it has Jennifer Aniston in it, so I was bound to like at least something about it. And I did. And not just her.
The plot is entirely predictable, the jokes are somewhat tired, and what little character development there is goes exactly the way you would expect it to. Yet overall the movie is a modestly entertaining little romantic comedy. Ben Stiller plays Reuben, a tightass risk-assessment analyst who gets married to Lisa, played by Debra Messing. She betrays him on their honeymoon, whereupon he returns alone to New York to hang out with his moronic best friend Stan, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. They go to a party, where Reuben meets Polly, his polar opposite, played by Jennifer Aniston.
Opposites attract, I hear. Boy meets girl; boy wins girl; boy loses girl; boy wins girl back and they live happily ever after. Is it really possible to spoil the ending of a movie like this? Short answer: No. None of the big-name stars (who include Alec Baldwin, Hank Azaria, Michelle Lee and Kevin Hart in small roles) is doing, or even attempting, their best work in this fluffy little film full of fart jokes, but it works on the level of a second date. It's good enough. And you get to see Jennifer Aniston salsa dancing. Did I mention she was in this?
Oh, and by the way, the ferret is named Rodolfo and this is his first film role. He nails it.
5. The Miracle Club
Starring Laura Linney, Kathy Bates and Maggie Smith
Directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan
released: 2023
Maggie Smith died last week; her final film was this quiet little movie about three women who travel to Lourdes from Ireland in the 1960s. None of them is looking for a miracle in the physical sense, but they find one in the guise of reconciliation. They have an unpleasant history with each other that gets worked out -- rather easily, if you ask me -- by saying the things they perhaps should have said to each other forty years before, when Linney's character was involved with Smith's character's son, who died young. Bates's character seems to have been, at least in part, the catalyst for the group's falling out.
Having never been to Lourdes myself, and having apparently never even seen pictures of the basilica there, I was a little surprised at how beautiful a place it was. But it's a distraction, really, from what I see as the real meaning of the film, which is encapsulated literally and metaphorically by a single word unexpectedly spoken in a whisper near the end of the movie. I won't spoil the ending by telling you what the word is or who says it, but will just say that all three starring actors, and several others, gave performances that make this slightly-too-cute film an enjoyable way to pass a couple of quiet hours at home.
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6. Quartet
Starring Tom Courtenay, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins and Maggie Smith
Directed by Dustin Hoffman
released: 2013
Every now and then one comes to a film or tv show that seems to have as its main purpose the employment of old-time actors who have fallen out of favour. I'm thinking Murder, She Wrote; Matlock; and Diagnosis: Murder and any number of small movies aimed at the older generations. Younger people who stumble across these shows will ask "Who's that?", and their parents will be shocked by their children's ignorance of such huge stars and accomplished performers. It is the way of things. (It works the same in reverse, of course, which is why old folks tend to cancel their subscriptions to People. I can't tell you how long it was before I figured out that Lady Gaga is not a country-and-western group; and I'm still not sure what a Dua Lipa is.)
This is one of those movies; and since it is thoroughly British, there's another layer of obscurity to factor in. I know who Maggie Smith is, of course, and I'm sure I've seen the rest of this film's stars in something or other over my lifetime, even if I wouldn't call them Big Names. (Well, except for Michael Gambon, who plays the pompous retired director; he did something in the Harry Potter series before he died, and so is almost as big a name as Ms Smith.) They've probably all been in Midsomer Murders or something like that.
Anyway, all these people play retired musicians -- opera folk, mostly, but with a sprinkling of less highbrow backgrounds thrown in -- living in a fancy retirement home in the English countryside. Money for the retirement home's operations is running short, so the residents are putting on a fundraising show. (Mickey Rooney died before this film was made, and anyway he's not a musician. Or British. Although he could sing....) Into the bubbling cauldron of jealousy, rivalry and friendship a new personality is injected, as the retirement home welcomes a Great Star whose identity has been kept secret pending arrival.
Let me be honest: like in The Miracle Club, above, the great tragic consequences of a lifetime of snubs and betrayals get resolved rather too easily in Quartet, but that doesn't mean the film's not enjoyable, even moving in its storytelling. And because these are all huge stars and accomplished performers (presumably) they play off each other, inspiring each other to give the film their best. It is, on a human level, quite a good movie. And while we got the DVD to see Maggie Smith, I have to say that Pauline Collins as Cissy gave what I think is the best performance in the movie.
The Third Annual Havasu Film Festival will continue in the next post. I don't want it to get too long for 21st-Century readers.
