Tag: Willem Dafoe

Sportin’ Life

Posted on by victorfraga

Labelling theory holds that behaviour of people is influenced by the descriptions given to them. With Sportin’ Life it is clear that Abel Ferrara has been described as an auteur enough times that he believes his own hype. Following a long and storied career in fictional features, he documents his recent trip to compete in the Berlin International Film Festival with 2020’s Willem Dafoe vehicle Siberia. To accompany the experience, some gigs have been booked for his blues band – all grist for the mill of Ferrara’s ambition to craft a “documentary about the act of making a documentary”. This knowingly ‘meta’ ambition is on smug display. Suddenly global disaster strikes and the ubiquity of lockdown living insists that that the pandemic, too, is covered. The result is a bloated hodgepodge of themes that never quite cohere and the experience outstays its welcome in even the brief 63 minute runtime.

The outcome is an equal parts band-on-tour rockumentary, family postcard, behind-the-scenes look at a Film Festival, career retrospective, quarantine diary, overview of the coronavirus situation and American talk show Inside the Actors Studio with Willem Dafoe. An overbearance of religious imagery is the kitchen sink (try playing count the crucifixes). These elements blur together original footage shot from too many angles with snapshots of media coverage from both the Festival and the pandemic. It’s all powered along by music from the concert recordings of both original blues tracks but the finished product is a purposefully formless experience; a “chaotic rhythm”, in Ferrara’s own words. It is supposed to be disorientating and begins effectively but quickly degrades into a non-narrative slog. Ambition should always be lauded but greater restraint would have produced something more coherent here.

Points are scored for the sound mixing and the enveloping bass notes that help carry the audience through the screen and into the music venues. Dafoe is always magnetic on screen and the moments that are allowed to breathe in his presence are a pleasure. Family life is also on show, with sweet moments at home and on the road with wife Cristina Chiriac and reliably cute daughter Anna. However, any interesting threads are soon undercut by pointless close-ups of artworks or grainy footage of a patient overflow in hospital corridors, for example. These range from high-resolution digital footage to the blurriest of cameraphone shots and the different textures jar. The coffin is finally nailed by Ferrera’s masturbatory decision to include snippets from his oeuvre, chosen to showcase painfully pseudo-philosophical digressions on the nature of man.

Footage from the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent police murders of civilians in the US bring a close to proceedings. There is no effort whatsoever to integrate it with the whole and this serves as a synecdochical example of the film in general. Why tack this on at the end? Just because he could, thinking that he should.

Sportin’ Life has just premiered at the San Sebastian Film Festival in the Festival Surprise slot:

The Lighthouse

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

The 1890s. The constant pounding of 19th century industrial machinery. Stark black and white photography in a 4:3 Academy aspect ratio. On the prow of a steamship as it ploughs through the water stand two men. They head towards an island with a light… a lighthouse. They disembark from a rowing boat.

Inside the building, the older lighthouse keeper (Willem Dafoe) instructs his new assistant (Robert Pattinson), who he constantly addresses as “Lad”, in his duties. Despite what’s written in the manual, he won’t allow the assistant to operate the light itself – he’s charged with repair and maintenance work.

They get off to a bad start when the Lad refuses a drink from his new superior, opting for water rather than whisky. Some time later though, he relents to join him in a whisky and asks that they address each other by name. The assistant is Ephraim, the keeper is Tom. Ephraim becomes increasingly unreliable. He has a run in with a gull and lobs a rock at it, an act which upsets Tom who believes that dead sailors’ souls inhabit the birds. Ephraim is sitting in Tom’s hoist halfway up the lighthouse exterior on painting duty when it breaks, causing him to fall some twenty or so feet.

He also has unnerving, increasingly sexual dreams and masturbatory fantasies of a mermaid, brought on perhaps by a combination of the isolation of the place and the small carved mermaid figurine he finds in a slit in his mattress. He finds her lying in recesses under seaweed atop rocks. He imagines tentacles passing and strange, close up shots of orifices in undersea creatures.

The two men’s rough period costumes and lengthy conversations in equally period dialogue over meal times and drink, the cramped lighthouse room and stairwell interiors, the harsh exteriors of rocky outcrop, gulls, mermaids, the contrasty black and white photography, the constant, pounding and pulsing industrial sound, all these elements combine to render the film a unique sensory narrative, visual and aural experience for the viewer.

It helps too that the dramatic element is grounded in two striking lead performances, but the other elements are very much in play. As the film proceeds, it becomes increasingly dreamlike and harder and harder to distinguish fantasy from reality. It’s not always clear if events are unfolding in the real world or somewhere in Ephraim’s subconscious. Like the intermittent shots rising up the spiral staircase lighthouse interior, this us not do much as descent into madness as, disturbingly, an ascent to that state as if it were a higher physical plane.

Although not that long a film, it’s highly demanding, not something to see if you’re quite tired after a hard day’s work. This is not a film that carries the viewer: a certain amount of work is required of the audience. Approach it in that frame of mind, though, and it should prove rewarding.

The Lighthouse is out in the UK on Friday, January 31st. On VoD on Monday, May 25th.

Motherless Brooklyn

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

It’s taken Edward Norton 20 years to adapt Jonathan Lethem’s novel Motherless Brooklyn for the screen, but it’s been worth the wait. Norton is best known as an actor, but his talent clearly extends a long way outside of that field – as well as being the lead, star actor here, he produced, wrote and directed, fulfilling all these duties as well as you can imagine any four separate people doing. You can sense the time that’s gone into this: the loving period detail, the feeling that the script has marinated so that the characters have a real depth to them on the page, the superb music score. There is a palpable sense here that you are watching one of the great private eye movies. Actually, there’s more than that… although this is a period piece, it feels very much about where we are now.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog (Norton) works for Frank Minna’s detective agency. A confident, safe pair of hands, Minna (Bruce Willis) has taken a chance on Lionel who suffers from Tourette Syndrome. Someone will say a word or make a gesture and it will set Lionel off. He just can’t help it. Most people would regard Lionel as an unemployable misfit, a drain on social resources. Frank sees his potential. Lionel’s head detects patterns, makes connections, won’t leave puzzles alone until all the pieces that don’t quite fit have been assembled into a coherent whole. Lionel is now an invaluable asset on Frank’s crew.

So when in the opening minutes Frank goes to a meeting which leads to a car ride which ends in his death, the circumstances and background worm their way into Lionel’s subconscious and force him to investigate, ponder and try to make the disparate pieces fit together. Somewhere in the puzzle, an unseen member of numerous committees at City Hall, lies the power behind the city’s planning department, visionary developer Moses Randolph (Alec Baldwin, the actor who among other roles is known for satirising Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live) who thinks nothing of demolishing areas where poor people live to further his idealised metropolis of the future. It’s simply collateral damage. Moses is contrasted with Paul (Willem Dafoe) who looks like a tramp but turns out to be a trained architect fallen from grace and the brother of Moses, with whom he has profound disagreements about urban development and the way people who live in a city should be treated.

Lionel’s investigations lead him to a woman named Laura Rose (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) at the Committee Against Racial Inequality in Housing. She drags him to a Harlem jazz dive where he discovers the music to be a liberating experience; if his Tourette’s is normally a cause of social embarrassment, here he finds himself involuntarily singing scat and impressing the players on the stage. He and she connect on the level of outsiders – he because of his so-called disability, she because of the colour of her skin. Eventually he will work out for himself her place in the complex puzzle his head is putting together.

Everything about this film – from its broadest brushstrokes to its finest detail – is magnificent. Nothing is here that hasn’t been considered, from Dick Pope’s satisfying noirish cinematography to a period jazz score with a contemporary urban edge involving legendary trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, composer Daniel Pemberton and a demo (of his song Daily Battles) by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. Norton’s vision is so strong and so detailed that he elicits and encourages incredible work from his well chosen team be they in front of or behind the camera.

More significantly though, the film is about something very important: ordinary people at the bottom of the pile, with their weaknesses and idiosyncrasies which make them human, doing the best they can. Perhaps even making a positive difference. And, at the other end of the social spectrum, the rich and powerful who walk all over them without seeing themselves doing anything wrong. It’s a US movie which clearly speaks to an America run by the despotic, racist and sexist Trump. The film doesn’t appear to be conceived that way – it was in development way before Trump was even a presidential nominee – it’s just that as a movie coming out now it seems to fit the place in which America currently finds itself. It likewise seems appropriate as a comment on the wider world right now. As for Britain, currently in the throes of a general election where the incumbent Tories appear to care little for truth in their duplicitous and deceitful campaigning, ordinary damaged heroes like Lionel who fight for human dignity as best they can are exactly what we need. The movie of the moment. Go see it as soon as you possibly can.

Motherless Brooklyn is out in the UK on Friday, December 6th.

At Eternity’s Gate

Posted on by victor@dmovies.org

Another Vincent Van Gogh biopic, but with a synthesis of Willem Dafoe in the lead role and Julian Schnabel behind the camera, who can resist? Despite being a legend of the New York art world, Schnabel’s cinema comes under criticism for leaning too middle-brow. But these artists are always fascinating beasts, constantly examining how artists communicate the indescribable in their head into some kind of language. Think of Jean-Dominique Bauby in The Diving Bell and The Butterfly (2007) learning to write by blinking.

Schnabel turns here to perhaps the most famous artist ever, who had to create an entirely new language to communicate the things that he saw. Schnabel and Dafoe do a great job of contrasting that interior genius with a man who can barely speak to others, who is so overwhelmed by his visions of nature that he appears to be entirely mad.

Willem, a 65-year-old in the role of a man who died at age 37, plays the part as myth. And perhaps that casting inherently allows us to see heretofore unseen shades of the man, his old soul, and Willem’s youthful exuberance. It’s a part that allows the actor to show off everything that makes him such a beloved character actor, the wild energy, the sadness behind his eyes, the controlled physicality. It does a service to both actor and subject, and one hopes that the Academy goes the same way as Venice and gives Willem the Best Actor Award for a role that works perfectly with his persona.

I did have to laugh at the appearance of the postman Joseph Roulin and his gigantic beard, though, ‘May I paint you?’ intones a shitfaced Vincent. Willem gets strong scene partners, in the form of a moustached Oscar Isaac as Paul Gauguin, Mathieu Amalric as the famously painted Dr. Gachet. A stand out scene towards the end has Willem sparring with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest, who charges that Van Gogh’s painting is an insult to God.

Schnabel shoots the process of painting with an urgency. These scenes are so vibrant, the paint pops off the screen as though in 3D – what might Bi Gan do with this material? There is an effort to relate Van Gogh’s style to photography, through the abstraction of rain on a window. With coloured lenses and hurried camerawork, Van Gogh’s form becomes the film form.

So how well does this fit into the Van Gogh canon? The recent Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela/ Hugh Welchman, 2017) is a glorified kids film, that plays to the silver screen crowd, and these American takes – including Robert Altman’s Vincent and Theo (1990) and Minnelli’s Lust For Life (1956) – are too respectful and stately to really capture the genius. More successful are Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) and an old episode of Doctor Who, which treat the artist in terms of his influence and confront our wish to reach back to him. This lands somewhere in the middle.

For despite the formal tics and a game Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate still follows the expected beats of a Van Gogh biopic. The Ear. The kids throwing rocks. The insane asylum. The notion of tortured genius isn’t really challenged by Schnabel, who doesn’t really bring anything new to our understanding of events surrounding Van Gogh. It’s a straightforward depiction of his last years, which may be enough. Its pleasures are varied, and the Dafoe performance is wonderful, but this is a tribute act, rather than an earth shattering new take.

At Eternity’s Gate showed at the International Film Festival Rotterdam,when this piece was originally written. It is out in UK cinemas and also on Curzon Home Cinema on Friday, March 29th.