Stroszek

Stroszek (1977) is an odd synthesis of Werner Herzog and Raymond Carver--more like Five Easy Pieces than Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Herzog's movies are often about the interplay of man and nature, man and beast; though he pans his singularly ethnographic lens from Berlin to Railroad Flats, Wis., in Stroszek, this movie seems to present life as a flat line that goes from urban European dreariness to its equivalent in rural America. Grubbiness is an insuperable condition for Bruno, the depressive street musician who was abused at a Nazi reform school growing up and has been bullied ever since, and Eva, his blank-faced prostitute girlfriend. No doubt its roots are in New Hollywood at its most cynical (Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy), and it probably served as inspiration for the even-more-abstract immigrant tale Stranger than Paradise, and the American indie boomlet to come. There's a strain of defeatism here that may have been tailored to the movie's star, Bruno S., but Herzog's almost stodgily objective style seems appreciative of the small pleasures of life, of music, of a premature baby that still has a chance to grow up, even of American kitsch, and the American dream on its most shoestring scale. This isn't the story of a classy European slumming in the hinterlands. The old German uncle who uses a voltage meter to measure "animal spirits" is as goofy as the American nephew who thrusts his hips in a yokel sex dance or the banker who's clearly out of his depth--he seems almost as diminutive as the pubescent agent on Louie, a show that's no doubt on the same wavelength as Herzog's sense of humor. When the expats join the nephew in his search to find a tractor (and its driver) under a frozen lake, there's something about this eccentric Calvin and Hobbes hi-jink that's as rewarding as a cup of hot coffee on a frosty day--but with that morbid undertone that makes their happiness as fragile as the ice. Sad-sack Bruno, the only member of the expatriate trio who doesn't learn English, sees the end point on the horizon before the movie does--and it almost seems like a cheat when the movie catches up to him with a vengeance. There's a barber-shop robbery as poorly conceived as any crime in a Coen Brothers movie, and a selling out of a character that seems to be excused only because Bruno is by then unhinged. The film, reportedly written in two days, is more like a short story than a feature. Bruno worries what will happen to his instruments--like his dusty piano, his "black friend"--when he croaks, and we don't know; they don't follow him to the New World. And Herzog can't hold in his bafflement about kitsch forever, so the final scene is a doozy: "We can't stop the dancing chicken," says a cop who looks to be of Pacific Northwestern Indian extraction, in regard to the livestock arcade that Bruno sets off when he reaches the literal end of his rope. They can't stop the dancing chicken. Is that his legacy? Bruno seems borderline autistic--although when people are speaking in rat-a-tat German, it's hard to tell. He's a good man who purses his lip when he talks and emotes at times with silent-film grandiosity,  but he's also a weak man--or at least a man who was irreparably broken long ago. Ian Curtis saw this film before Joy Division was to go on its American tour; he killed himself instead.

A Room with a View

Merchant-Ivory's A Room with a View (1986) is probably as "tasteful" as movies get. When its Renaissance illustrations and Florentine backdrop and Puccini on the soundtrack first broke through the Hollywood machine, louder and more starved for art than ever, it must have seemed like a godsend. Yet it can easily be shunted aside as drawing-room porn, a Masterpiece Theater afterbirth awash with "culture," but, in sum, only as challenging as Beverly Hills Cop or Top Gun. But I still found it marvelously entertaining, and here, I think, is why -- apart from such obvious factors as its wonderful cast, with wonderful elocution, in beautifully refined settings. The E. M. Forrester novel on which it was based was written in 1908, when Victorian mores were still in tact and the dark clouds of World Wars were still beyond the horizon. What was once probably considered a satire can now be seen as a straight document about exceptionally straight times; and since the strictures that keep Lucy Honeychurch from admitting her love to George Emerson are so unbelievably anachronistic, her problems seem clear-cut and simple to the point of not being problems at all. This world is both weightless and wealthy: Lucy's distress can be served up at tea or during a game of tennis on a regal estate or on an impromptu trip to Italy. And it really can be her only concern, since nobody has to work -- so it seems as if she has no concerns at all. In short, Edwardian England seems like a sort of idyll, unsullied even by seriously sexual thoughts -- all that Lucy and George do is a three-second kiss. The rest is all talk, and not even the capital-R Romance talk of Dench's novelist, because Lucy's too cool-headed. This is life on constant holiday, when it looked like happy days were there to stay.

The Town

Ben Affleck's The Town is a movie I wanted to like more than I did. I did like it; there's no question that as a director, and as an actor, Affleck is earnest; and it's hard to not feel a certain affection for his character. But the dramatic arc goes haywire. He hardly flinches when he tries to pick up the woman he held hostage during a robbery (Rebecca Hall), and she hardly flinches when the FBI guy (Jon Hamm) tells her the truth about Affleck. He doesn't even give himself a moment to register the truth when a gangster reveals that his mother, presumed missing, was murdered. The director puts the brake on scenes too early, and plot threads simply don't tie together. The romance looms large early on, and one wants to see Hall and Affleck stay together; but Jeremy Renner, as Affleck's psychopathic accomplice, isn't a threat to their love for long. Renner is a fantastic actor when he gets to be intense and this movie gives him plenty of excuses for that. But what is one to make of this townie pscyho with a heart of gold? He has a great moment when he slurps the remainder of his drink before facing his final hail of gunfire from the FBI, but I was hoping for a little more Tommy Udo in him. He has too much "depth" when he should be simplistically frightening; and yet every other character is cardboard. Hall is stuck with the "love interest from out of town" label, and though Hamm's mannerisms are familiar, he tries to carve a prick out of his potentially dirty G-man. But Affleck is the only one with any substance, any hidden motivations. And the obstacles that require him to take on one last heist stack up too easily. Gone Baby Gone felt like the dime-novel mystery that it was, but Affleck seems to have made less with the more human material that The Town comprises. He doesn't come on as strongly with his hometown affection here, though one feels good at witnessing this love letter to a semi-anachronistic side of a city which is generally perceived in terms of wealth and history and Harvard and MIT. But the robbery scenes never go beyond average, and with the narrative ride as bumpy as it is, all one's left with is the Boston cream filling.