KWIF is Kent's Week in Film where each week (ha!) I have a spotlight movie which I write a longer, thinkier piece about, and then whatever else I watched that week I do a quick little summary of my thoughts.
This week:
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar | The Rat Catcher | The Swan | Poison (2023, d. Wes Anderson - Netflix)
World on a Wire (aka Welt am Draht) (1973, d. Rainer Werner Fassbinder - Criterion)
The Grand Tour (1991, d. David Twohy - Bluray)
Maggie Moore(s) (2023, d. John Slattery - Netflix)
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Wes Anderson is not the most prolific of creators. Looking at his filmography, he trends at about three years between films. We just received Asteroid City earlier this year, so this quartet of short films from Anderson was entirely unexpected, and a delightful surprise. His films are quite obviously painstakingly crafted... not that other films aren't, but Anderson's fastidiousness in art and visual design requires exacting confluence in not just art design and technical production, but also choreography. It's not just that the positioning of sets, props, camera, lighting, performer, etc. need to be in the exact right position, it's that they need to all move with the precision of Cirque du Soliel to achieve the effect Anderson wants. I have speculated in the past about what drives character performance Anderson's films -- the forthright and honest, dispassionate and unfiltered way of speaking -- is either the director finds human emotion an alien concept, or else understands it so well he turns a clinical eye towards it. I'm now wondering if it's because his films are often so clockwork in their timing, that there's no room for modulation in performance.
With these four productions, Anderson has stripped down even further the performance side of things, and upped the ante on precise, controlled movement. These four tales to be told are each a Roald Dahl short story that Anderson is not so much adapting into a play or production, but a moving storybook.
He's ostensibly created a new genre.
Think books-on-tape, but visualized. We see the narrator, a big-name celebrity, in costume, on a set, relaying the prose story, with visual cues of all kinds - performers interacting, props being handed or taken away by costumed stagehands, set pieces (or pieces of sets) moving to reveal new set pieces, camera movements around a set, soft transitions to stop motion animation, in-camera visual trickery, pantomime -- all in service of the verbalized narrative.
Who is narrating can shift throughout each production, the duties lobbed around like a volleyball, but there's always a logic to the shift. Anderson has these narratives relayed at a lightning clip, to the point of being somewhat dizzying. If you get distracted, even for a second, you can lose the plot. And with all the wonderfully captivating and clever visuals, it's hard not to be distracted. The breakneck pacing is doubly part of the whole stage-production vibe that gives each story the air of a single take, but also necessary to keep the story contained to its sub-20-minute length. The narrators -- Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade, Ralph Fiennes and Rupert Friend -- all deliver the story rapidly and precisely, super enunciated, and whether it's rote memorization or reading off cue cards it's quite impressive (methinks it's the former, as eye movement and demands of performance would make cue card reading even more of a challenge.)
The four stories are:
1) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Here the narrator switches because of a nesting doll-like tale that finds a story within a story within a story. It's ultimately the tale of a man aiming for the greatest riches he can imagine by learning the very specific discipline of seeing without seeing. It takes years for him to master it but when he does, he finds that he sees something more can be done than benefit himself, that the greatest reward in life is helping others. It's the most moralistic storybook tale of the quartet, and also the most involved production, with the most performers and elaborate set changes required. It's the greatest marvel of the four. I envy the weird kids who stumble on this absolutely curious product at a young age and watch it over and over. It is both transfixing and mind expanding.
2) The Swan. A sensitive young boy is bullied by two exceptionally nasty brutes who force him into more and more extreme situations. It is a harsh tale that exemplifies the cruelty of man towards other men and towards nature, and one's ability to, if not rise above it, then endure in spite of it. It's a melancholy tale reflecting the worst of human nature. If I take anything from this it's that we've hit a stage in children's stories in the past two or three decades where parents increasingly want to shield their children from such tales, to promise the kids a world of harmony, not harshness, and this is Anderson reminding us that it's okay... that maybe such stories teach us empathy as well as extoll the virtues of endurance and perseverance. Anderson still loads the storytelling up with innate whimsy as a result of the production values and the preformative acts of the stagehands, but it's not even the proverbial spoonful of sugar. It's a dark tale with a small speck of glitter.
3) The Rat Catcher. A darkly comedic tale of a nasty rat-like exterminator hired to catch rats. He engages with the narrator and a garage hand, providing his insight into his profession, but also his own disturbed self. Richard Ayoade is the narrator here and, frankly, I'm surprised it took Anderson this long to collaborate with him. They seem to be a natural fit. Ralph Fiennes plays the ratcatcher here, and it is a magnificent comedic performance. This story exemplifies best Anderson's control over the power of suggestion, using the combination narrative and pantomime to get through the most unpleasant aspects of the story.
4) Poison. An Englishman in (presumably) occupied India awakens to finds himself in a predicament with a poisonous snake asleep on his belly. His associate summons the doctor, and both endeavour to aide the man in his situation. While each of these tales is told in a rapid clip, this one utilizes its storytelling pace like a ticking time bomb, ratcheting up the tension as Dev Patel and Ben Kingsley try to diffuse the situation, while a more and more uncomfortable-looking Benedict Cumberbatch lay motionless in bed. It's easily the most exciting of the quartet's stories, but it's climax is the most sobering and potent. We think this is a whimsical story about a most tense situation, but the poison in question is the racism already in the Englishman's blood. it's toxic and spat venomously, with no easy antedote.
I can see these not being to everyone's delight, because the form here is so radically different than what we expect from a Wes Anderson film, or from film in general. It's a new form of storytelling that I would love to see others try their hand at, having actors narrate a short story but providing staged visual accompaniment, maybe under a structured anthology. I don't imagine it becoming a dominant form of entertainment, but it's such a bold new way to tell stories. At the very least, I would love more of this pairing of Anderson and Dahl. It's clear the influence the author and his storytelling, has had on the director.
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This is my first exposure to Fassbinder, as part of Criterion's October selection of Techno Thrillers. I only just learned that the production was a two-part made-for-TVmini-series based on the Daniel F. Galouye novel "Simulacron-3", which suddenly makes much more sense to me. I had wondered how someone like Fassbinder who was incredibly prolific (looking at his IMDB page, he had completed over 40 productions in about a 15 year career before his death) could come up with such an immaculately well-realized cyberpunk story in the early 1970s. Of course there was a novel behind it, there had to be. And, as a production, it feels very much structured like a novel, less like TV or a movie.
Running 205 minutes, on a German TV budget, early on it seemingly feels the strain of its limitations. The sets and wardrobe and lighting seem a bit cheap, the performers somewhat stiff, and there's just some oddness, like lack of extras or strange behaviour on screen. But moving past the 1970's German TV of it, and it starts to unveil itself... and the methodology of a craftsman comes through. There aren't special effects in this production, but through use of mirrors and windows and camera positioning or movement, Fassbinder delivers clues and cues to what's really going on. Glass is a motif throughout the production in both obvious and subtle forms. It's clear that the director is thinking both about telling the story as well as presenting it.
I had no idea cyberpunk existed as a genre prior to, like, William Gibson, but this is quite definitively a cyberpunk prototype. Our protagonist, Fred Stiller, is one of the architects of a simulated reality, where thousands of unique near-humans exist, primarily for the purpose of advancing market research for the government. Stiller's colleague mysteriously dies in an unlikely accident, after seemingly going mad, Stiller begins to question the project. When another colleague, the head of security, disappears before his very eyes, and then seems to be the only one who remembers the man, Stiller begins to question his sanity.
It's not really a spoiler to say that Stiller learns his reality is, in fact, a simulation. It's the obvious revelation that I worried the story would spend 3 hours building towards. Instead, the clues are laid out for the audience to piece together, and for Stiller to resist the truth until he can no longer ignore it. By the mid-way point (the break between the two episodes) Stiller is aware that he is not a real person, and then it becomes about what he does with that information.
I'm blow away with this early 70's sci-fi psychological thriller and how adeptly and thoroughly it negotiates its ideas of reality, which, to me didn't seem to become part of the sci-fi conversation at large until the 90's when VR became a buzzword. I was captivated by not just the story but the choices made in the production of the story that smartly expand on the world, and the worlds within worlds. I was going to say I'm surprised this hasn't been remade, but Galouye's novel was also the basis for The Thirteenth Floor (1999) which I recall being a trite, subpar production. This is an utterly surprising, quality piece from a filmmaker I probably shouldn't like very much, but I'll separate the art from the artist for the time being.
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Re-released this year by Unearthed Films, I picked up the blu-ray of The Grand Tour on a recent physical media hunt because it was "A David Twohy film" I had never heard of before. It stars Jeff Daniels, but the figure on the painted box art it looked at first glance like Jeff Bridges to me, further confusing me. It also intoned time travel ("He came back from the future to save his only child from the past") so that's all I needed.
Once I unwrapped the box, and saw that the case had a reversible liner with a different image, I immediately recognized it... Timescape. This film was released in theatres as Timescape. Or, at the very least, it was advertised in comic books with that second image as Timescape. But that was still the limit of my familiarity. I had no idea what I was in for.
The film delicately balances its sci-fi aspects with a very human story of a flawed and hurting man looking to keep it all together in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Daniels does a pretty amazing job at keeping the character consistent between investigating what his guests are up to, fighting his attraction to one of them, trying to be a good dad, holding his father-in-law at bay, and struggling through guilt and depression. Though we didn't talk about depression much in the early 90's, it's clearly a film that is working through it, showing that there's no easy fix but sometimes you just need to prioritize others over yourself.
I liked this quite a bit. It's a surprisingly deep story within a thrifty production that has those layers that Twohy always brings to his scripts, elevating it above the usual direct-to-video or B-movie genre pictures. Twohy is a pretty good visual storyteller, though not exactly a stylist, and I think he trusts his writing more than his visual storytelling which may be what has held him back from being a more prominent director. This is a bit of a gem.
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Maggie Moore(s) is the second directorial feature of Hamm's Mad Men co-star and friend John Slattery. It is a dark comedy/crime drama about a troubled sandwich shop franchisee, Jay Moore (Micah Stock), whose life spirals out of control resulting in a hitman murdering his wife, Maggie, as well as woman of the same name. Hamm plays the widower Police Chief who is trying to make sense of the chaos.
The film co-stars Tina Fey as a neighbour to the Moores who Hamm's Chief takes a romantic interest in. Fey and Hamm have had a long history of working together (notably 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt), and there's such a natural sense of comfort between them. There may not be heavy fireworks between them, but there is a sweetness to their pairing that plays well on camera. If I'm honest, I found the relationship drama between Fey and Hamm to be far more stimulating than the shitstorm Jay Moore gets himself into and the knots Hamm and his deputy (Ted Lasso's Nick Mohammad) try to untie. They're almost two separate films tonally, the relationship dramedy and the crime comedy, and they do seem at odds with one another. The third act culminates in gunplay and violence that is even more tonally at odds with the rest of the production.
Positioned as a comedy by Netflix, I find it difficult to laugh when child pornography and spousal abuse are kind of instigators of the films high-jinks, and there are only a few outright chuckles found within. To its credit, the film never lost my interest, because I found Hamm held this up on his beefy shoulders pretty well, but I've seen more than a few of the muddy small-town crime-comedies over the years, and the key distinguisher of them as a subgenre is that they're all pretty forgettable. They all want to be Fargo but the only memorable one is Fargo. The difference with Fargo is how conscious it is of its tragedy. It's a satire of human nature, how our egos tend to just dig us deeper into holes we've already dug. Maggie Moore(s)' story is trying to find humour in its horrors, and just can't escape the nature of the horrors it presents. I think maybe if they shifted tones, did more of a Hell and High Water vibe, taking it all more seriously, it would play better...heavier, but better.
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