Day: January 10, 2011

LFM Double Review: “Country Strong” and “Golden Girl of the West” Live at the Met in HD

From Puccini's "La Fanciulla del West" ("Golden Girl of the West") HD series at The Met.

By Patricia Ducey. Giacomo Puccini’s Wild West opera, La Fanciulla del West (“Golden Girl of the West”), is the latest offering from The Met: Live in HD series (Encore: Wednesday, January 26, 2011, 6:30 PST).

Commissioned 100 years ago by the Metropolitan Opera, Fanciulla is Puccini’s homage to the conventions and themes of the American Western—and to America itself. Puccini gave his patrons exactly what they were looking for, and after 19 standing curtain calls on opening night, the Met knew they had a durable hit in their first commission.

This year, the Met celebrates Fanciulla’s centenary with a boisterous, lyrical restaging featuring American soprano Deborah Voigt and Italian tenor Marcello Giordani and a delightful ensemble chorus of gunslingers, miners and banditos—a wonderful addition to a movie season that includes other shining examples of Americana like True Grit and the lesser Country Strong.

The music is Puccini-gorgeous, from one of his most beloved arias, “Ch’ella mi creda” (see here) sung by Dick Johnson as he begs his executioners to spare Minnie the knowledge of his perfidy, to the orchestral passages that reportedly inspired Andrew Lloyd-Weber’s Music of the Night.

Fanciulla’s story centers on frontierswoman Minnie, a saloon owner and Bible study teacher to a gold mining camp’s barely civilized miners. These are rough men: they drink their whiskey straight and shoot first, ask questions later. The only trace of sentiment emerges when they share stories of the dear mothers and big old dogs they left behind. Minnie and her “boys” are courageous loners, striking out for the fabled Sierra gold mines, for personal freedom and for adventure. Minnie with her book-learning and Bible lessons is the slim thread that ties them to civilization, and they are all in love in one fashion or the other with her. She helps them write home and tempers their anger in their many arguments and brawls. In one scene, when they catch one of their own cheating at poker, she instructs them, Bible in hand, “Every sinner can be redeemed.”  Later, we suspect she will have to walk that talk herself.

In Minnie we have a new kind of Puccini heroine: a self-made woman, owner of a thriving business, cheerful in adversity and fiercely independent. Her pistol is her best friend, she recounts to an overly amorous miner, and she breaks up more than one unruly mob with a few well-aimed gunshot blasts. Puccini looks more to Annie Oakley than Mimi for this Minnie. She would rather live alone than be trapped in a loveless marriage with any of the several men in camp who endlessly woo her–as soon as she asserts that independence, though, in walks the handsome stranger. Of course she falls totally in love, but her love leads her to triumph here rather than to a pitiable death, as in most of Puccini’s other operas. In the final act, she singlehandedly holds back the lynch mob and at the same time inspires her man to renounce his banditry and dedicate his life to goodness and love.

Deborah Voigt as Minnie.

In Fanciulla, Puccini weds the traditions of operatic tragedy with American optimism. Like the deservedly praised True Grit, Fanciulla exults in themes of Americana as well as in the Judeo-Christian heritage that anchors them. From True Grit’s Bible allusions–read without irony–to the rollicking barroom brawl in Fanciulla, both honor the eternal truths expressed by the Western genre and thus revive its classical expression. Puccini recognizes that the Western is the essential American morality play, and that goodness eventually will triumph in this land caught between wildness and civilization. That’s the real American Dream and the sense of possibility that drew so many of Puccini’s countrymen to our shores.

Writer/Director Shana Feste, on the other hand, is all mixed up about her Americana in Country Strong. She misses entirely the reason country music is so popular: there is no self-hating in Nashville. The movie starts out as a melodrama about Kelly Canter (Gwyneth Paltrow), a fading country singer sprung a little too early from rehab by her emotionally distant husband James (Tim McGraw) because … well, we’re never told why. He insists she needs to start touring before the docs release her. Do they need the money? Is he trying to gaslight Kelly because he loves a younger singer?  We hope to find out, yet McGraw’s character and motivation remain a mystery.

Kelly wants rehab orderly Beau (who also conveniently happens to be a singer) to open for her on the tour, but James chooses newcomer Chiles Stanton (Leighton Meester) instead. Kelly is jealous of the younger woman and imagines her flirting with James—or maybe she is flirting with him?—yet Kelly herself has been bedding Beau since rehab. Who’s zoomin’ who? Eventually all four of them are on tour together, in the crucible of Kelly’s comeback. They hook up, break up, fight and make up, with lots of streaked mascara but little discernable rationale. With all possible plot points on the table, the histrionics and plot twists remain vaguely mystifying. No much is at stake here: not principles, life and death, nor even love. In hipster movies, love hurts.

The actors do a heroic job, and a few of the tunes, even though we never hear one in its entirety, are iPod worthy. Paltrow proves again what a rich, emotionally layered actor she is, and Meester, of Gossip Girl fame, wrests depth and nuance from a most shallow stereotype. Garrett Hedlund from Tron could have a singing career. Tim McGraw, one of the most radiantly masculine stars on screen, though, is seriously misused or underused. McGraw’s James is written as cold and distant, but this behavior is never explained. Maybe a prequel will explain his pinched rejection of the whole lot of them?

Country Strong is a serviceable enough musical melodrama, but it’s hard to tell what the point is. This is either a script-by-committee mashup, or Feste is another screenwriter gripped by existential confusion towards her subject. She cannot decide if Country Strong is a classic melodrama or hipster hit-piece. On the one hand, the script panders to the bien pensant with jabs at what she envisions as flyover country: Christians are hypocrites, patriots are jingoists, pro-lifers are haters, crossover country is insipid and beauty queens are stupid, etc. Then why is Kelly’s triumphant comeback song an insipid pop song itself, presented without irony? On the other hand, sometimes Country Strong seems to be playing it straight, as with the actors’ performances, and that does work. Her method seems to be to throw tropes and clichés on the wall, however contradictory, and see what sticks.

Puccini’s Minnie and the Coen brothers’ Mattie Ross would be perplexed at so much wild emotion in service of such small stakes. Minnie probably would chuck Kelly out of her saloon at the first whine, and Hattie would sniff and ride off, head held high, to right another wrong. They knew that their journey was the American journey, into the wilderness and into the human heart, and that “strong” is more than just a word in a song.

In related news, the inevitable: the Royal Opera House’s Carmen is soon to be released in 3D (see here). I’m down with that.

Posted on January 10th, 2011 at 3:56pm.

LFM Review: Stalin Thought of You at The New York Jewish Film Festival

By Joe Bendel. Attention to detail and a long memory might be all well and good for office drones, but they are not so hot in dictators. Stalin was a case in point. He always remembered the little people he encountered—much to their woe. However, the tyrant saw a potential usefulness in one political cartoonist that proved to be his salvation. Indeed, the late Boris Efimov would outlive Stalin and his successors, surviving well past his centennial. It is a telling episode in Soviet history, even if Efimov himself was somewhat ambiguous about his relationship with his brother’s murderer in Stalin Thought of You (trailer above), Kevin McNeer’s documentary profile of the Communist caricaturist, which screens on the opening day of the 2011 New York Jewish Film Festival, co-presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum.

Efimov and his brother Mikhail Koltsov were both ardent Communists who had permanently adopted their revolutionary nom de plumes. Koltsov was the more outgoing sibling, rocketing up the ladder of the Soviet journalism establishment while secretly working for the NKVD. He is widely accepted to have been the inspiration for the Karkov character in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Despite (or more likely because) of his prominence, he was executed during Stalin’s Great Purge, although he recanted his forced confession.

The role of satire in a tyranny.

Obviously, this put Efimov in a difficult position as the brother of a declared class enemy, but it was Stalin himself who threw the struggling artist a lifeline with a personal request for a very specific cartoon supposedly well suited to his talents. While it was only during Khrushchev’s anti-Stalin campaign that Efimov was fully rehabilitated, his lingering sense of indebtedness to the fearsome dictator is evident all through Thought.

To his credit, McNeer presents an unvarnished portrait of Efimov, often challenging him on his loyal service to the Communist system that murdered his brother. He also often broached the subject of Efimov’s Jewish identity, but the centenarian shut him down each time. While he might simply be ambivalent, McNeer shrewdly includes footage of old Soviet newscasts using Efimov’s Jewish heritage as cover for the virulently “anti-Zionist” cartoons he was required to produce.

If not an explicitly hostile witness, it is clear Efimov was not entirely forthcoming with McNeer. Yet, rather than papering over his evasiveness, McNeer wisely exploits it to make larger points. Frankly, one comes away from Thought with a much higher regard for Koltsov than its ostensive subject.

Throughout Thought, McNeer consistently asks the right questions and provides the necessary context to fully understand the propaganda under discussion. The resulting film offers fresh insights into a dark time in human history fueled by a poisonous ideology. Selections of the New York Jewish Film Festival frequently play at subsequent regional Jewish themed film festivals, so viewers outside the City should definitely keep an eye out for it.  For New Yorkers, Thought screens this Wednesday (1/12), both in the afternoon and evening, as the 2011 NYJFF kicks off at the Walter Reade Theater.

Posted on January 10th, 2011 at 2:19pm.

Director Peter Yates, 1929-2011 & The Lost Art of Understated Cool

By Jason Apuzzo. Peter Yates, the director of Bullitt and other acclaimed films, has passed away at age 82.

I was very sorry to read this today, because just last weekend I’d watched Bullitt while listening to Yates’ director’s commentary – which was superb. Yates was a fine director – one of my favorites of his was The Deep from 1977 – and was originally brought from the UK to the United States by Steve McQueen to do Bullitt (Yates’ first American film) because of his fine work on the 1967 film Robbery; Robbery had featured a great car chase and an avant-garde style that McQueen very much liked.

"Bullitt"'s cool sophistication has rarely been matched.

Yates and cinematographer William Fraker (who just passed away this past year) brought an understated, documentary styling to Bullitt that continues to make it a cut above its many imitators – a kind of clinical/ironic detachment that made everything in the film seem more believable, and therefore more intense. Almost as if eavesdropping, the audience hardly ever sees anything in Bullitt happen directly – but only through reflected images, windows, mirrors; plus, the long lenses Fraker used give the photography the feeling of being an act of surveillance. When combined with the tight, economical performances of the cast – and Lalo Schifrin’s jazz score – these qualities lend Bullitt a cool sophistication that few films of any genre can match.

I remember my parents telling me that when Bullitt came out in 1968, they were so excited by it that they sat through two consecutive screenings – something I don’t think they’ve done before or since. The film still has that kind of effect on people, I think in part due to its depiction of strong, stylish professionals (McQueen in particular) maintaining their cool in moments of extreme tension and suspense. Watch the famous car chase from the film above, for example. Look how perfectly dressed everybody is, and how they never lose their composure – even while careening over the vertiginous hills of San Francisco.

Yates and Irvin Kershner, who also passed away recently, were director/storytellers of a different generation who were less obtrusive, less likely to impose themselves on their material than today’s breed. They were, in short, pros – with a passion for documentary fidelity to reality – more than they were self-styled, egocentric auteurs out to distort reality (Nolan, Aronosfsky, etc.).

Yates will be missed; his films, however, will certainly live on and stand the test of time.

Posted on January 10th, 2011 at 1:51pm.