MID-WINTER ODDS AND ENDS

TALES OF TWO MISSUSES

MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS (B-)

Directed by the esteemed Stephen Frears (Dirty Pretty Things, High Fidelity, The Grifters), this film is a shimmering, luxury vehicle for Dame Judi Dench, who made her mark on British television of the 1960’s and 70’s, later capturing American hearts and souls on such PBS imports as “A Fine Romance” and “As Time Goes By” and enormously popular theatrical films such as “A Room with a View”, “Shakespeare in Love”, “Tea with Mussolini”, and, just this past year, “Pride and Prejudice” and “Ladies in Lavender”. Trouble is, the vehicle sputters and nearly stalls halfway through when it veers from biting wit and irresistible charm to dreary sentiment. Even so, it’s pleasant enough entertainment, with Dench turning in her trademark saucy-old-girl performance, this time as a widow with time on her hands who buys an abandoned theater in the heart of London on the eve of World War II and dares to present inventively staged revues featuring naked ladies.

Though it’s hate-at-first-sight for both, the thoroughly irascible missus hires the thoroughly scrupulous Vivian Van Damm (Bob Hoskins) as the company’s impresario. The movie is a lot of fun running up to the Nazi Blitz, but sags clumsily when the mood darkens and melodramatics intervene. Flawless as it is, Dench’s performance is nowhere near Oscar caliber (she’s nominated as Best Actress). In addition to my half-dozen nominations in that category (previous posting), I can think of at least a half-dozen others I’d rate ahead of the Dame. Add Dench to a growing list of film actors whose estimable talents keep them in such high demand that they run the risk of overexposure and character repetition -- industry giants like Anthony Hopkins, Morgan Freeman, and Ben Kingsley. And speaking of Sir Ben, there’s the little matter of...


MRS. HARRIS (B)

...in which he plays that reigning monarch of the misogynists, Dr. Herman Tarnower, a New York cardiologist who invented the famous Scarsdale Diet and who, some would say, got his just desserts when he was shot and killed by his emotionally abused and ultimately jilted long-term lover Jean Harris -- which turned into a sensational media event 25 years ago. After I lavished much praise on Kingsley for his performance as Fagin in last year’s overlooked and underrated remake of “Oliver Twist,” and went on and on about Sir Ben’s amazing range and versatility as an actor, he finally landed in a role for which he is ill-suited. He looks the part of a middle-aged Jewish doctor, but, for once, he seems unsure how to project this modern-day Casanova’s swashbuckling, womanizing personality. The result is a panoply of over-the-top physical and vocal mannerisms and contortions that are showy but hardly character-defining. Perhaps the fault lies with first-time director Phyllis Nagy, who, in awe of Sir Ben’s celebrity and stature, may have let him do his own thing, and his own thing is distractingly bizarre.

On the other hand, Annette Bening, as the prescription drug-addled, habitually humiliated, driven-to-desperation Mrs. Harris, turns in an unglamorous, insightful, workmanlike performance. And the supporting cast, particularly Cloris Leachman as Dr. Tarnower’s sister, is first-rate. Nagy, who also wrote the screenplay, adroitly balances the story’s quirkily comedic and darkly dramatic elements -- mocking both characters, almost reducing them to tabloid realm, in the process. In fact, the opening credits for the film portend the melding of farce and fury, flashing old movie clips of scorned women gunning down their tormenting infidels over a jocular rendition of “Put the Blame on Mame”, from the Rita Hayworth noir classic, “Gilda”. “Mrs. Harris” began its month-long run on HBO the last weekend of February.


THE PASSENGER (B+)

This Michelangelo Antonioni classic, filmed on location in Spain, England, Germany, and Algeria, and originally released in 1975, has been re-released in the director’s cut version that was shown in Europe and is making the rounds of selected art houses around the country as I write. Its star, Jack Nicholson, put up his own money to finance the film’s restoration and distribution. It found a limited audience in the mid-70’s, despite gushing critical praise, and it will find an even more limited audience this time around because its pace is so painstaking and its tale is so elusive and ambiguous. According to the Sony Classics website, the film’s final seven-minute sequence, with the camera panning, zooming, and lingering on an expanse of dusty, gritty, barren landscape outside a fleabag hotel in southern Spain, with almost no audible dialogue, took 11 days to shoot. That sequence alone is reason enough to see “The Passenger” because it synthesizes the desolate loneliness, cynicism, and resignation of its central character, whose life is about to run out.

A more understated performance Nicholson has never given, although “About Schmidt” comes close. It was the 26th film of his career (32 more have followed since), sandwiched right between far more flamboyant and honored roles in “Chinatown” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Nicholson plays David Locke, a television journalist soured on his profession from a futile string of assignments interviewing amoral and politically corrupt leaders of third-world fiefdoms. Locke seizes an opportunity to escape his own life when he decides to exchange his identity for that of a casual acquaintance who has died of heart failure in an adjoining hotel room. Unfortunately for Locke, the deceased gentleman was not the starchy, upstanding businessman he appeared and professed to be, and Locke’s new life becomes entangled in a web of intrigue and peril. The film poses more questions than it answers -- Locke does not vocalize his private thoughts -- so for those of us who want to be clear on the motivations that drive the enigmatic behaviors of the film’s characters, “The Passenger” can be frustrating to watch. But it is a stylistically compelling commentary on the human condition, magnificently photographed and intensely atmospheric.


WHY WE FIGHT (A)

Vermont filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) uses Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential farewell address in January, 1961 -- in which Ike warned the nation about the looming specter and burgeoning influence of its military-industrial complex -- as the launching pad for his exhaustingly researched, persuasively evidenced documentary “Why We Fight”. Financed by the BBC and distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, the film is currently being shown in 200 cities nationwide and will be intermediately aired on PBS before going to DVD later this year, which almost elevates it to mainstream status.

Jarecki’s central premise is that war is great for business and the U.S. economy -- we discovered that way back in the early 40’s when gearing up to fight on two World War II fronts put everyone to work and pulled us out of the Great Depression. And if we aren’t sucked into war by aggressor nations that actually threaten our security and way of life, we’ll start one up ourselves, even if the pretext is illusory and provocation is a myth, trumpeting our altruism every step of the way. It doesn’t matter whether or not we’re triumphant on the battlefield, either -- and, in fact, we haven’t been since 1945 -- industry profits soar and the economy hums nevertheless. What’s more, the American lives that are sacrificed are disposable anyway. They have been since military drafting was discontinued and we now fight entirely with volunteer forces made up almost exclusively of young men and women from the nation’s underclasses, who can’t find a decent-paying job, afford a formal education, or forge a meaningful identity in any other way.

So many modifiers come to mind in assessing the scope, depth, and authority of “Why We Fight” and its exposure of cynicism, deceit, and corruption at the highest levels of government and industry. Most of us have been at least subliminally aware of these destructive processes, but Jarecki has brilliantly assembled, distilled, and crystalized all of the disparate elements into a monstrous whole that is at once searing and chilling, infuriating and sobering, provoking and numbing. At a question-and-answer session following the screening I attended, a gentleman rose in the back of the auditorium and declared “I’m sick and I’m angry -- I need help.” Jarecki empathized, but eschewed the man’s feelings of futility and hopelessness, interjecting what he observes as a growing public awareness that will propel action that brings about incremental changes.

What is also so remarkable about “Why We Fight” is that it gets its points across brilliantly without the strident, blatantly biased affect often attributed to Michael Moore’s documentaries, which, if one has politically left leanings, are equally substantive and commendable. Those points include the following: 1) Capitalism and democracy are not necessarily linked together like love and marriage and death and taxes, 2) The budgets for the U.S. military now exceed those for all other sectors combined, including education, health care, infrastructure, etc., 3) The current administration has mastered the art of information management, built on the premise that what you and I don’t know won’t hurt them, and 4) As our national interests change or our imperialist objectives shift, last year’s friendly regime may evolve into this year’s rogue nation, witness Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party in Iraq, whom we once nurtured and coddled during its long war with Iran, and 5) The U.S., as the world’s only remaining superpower, has strong empirical ambitions, but runs the risk of crumbling under the weight of its global commitments and entanglements. Jarecki concludes that “it is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever.”

The sources that give “Why We Fight” its veracity and urgency are impeccable; Jarecki’s spokespersons are highly credentialed and often represent opposing political views -- people like Ike’s son John S. D. Eisenhower, TV newsman Dan Rather, Senator John McCain, “Prince of Darkness” Richard Perle, author, filmmaker, and social commentator Gore Vidal, Colonel Richard Treadway, Joseph Cirincione (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), and Karen Kwiatkowski, retired Lieutenant Air Force Colonel and former aide to Donald Rumsfeld. Kwiatkowski’s on-camera contributions are particularly candid in a way that casts a pall of secrecy and misinformation on the Pentagon and White House.

It becomes abundantly clear that most people in 1961 didn’t take Dwight Eisenhower’s prophetic words to heart -- they were largely dismissed as alarmist blathering from a foggy and failing old man, who had been ill for much of his second term. Never mind that the stern warning came from a former general who knew first-hand whereof he was speaking. The nation was not to be distracted by such an elusive concept, particularly since it was welcoming into office within days its youngest president ever -- a charismatic and handsome charmer with a trophy wife about to turn the White House into Camelot.

One audience member at the end of the film’s first Vermont showing asked Jarecki to what he attributed the dramatic rise in the fame and fortunes of documentary films. His reply was that the content of films like “Why We Fight” is nowhere to be found in the news coverage of either the print or broadcast media. The press has effectively been rendered benign by its corporate conglomerate status and governmental pressures that can and are brought to bear. Big Brother is being monitored and muzzled by Big Bully, and reporters, editors, analysts, and producers better mind their P’s and Q’s, as in Probing and Questioning. It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of.


GEORGE MICHAEL: A DIFFERENT STORY (A)

George Michael (born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou to a Cypriot father and English mother) imprinted himself on America’s rock music consciousness 21 years ago this month as a 21-year-old member of a singing duo from North London called Wham. The career-igniting song, penned with sidekick and collaborator Andrew Ridgeley, was “Careless Whisper”, and that and another megahit entitled “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” launched Michael on a celebrity voyage not without its choppy waters over the past two decades, most of it without Ridgeley, with whom he parted professional company in 1986. But Michael is a resilient and resourceful bloke, and as he enters mid-life, having survived and emerged from the latest of several career-threatening crises, is still solidly entrenched as rock royalty.

That said, I still had my doubts that his “story”, no matter how “different” or how told, was going to grab and hold onto me for 93 minutes, as a featured entry in the Palm Springs International Film Festival last month. What I didn’t realize was that George Michael is far more than “just” a hunky dude with high-energy pipes and commanding superstar presence; he’s an engaging, candid, articulate, good-humored, and self-aware man who knows a lot about a lot of things outside of his music milieu, including world politics and social injustice, and isn’t afraid to speak his mind. His jabs at the current regime in D.C. got him roundly criticized by people who think rock icons should stick to...well...rocking. Other entertainers -- Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Alec Baldwin, and Eartha Kitt come to mind -- have also felt the sting of backlash, from colleagues and the public, when they’ve opinionized on politically sensitive issues.

Michael and Ridgeley are reunited for this documentary, and their growing-up-together and Wham reminiscences sometimes get a little edgy. During a couple of their exchanges, Ridgeley’s body language suggests that while all may be forgiven, it’s not forgotten. They do seem to put to rest any notion that they were lovers way back when. Michael goes on to ruminate about his rocky relationship with Sony Records and the 1993 brouhaha that erupted when he persevered to break free from an artistically restrictive contract with the media giant -- a disentanglement that temporarily sidetracked his career.

But nowhere in the film is Michael more ingenuous and forthcoming than when he discusses his sexuality and the process of discovery and acknowledgment that led to high anxiety. “Oh my God,” he recollects, “I’m this massive star, and I think I may be a poof. What am I going to do? This will not end well.” A prophecy that was almost infamously self-fulfilling when, in 1998, he was entrapped and arrested on charges of lewd behavior in a park john in Los Angeles. He speaks with gravity but not self-pity about his Brazilian lover Anselmo Feleppa who died of complications from AIDS in 1993, before Michael was out as a gay performer, and how his grief had to be put on hold because of a grueling performance schedule. He again refers to the double-edged sword of fame and the obligations thereof when he regrets not spending more time with his mother during her battle with cancer. Implicit throughout the documentary is that while his career path for the first decade was a manic speedway to superstardom, little else mattering, the route for the second decade has been more strategically or discriminatingly drawn, in deference to his personal life and passions apart from music.

By no means is the film all yakety-yak. There are plenty of live-performance clips that document the evolution of Michael’s music and the creative reinvention that sustains his popularity.

Others who make cameo appearances and add their two cents, often whimsically, are: Michael’s brother Jack Panayiotou, his boyhood pal David Austin, Boy George, Elton John, Mariah Carey, Martin Kemp (Spandau Ballet), Sting, and Simon Cowell. “George Michael: A Different Story” was written and directed by Southan Morris. It doesn’t look like the film will have a theatrical release in the U.S., but should show up eventually on cable TV and DVD. When it does, tune it in or rent it. You may wind up adding it to your library. I certainly will.



DESPERATE, DITSY, AND SOMETIMES DEMENTED MOTHERS

QUEENS (REINAS) (A-)

Another entry at the PSIFF in January, “Queens” (Reinas) confidently anticipated passage of legislation in Spain legalizing same-sex marriages, and its filmmakers conjured up a “big fat gay wedding” inaugural event over an entire weekend as their story’s launching pad. “Queens” debuted in Madrid last April, three months before the landmark law went into effect, though I doubt it had any influence on members of parliament. The double-entendre of the title refers not so much to the screenplay’s sextet of gay men on an historic date with matrimony, but to their red-hot middle-aged mamas, all of whom are trying to work through their mixed emotions about male-to-male unions at a time when their own lives are becoming unhinged by tremulous affairs of the heart and/or hormones. And, to play these matrons in dalliance and distress, writer-director Manuel Gomez Periera has rounded up the most distinguished ladies of the Spanish cinema -- Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes, Veronica Forque, Betiana Blum, and Mercedes Sampietro. Maura and Paredes are best known to American audiences for their films with award-winning director Pedro Almadovar.

Maura plays Magda, who runs the upscale hotel that will host the mass ceremony; she’s embroiled in labor problems with her hotel’s head chef who’s leading a strike of his underpaid kitchen staff on the eve of the grand event. To undermine her bargaining power, he’s also Magda’s longtime paramour, though that liaison doesn’t appear to be softening either’s business resolve. To further complicate matters, Magda’s son Miguel is set to marry an Argentinean designer named Oscar, whose flighty, sugarcoated mother Ofelia (Blum) has just arrived at Magda’s no-pets-allowed hostelry with her problematically pampered pooch.

Nuria (Forque), a strung-out nymphomaniac, is mother to Narciso who is about to get hitched to the sexually skittish Hugo, son of power lawyer Helena (Sampietro), the only “queen” with serious homophobic issues. In her official capacity, Helena’s been front and center for same-sex marriage, but, as a mother, she’s not so sure. Her husband, a cop named Hector, is Nuria’s most recent conquest -- their fevered tryst in a commuter train lavatory, hilariously documented in the film’s opening sequence, turns out to be not so anonymous.

Finally, there is the diva actress Reyes (Paredes essentially playing herself) whose son Rafa is about to tie the knot with Jonas, the son of mama’s longtime gardener Jacinto -- her attraction to whom she has only just discovered when she comes home and encounters him buck naked coming out of the shower. Ooh, ooh, ooh, what a little full frontal will do-do-do.

All of this sets up a weekend of madcap misadventures involving mothers and lovers, mothers and sons, and sons and lovers. Screwball situations abound, many of which come within a whisker of improbability. One is not meant to look for high artistic achievement in a movie like “Queens”. It’s a slick flick, gorgeously photographed, about glossy lives -- the gay guys, all pretty one-dimensional, look like they just stepped out of the pages of GQ, Details, and Genre, though most have agreeable personalities and are slightly saner than their mothers, all of whom are in full mid-life crisis mode. Boiled down to basics, “Queens” is a messy film about high-maintenance people, but the mess is what fuels the broad farce that begets the big laughs. Too bad “Queens”, despite being financed by Warner Brothers’ Spanish division, is getting limited play in the United States -- it’s every bit as funny as “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”.


TRANSAMERICA (B+)

Before she became a pill-popping desperate housewife in the fall of 2004, Felicity Huffman was a desperate transsexual named Bree Osbourne in Duncan Tucker’s singularly offbeat road movie “Transamerica”, finished before the ABC-TV series debuted but only released late last year. And a road movie has never before veered so far from the mainstream.

“Transamerica’s” Bree -- coincidentally the name of the character played by her costar Marcia Cross on “Desperate Housewives” -- is a pre-op on a daily regimen of hormone meds in preparation for her final gender reassignment surgery, when she finds out she once fathered a son from a chance encounter as Stanley Osbourne in her previous life. That son, Toby (Kevin Zegers), now a 17-year-old street hustler, is jailed in New York City on a drug charge and needs his father to put up bail. Bree wants to say “to hell with it,” but her therapist (Elizabeth Pena) refuses to sign off on her operation until she faces up to her parental obligations. Bree has no choice but to accede.

She flies cross-country from Los Angeles to spring Toby, but has no intention of revealing who she really is and once was, posing instead as a Christian samaritan. Toby, sullen and hostile, doesn’t care a damn about anything other than having his ass carted back to LA where he can pursue a career as a porn star. Bree buys an old clunker and the two set off for the West Coast, feudin’ and fussin’ the first third of the way. Gradually, though, they start to dialogue, and prim and straight-laced Bree lets down her guard a little as she tries her hand at socializing the lad. They meet some curious characters along the way, including a gentle, new-agey native-American named Calvin (Graham Greene), who falls for Bree in a big way, and an over-the-top pre-op support group in Dallas, whose members take a maternal shine towards the boy.

Their defense mechanisms and Bree’s secret and indelicate condition are barriers to bonding for both her and Toby, but visits to their respective families produce insights that soften their regard for one another. Meeting Toby’s stepfather proves a shocker for Bree when the man shamelessly reveals himself as the sex abuser Toby ran away from after his mother committed suicide. And when the two descend on Bree’s antagonistic and vulgarly nouveau-riche parents (Fionnula Flanagan, Burt Young) and embittered sister (Carrie Preston) in Phoenix, a rowdy reunion laden with darkly humorous confrontations gives Toby more than a glimpse into Bree’s disaffection from family. Now they have a common ground, even if it’s to commiserate with one another.

But there’s the inevitable setback to their rapprochement when Bree inadvertently bares her secret and Toby unmasks her true identity. Bitterly denouncing her masquerade, he bolts, setting up a final reel that is emotionally complex and warmly human.

Huffman is right on target with her tightly controlled performance, careful never to overplay Bree’s “difference” as caricature in a society that generally freaks out about transgenderism. Bree is not a drag queen, a female illusionist, cross-dresser, or transvestite -- she is not about flamboyance, showmanship, or part-time pursuit of fantasy, and I don’t mean these disclaimers to be judgmental or prejudicial. Simply put, Huffman’s character has heretofore lived in conflict as Sabrina trapped in Stanley’s body, and she wants that conflict resolved at long last by getting the physical matched up with the mental -- calling as little attention to herself as possible in the process. Huffman’s Academy Award-nominated performance is without artifice or affectation, except perhaps for a subtle huskiness of the voice; it’s matter-of-factness makes it so real and appealing.

Zegers, only 21, already has 15 years of acting experience, much of it on TV in his native Canada. He’s appeared recently in episodes of the U.S. series “House” and “Smallville” and in the theatrical films “The Hollow” and “Dawn of the Dead”. The role of Toby isn’t one of range and nuance, but Zegers handles it capably. Of the other supporting roles, Greene’s Calvin stands out in contrast to all the other personalities as a man of peace, tranquility, and inner contentment.