** (out of ****)
and
MARIE ANTOINETTE
***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Ryan Philippe, Jesse Bradford, Adam Beach, Jamie Bell, Neal McDonough, and Barry Pepper
Directed by Clint Eastwood & written by William Broyles Jr. and Paul Haggis, from the book by James Bradley and Ron Powers
2006
133 min R
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rip Torn, and Steve Coogan
Directed & written by Sofia Coppola, from the book by Antonia Fraser
2006
123 min PG13
Moments of brilliance pervade Eastwood’s WWII epic about the Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima, but for the most part it is disjointed and mawkish. The combat sequences on Iwo Jima are quite good; the executive producer is Steven Spielberg and I wish the movie had been content to be a “Saving Private Ryan Jr.” kind of thing. Although, for a film about destroying the myths of heroism, Eastwood shoots many action sequences with the same framing as the famous flag-raising photograph, that is, a safe distance from the side, so we don’t feel so much in the action as swept along by iconography.
But every time “Flags” builds up dramatic steam we cut forward in time, either to the heroes’ fund-raising campaign (kinda boring), or the present day (real boring). The script is co-written by (ug) Paul Haggis (“Crash,” “Million Dollar Baby”), who never came up with a theme he didn’t want to spell out through dialogue, narration, or, in this case, both. The fund-raising campaign is simply not very interesting, way too long, and is punctuated with Haggis’s contrived confrontations. The central conflict (if you can call it that) is not the battle on the island at all; the powerful combat scenes are essentially filler. The central conflict is that the guys tour the country raising money for war bonds and feel kind-of bad about it.
The present day stuff is simply lame and syrupy, culminating in an old man’s out-of-the-blue death-bed apology to his son: “I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father!” My wife wanted to yell at the screen: “What the hell?! That hasn’t been in the movie AT ALL!!”
Plenty of good supporting performances, although the three leads seem unfocused, as if each thinks the movie is really about the others. Maybe the film might have worked better in chronological order. I would have been happier with 60 minutes of battle and a 30-minute fund-raising epilogue, with nothing in the present day. As it is, I couldn’t keep straight which soldier was which in each time zone. My wife and I argued about who narrated what for about 15 minutes and couldn’t reach any conclusions. “Flags” runs over-long because it doesn’t know what point it’s making; or, alternately, it makes its point in about five minutes and spends the next two hours beating all the poignancy out of it through repetition and narration. Sometimes movies with the least to say take forever to say it, flailing their arms in place of depth.
The grayed-out photography is getting old. The CG cheese and the score is a little distracting, too. I’m so tired of solo trumpets being soldier music. It was cool when Aaron Copland did it.
(IMDb summary: “The retelling of France’s iconic but ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette. From her betrothal and marriage to Louis XVI at 15 to her reign as queen at 19 and to the end of her reign as queen and ultimately the fall of Versailles.”)
Equal parts Terry Malick and “Russian Ark,” I started smiling early in “Marie Antoinette” and never stopped. There are a thousand essays to be written about it, but it is the act of watching it that is magical – its ethereal charm is hard to describe. Like “Russian Ark,” it revels in the beauty of Baroque Europe. Like “Russian Ark,” it shows great sympathy for its doomed aristocrats without saying anything they did was justifiable. Like “Russian Ark,” it posits that most people are good but simply not strong enough to stand up to the status quo. Marie (Kirsten Dunst) and her king (a magnificently goofy Jason Schwartzman) might behave differently if they knew what life was like outside their castle walls. But they are victims of an isolation begun long before they were born, people trapped and eventually ground down by history after lives squandered by meaningless regulation and luxury.
Like Terrence Malick, “Marie Antoinette” is at once as observational as a documentary, yet always, dreamily, obviously, the active vision of an artist. Coppola admittedly apes man-god Malick in the way she turns hand-held camerawork not into something jarring, gritty, or trendy, but into a floating half-memory, a random glimpse burned in the memory of a passing angel, while a thousand other glances are forgotten. There’s even a sequence of Marie at her summer cottage that makes you think Malick showed up one day to take over the directing.
Like Malick’s “The New World,” “Marie Antoinette” is the story of a teenage girl (many critics of the film seem to assume that teenage girls are inherently hateful). Coppola tucks anachronisms throughout the film, not to “update” the story but as a form of critical juxtaposition. The use of ‘80s pop songs come across not as a concession to popular tastes, but the exact opposite (the lukewarm critical and popular response are proof of that – people would much rather see queens accompanied by classical music like “The Queen”). Coppola is personalizing the film, connecting Marie’s own life to the places where Coppola was at that same age.
(The rejection of the ‘80s music is a stupefying devotion to a random cinematic convention, which states that 19th-century orchestral music is somehow “eternal” while pop music is “anachronistic.” The modern orchestra is only about 200 years old, which means that if you’re going to begrudge “Marie Antoinette” for 1980s music in the 1700s, you have to begrudge “Braveheart” and everyone’s beloved “Lord of the Rings” for music 600 years too early, “The Passion of the Christ” for music sixteen or seventeen centuries too early, and “The Ten Commandments” for music that’s a whopping four millennia too soon. “2001: A Space Odyssey” takes the cake, of course; “Thus Spake Zarathustra” appears in a sequence between one and three million years before it was written.)
In the end, “Marie Antoinette” succeeds in creating its own universe, and I was its visitor. It’s partly the real court of Versailles but also our world today, capturing a private universe with rules of its own that only ever really existing in the minds of its creators during its months of shooting. Conversely, “Flags of Our Fathers” felt like I was sitting in a movie theater listening to a lecture.
Finished Saturday, December 16th, 2006
Copyright © 2006 Friday & Saturday Night
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