The Conversations: Wong Kar Wai

It's been a longer than usual lapse since the previous edition of The Conversations, but that's not the reason for the image above. Today the series returns with a look at the career of the time-obsessed Wong Kar Wai. Ed Howard and I don't cover every film of Wong's career, but we do take a healthy and typically in-depth sampling: Days of Being Wild (1990), Chungking Express (1994), In the Mood for Love (2000), 2046 (2004) and My Blueberry Nights (2007). Wong is of course known for his blatant stylistic flourishes and themes, and over the course of the discussion Ed and I point out moments when it works and when it doesn't. We also discuss how Wong's films have a way of overlapping one another to create the feeling of a director making one sprawling work. What this discussion is missing is your input. So, if you can, make some time over the next few days, read through the piece and tell us what we missed in the comments at The House Next Door.

On the Money: POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Morgan Spurlock’s brand personality is “mindful/playful.” That’s what he learns while consulting with a branding expert in the process of making POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It’s a shame Spurlock didn’t learn that while making his previous documentary, Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?, because that would have spared us the pain of sitting through it. As Spurlock now knows, when a brand has a hybrid identity it’s imperative to preserve the balance. Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden? failed in large part because Spurlock fluctuated wildly between excessive playfulness (an animated sequence that put bin Laden’s head on MC Hammer’s body) and excessive seriousness (pretending to contemplate risking his life by walking into the Taliban’s hood), coming off foolish either way. In this film, though, Spurlock rediscovers his brand essence, and in doing so revitalizes the chemistry that made 2004’s Super Size Me a breakout success. There will still be those who find Spurlock’s playfulness too childish and his mindfulness too elementary, but what you see in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is Spurlock at his most Spurlockian – take it or leave it.

This time around, I’ll take it. Spurlock isn’t the documentary filmmaker you want exploring torture, terrorism, fraud, or the self-combustion of the American economy, but by the same measure Alex Gibney and Charles Ferguson probably aren’t the right guys to test the impact of a fast-food diet by eating at McDonald’s for a month. There are real problems in this world, and blatant product placement in movies just ain’t one of them. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t a topic worth exploring, and that’s why Spurlock is the man for the job. His mindful/playful approach is perfect for taking this topic just seriously enough. You’ll likely learn a thing or two while watching his film, but like Jon Stewart on The Daily Show Spurlock has a gift for imparting knowledge with a tone that suggests he figures you know this stuff already. Put another way, he doesn’t talk down to the audience, which is precisely why it’s so nauseating when he occasionally tries to pull one over on us with some clearly calculated acting. (In Where in the World it was going through the charade of strapping on a bulletproof vest as if we bought for a moment that he was going to follow bin Laden to the darkest corners of the earth. In this film it’s telling his lawyer, ‘Gee, now that all these corporate partners are involved I feel like I’m losing the artistic control of my film.’) Spurlock’s documentaries thrive when he operates with the notion that we’re as intelligent as he is, and they fall apart when he forgets that it’s actually true.

Reality Bites: Certified Copy

Early in Certified Copy, one of the main characters, an author who has just published an extended essay on art authenticity, describes watching a boy looking at the statue of David. Actually, to be more precise, the author describes a boy looking at a statue of David. The boy is in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, Italy, so the statue in front of the boy is only a replica of the “real” thing. The boy doesn’t know this, of course. He regards the statue with no concern for the statue’s pedigree. Instead, he regards it as artistic depiction alone, and he is awestruck. Is the boy wrong to feel that way? The author would argue he isn’t, suggesting that the search for originality places value on lineage instead of artistry. But if the boy’s reaction to the David replica serves as a parable about the purity of appreciating art without prejudice, it’s also something of a cautionary tale. Because when the boy looks upon the replica in amazement he makes the same mistake that so many of us make when we fall in love with anything: he regards the beauty in front of him without any notion of context. Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy is about art and relationships, but mostly it’s about the elusiveness of truth and the imperfection of perception.

At least, I think that’s what it’s about. For a film that’s little more than two characters walking and talking, often very explicitly, about how they feel, Certified Copy is a remarkably challenging film to decode. (Major spoilers ahead throughout.) When the film begins, the characters played by William Shimell and Juliette Binoche appear to be perfect strangers – he’s the author and she’s an antiques dealer and single mom who appears to have a crush on him – but by the end of the film it’s suggested that these characters have been married for 15 years. Is this a ruse, a game? Are this man and woman play-acting, either pretending not to know one another at the start or pretending to be married later on? Perhaps, but I doubt it. The duo’s early getting-to-know-you banter is too mundane and their eventual marital spats are too intimate for this to be role-playing. The only rational explanation that I can come up with is to accept that the film’s halves are as irrational as they appear: the man and woman do start their day together as complete strangers and they do end the day as (quasi-estranged?) husband and wife. This impossible shift doesn’t mean that the characters are crazy or that the film is disingenuous. Rather, Kiarostami is trading narrative cohesion for audience manipulation.

A Pawn in the Game: The Conspirator

Robin Wright has a face of contradictions: soft blond beauty made out of firm features and a cold stare. It’s a face that welcomes us close but that never really lets us in. When Wright smiles, the expression seems sincere but rarely entirely carefree. It’s as if her mind is elsewhere, working out some problem much more significant than whatever she’s doing, or simply thinking three steps ahead of whatever is going on. On screen or in public, she’s a little aloof and a lot hard to read. That’s why Wright is a terrific choice to play Mary Surratt, the proprietor of a Washington, DC, boarding house that served as a meeting place for those accused of conspiring to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward on April 14, 1865 – among them Mary’s son John Surratt and, of course, John Wilkes Booth. Mary Surratt was hanged as a fellow conspirator less than three months after the assassination plot was carried out (to varying degrees of success), but her actual role in the affair, and even her awareness of it, has been a subject of debate ever since. Played by Wright in Robert Redford’s The Conspirator, Mary Surratt isn’t just an ambiguous figure, she’s an enigmatic one, too. More than questioning what Surratt did or didn’t know, Wright makes us wonder how Surratt feels about the whole mess.

Mary Surratt is a complex figure, to be sure. Mastermind or just mother? Lincoln hater or family protector? Does Mary resent her son for not coming forward, or does she blame herself for her son’s flight? Wright’s subdued performance makes it hard to say and compelling to wonder. Watching Wright in The Conspirator is a reminder of how underutilized she is – not just in cinema in general but also in this film specifically. Although by title Surratt is the focus of The Conspirator, in actuality she’s nothing more than a supporting player in a picture that’s less about her than about the trial in which she was convicted and less about the events of the past that it portrays than about the events of the present to which it alludes. Redford’s film may have the whiff of a History Channel reenactment, but above all else The Conspirator is a metaphor directly challenging the legality of the upcoming trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and his coconspirators, who like Mary Surratt before them will be tried via military tribunal, rather than in civilian courts. Written by James D. Solomon, The Conspirator repeatedly argues that a conviction can only be just if it is achieved through just means, via a civilian trial in which guilt isn’t assumed ahead of time.

Ordinary People: All the President’s Men

The reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein didn’t just halt a presidency, it also helped to create a new American mindset. After Watergate, there was no more pretending that any public office was too lofty to be above crime or that any crime was too lowly for the corrupt to commit. Richard Nixon taught America that even a president could be a common crook (among other things), and the reporting of The Washington Post proved that a free press could be a powerful tool against unscrupulousness. In the years that followed, the government grew less trusting of the press while the press became more emboldened, proudly shining their studded collars as America’s de facto watchdogs. “Watergate,” by which I mean not just the crime itself but also the exposure of its perpetrators and schemers and its resulting ramifications, was a seismic event. Given its impact, one might expect the signature film about this epic “moment” in history to be populated by titans – imposing figures of villainy and heroism. But it isn’t. All the President’s Men is a story of ordinary people. That’s precisely what makes it so powerful.

Released in 1976, not even two full years removed from Nixon’s resignation, Alan J. Pakula’s film isn’t ripped from the headlines so much as it’s spun out of scribbles in reporters’ notebooks. It’s a film about details – details that when viewed alone had little meaning but that once put together rattled the foundation of America’s government. It’s also, of course, a film about the men who unearthed and sequenced those details – men who, if not for circumstance, would have appeared equally unremarkable. Woodward and Bernstein are for the most part household names now, but they weren’t then, and Pakula’s film, based on a screenplay by William Goldman, doesn’t even begin to suggest the incredible fame (by print journalism standards) that awaited them. Played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, respectively, Woodward and Bernstein are like a pair of terriers biting at the government’s pant legs and following their noses toward they-don’t-know-quite-what. They are tenacious, but also uncertain, and when they have to face the newspaper’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee (a perfectly cast Jason Robards), it’s usually with their tails between their legs. Woodward and Bernstein don’t look or act like the guys who have it all figured out, because they rarely do. And they don’t act like heroes because it never occurs to them that they might be.

Express Train: Source Code

In Source Code, Duncan Jones’ follow-up to his mind-bending debut Moon, it’s not just the audience who joins the story in medias res. The main character does, too. The film’s opening 10 minutes involve a guy waking up across from a smitten woman he’s never met before, on a military mission he’s never heard of before, inside the body of a man he’s never seen before and, oh yeah, onboard a train heading into Chicago that, technically speaking, has already exploded. For most films that would be the climax. For this film, it’s a tease. Source Code is about a man inhabiting another man’s body, Quantum Leap style, in order to repeatedly relieve the same time period, Groundhog Day style, in order to figure out who the bomber is, Murder on the Orient Express style, all while under the command of some military types, Avatar style, all while falling for the girl across the way, Before Sunrise style, all while looking to make amends from beyond the grave, Heaven Can Wait style, and all while Jones injects urgency into almost every frame, Christopher Nolan style. If that makes Source Code sound like an especially busy film, it is. But to Jones’ credit, it’s also a short one.

Unlike Nolan, who in his two most recent pictures, The Dark Knight and Inception, has attempted to sustain armrest-gripping intensity for two-and-a-half hours, Jones is content to leave the stage after a modest 93 minutes. That’s actually four minutes shorter than Moon, which is narratively straightforward by comparison. Backhanded though this compliment might seem, Source Code’s brevity is its masterstroke. The film is overstuffed with under-developed and unnecessary subplots, it has a central plot with more holes than a Dunkin’ Donuts, it has a repetitive design that tempts tediousness and, if that weren’t enough, it spends most of its energy leading us toward a remarkably flat (and false) climax, but none of that matters too much because Source Code never slows down long enough for us to complain about the view and it quits while its ahead. At 120 minutes, heck, maybe even at 100, Source Code would be yet another disheartening slog through the all-too-familiar. Instead, it’s one of the livelier movie experiences of the spring, all because Jones has the common sense to exit the ball before his carriage turns back into a pumpkin.