The Conversations: Terrence Malick - Part I

Everyone is talking about Tree of Life. Well, everyone who lives in New York or Los Angeles or made it to Cannes. The rest of you can get your fix by heading over to The House Next Door for Part I of The Conversations: Terrence Malick, in which Ed Howard and I discuss his first four pictures: Badlands (1973), Days of Heaven (1978), The Thin Red Line (1998) and The New World (2005). We discuss Malick's affection for nature, his use of narrators and his implementation of music. We also discuss whether Malick's pictures are "too pretty." So give it a read, and let us know what we missed.

Gee, Wally: The Beaver

In Jodie Foster’s latest film, a beaver gets multiple close-ups, but it’s the elephant in the room that dominates our attention. Mel Gibson’s turbulent private life, so sordid that even those of us who are thoroughly uninterested know all the basics, thoroughly colors his performance as Walter Black, a depressed businessman who goes from the top of a balcony ledge to the top of the business world by forming a relationship with a mangy beaver puppet that he pulls out of a trash bin. Incredibly, I suspect that’s the way Foster wants it. The screenplay for The Beaver was written by Kyle Killen, and yet the entire project feels as if it was manufactured with the rehabilitation of Gibson’s image as the mission statement. Throughout the picture, Gibson is asked to play one of three emotions: suicidal; socially anxious; and playful, and he does them while wearing a cuddly beaver puppet on his left hand. In theory, it’s the perfect blueprint for building sympathy for the troubled star, loosely suggesting that all of Gibson’s outrageous behavior is a sign of how much he’s hurting on the inside, while also allowing him enough room to flash his movie-star charm. But it never comes to form, because The Beaver is incapable of standing on its own two (four? six?) feet.

Indeed, if The Beaver is about something other than the rehabilitation of Gibson’s image, what is it about? (Big spoilers ahead.) Walter’s character arc goes like this: he’s depressed; he tries to kill himself; he begins living his life through a puppet alter ego and in doing so finds happiness, inner peace and business success; he is judged for his eccentricities and, unable to cope without his puppet, does physical harm to himself, landing in a mental health institution. Read that one more time and riddle me this: What’s the takeaway? So far as I can tell, there isn’t one, unless you consider this a cautionary tale about the risks of saving one’s sanity via insane means. Trouble is, that doesn’t quite work, because as pitiful as Walter is at the end of the film, he’s in better shape than when the film begins. In essence, Walter trades a piece of himself and his dignity for a shot at happiness, and it works. It’s a net gain, which makes Walter’s story not so cautionary after all. Additionally perplexing is the subplot involving Walter’s eldest son, Porter (Anton Yelchin), who falls for the valedictorian (Jennifer Lawrence); invades her privacy; gets them both arrested; writes her graduation speech; watches her find her own voice; and then finds a place in his heart for his psycho dad. Never mind that the pieces of Porter’s story don’t have anything to do with Walter’s journey, I don’t think they have much to do with each other either.

My “Movie”

“What’s your movie?” That’s the way he first asked the question. Or at least that’s the way I first heard it. I was standing in the living room of Keith Uhlich, editor of The House Next Door, and his partner of 10 years, Dan Callahan. More specifically, I was standing in a circle with Odie Henderson, Sheila O’Malley, Steven Santos and Steven Boone, each of them bloggers in their own right who, at one time or another, in one way or another, also contributed to The House Next Door. We’d been standing in that circle for a while at that point, just one of many conversational shapes that formed over the course of that afternoon, evening and night. I couldn’t tell you what time it was, only that by that point I’d been upstairs and downstairs, in this corner and that one, with these fellow movie geeks and others, and it was dark outside. Many revelers had now been gone for as long as they’d attended. A few who remained were quite drunk – just not anyone in this circle. No, when Steven Boone halted our mostly scattered chitchat to ask us a group question, he was stone cold sober, and so was I.

That’s why I’m surprised I didn’t immediately understand what Boone was getting at. His question sounded to me like a fairly banal “What’s your desert island movie?” sort of inquiry. I don’t pretend to know Boone all that well, but by that point of the night (and, heck, even before it began) I knew him well enough that it shouldn’t have taken retrospect to realize that Boone was the last guy to be interested in something so pedestrian. And yet the question went over my head, maybe because I stopped listening before he finished asking it. As the person immediately to Boone’s right, I was up first, and so I gave an answer that I’ve given many times before in similar situations: Rear Window. It’s one of my favorite fallbacks (along with On the Waterfront), not necessarily because it’s true but because it isn’t altogether untrue, and mostly because it’s a simple answer that always gets an understanding nod from the person who asked it, whether that person is a teenage blockbuster watcher who has only heard of Rear Window or a pretentious film snob who is likely to answer that question by mentioning the most unknown work of Norway’s best auteur. It’s a safe answer, and, not incidentally, a fairly accurate one – Rear Window is a movie I indeed love, admire and cherish. The problem is that Rear Window wasn’t the answer to Boone’s question. I just didn’t realize that yet.

Weekly Rant: Bye-Bye Boss Man (The Office)

Last Thursday, in a patriotic “Fuck you!” to terrorism that left millions of Americans in tears, Pam Beesly Halpert walked through airport security without a boarding pass. Three days later, Osama bin Laden was dead. Coincidence? I suppose. Still, the timing is interesting. Sunday night Americans were marveling at just how long it took the U.S. military to catch the godfather of the most devastating terrorist attack on American soil. A few nights earlier (or, heck, for the DVR users among us, maybe that very night), Americans watched the final moments of the Michael Scott farewell episode while wondering if the writers of The Office had been to an airport in the past 10 years. With that said, you might think the Weekly Rant has emerged from a long hiatus in order to take down The Office with Navy Seal precision, but you’d be wrong. Yes, Michael Scott’s final seconds on NBC’s hit show were a tad clumsy, what with Pam getting through security without a ticket and, apparently, without her microphone. But in spirit Michael’s departure was graceful. Or at least as graceful as this character-overloaded sitcom is capable of being.

The farewell tour for Michael Scott began in earnest with the previous episode, “Michael’s Last Dundies.” The final edition of the Michael’s-choice awards had a lot in common with our first exposure in the Season 2 premiere – same inappropriateness and insensitivity, same unpredictability and same self-centeredness. The big difference this time around is that Michael’s coworkers no longer protest the Dundies’ existence. Their willingness to roll with the punches is no doubt tied to Michael’s immanent departure. (When Toby wins the Dundie for Extreme Repulsiveness, Jim and Oscar tell the much-maligned HR director that he has to suck it up and play along.) But at least as significant is that over the years the crew at Dunder Mifflin has come to recognize the Dundies – and similar Michael antics – for what they really are: desperate pleas for acceptance. Those equally unsure of themselves (Erin, Andy, even Dwight) are the ones who emotionally connect with the Dundies, while the self-assured have learned to look the other way (Jim, Pam, Oscar, etc.) and the universally oblivious (Creed, Meredith, Kelly, etc.) remain so. Watching Michael host his final ceremony it’s clear that his show is as sophisticated as ever (complete with cue cards and a prerecorded video intro), and yet his level of effort has gone down considerably. At the final Dundies, there are no costumes or characters. Finally, it’s as if Michael realizes that he’s character enough on his own.