Directed by Lasse Hallstrom
Miramax is dead, but the Miramax Oscar-baiting costume picture lives on, courtesy of Casanova. This Touchstone-bankrolled Shakespeare in Love wannabe, which stars an absolutely, positively not-gay Heath Ledger as the title rapscallion, is the latest from onetime Miramax house pet Lasse Hallstrom, who directed two wonderful movies ages ago (My Life as a Dog and Once Around), then settled into a depressingly lucrative career making fake foreign films that offered multiplex regulars all the surface qualities they associated with art house pictures (provocative situations, Sundance-approved empowerment narratives) minus anything that might make them uncomfortable (sex and violence, ambiguous narratives, contradictory characters, socially and politically tangled situations).
Like Hallstrom’s similarly bland The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and The Shipping News, Casanova pretends to be edgy and relevant but is essentially harmless. Unlike the superficially similar but far nastier, sexier and smarter The Libertine, Casanova goes the extra furlong to make its womanizing Venetian hero as puppy-lovable as possible. It even keeps onscreen sex to a minimum (which is like making an Evel Knievel biopic with no bike stunts), ostentatiously praises the virtues of monogamy and reassures us that its hero isn’t a sexual compulsive, God forbid, but a man-child with lost-mommy issues who just wants to settle down with a true love forever and ever. Your mom is going to love this movie. It’s Hitch in powdered wigs.
Following an opening tryst with a hot young nun in training, our studly hero never again succumbs to momentary sexual temptation (except for a comic hummer performed under a table, and quickly aborted). He’s too smitten with wooing a swordfighting, women’s-lib-advocating babe named Francesca Bruni (Sienna Miller), who’s betrothed to marry a man she doesn’t know. (Horrors!) Like Chocolat, Casanova fashions its story into lame social satire that seems very Clinton-era, pitting religious hypocrites and blue-nosed killjoys against our heroes’ earthy life-forces. Like Chocolat, Casanova even features a Kenneth Starr-type inquisitor, the Vatican emisssary Pucci (Jeremy Irons, pursing his Chuck Jones lips) who thinks sex is evil, gets off on torture and even brags, “Heresy is whatever I say it is.”
Except for Irons’ Grinchy fussing and costar Oliver Platt’s Charles Laughton-esque turn as Francesca’s future husband, a salami-loving mogul (insert joke here, or don’t), the cast is constrained by the movie’s cute, schematic phoniness. Ledger’s hetero ‘Nilla wafer movie star swagger isn’t a tenth as interesting as his gay Hud posturing in Brokeback Mountain, and neither is it as complex and fearsomely alive as Johnny Depp’s hatefully magnetic, ultimately tragic characterization in The Libertine. The whole point of The Libertine is to make us wonder what, exactly, constitutes a “likeable” and “relatable” character, then get past it and arrive at something like understanding. Casanova, while feigning sophistication, is much more crude. It’s all about applauding viewers for holding vaguely “correct” beliefs (sexism and organized religion bad; sex and commitment good) so that they feel good about having bought a ticket. It’s another historical film that invites people to escape into the past without admitting that the very idea is a lie.
BARRY LYNDON
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
MOMA January 6 and 7
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
Directed by Alain Resnais
The Museum of the Moving Image Jan. 7 & 8, 2 p.m.
It’s not surprising that Terrence Malick’s The New World would be the most divisive studio release of the year, much more of a fight-starter than the more politically and philosophically current Munich. Malick’s symphonic drama is the most stylistically radical historical film released in this country since, well, Malick’s last movie, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, but more engaging and propulsive because it’s anchored to the story of one woman’s cultural and romantic evolution. With the exception of Robert Altman’s panoramic social dramas and Oliver Stone’s epic depictions of splintered consciousness, Malick’s films are as aesthetically bold as Hollywood movies get. They deny audiences all the usual aesthetic anchors. Audiences still aren’t ready for that sort of storytelling. It’s too unsettling and mysterious; the sort of approach that’s likely to be shrugged off as random, undisciplined and—that favorite box-office killer—“pretentious.” (Code for, “How dare you throw me in the water and expect me to swim.”)
What a shame. Almost a century after D.W. Griffith allegedly liberated cinema from the shackles of all previous storytelling forms, commercial narrative movie still owe their primary allegiance to theater and, to a lesser extent, the third-person-limited novel. There is nothing else in American movies as sustained and structurally daring as the soldiers’ reminiscences intercut with jagged flashbacks in The Thin Red Line, or the Jamestown winter sequence in The New World, which combines self-contained scenes and jagged, jump-cut, almost trailer-like moments in a mosaic that effectively obliterates the usual movie concepts of how time advances onscreen. It is as if the world itself is remembering what happened, dipping into individual characters’ minds at will.
The New World, like the rest of Malick’s output, is an epic assembled according to the quicksilver rhythms of the mind. Immediate, present-tense drama fuses with analytical language as individual characters attempt to interpret, through voice-overs, what is happening to them at that particular moment (or perhaps what happened to them, past tense; we’re often deliberately unsure if Malick’s characters are remembering something that happened long ago, or trying to envision how they’ll remember it at some future point). Except for Stone, no major American filmmaker makes such a point of depicting the instability of consciousness, and showing how little the individual self means compared with the tectonic forward motion of history. As civilizations meet, armies clash and lovers clinch, Malick’s movies simultaneously plunge us into raw feeling and insist that we hover outside of it and admit the myth of centrality, the sweet lie (celebrated in almost every other commercial film) that we truly are the center of the existence, that the rest of society, indeed the cosmos, cares what we say, do or think, or that we ever lived at all.
As luck would have it, two local repertory venues are screening classic films that reflect different aspects of Malick’s approach. On January 6 and 7, MOMA screens Stanley Kubrick’s least appreciated masterwork, Barry Lyndon, which, like The New World, puts its characters’ bosom-heaving passions and social aspirations in their proper context, one immense panorama at a time. On January 7 and 8 at 2 p.m. at the Museum of the Moving Image, I’ll introduce a new black-and-white print of Alain Resnais’ moody, sexually explicit, nearly Cubist masterpiece Hiroshima Mon Amour, which pioneered the use of flash cuts and employed voice-over narration not to help the narrative along, but to undercut it and act as an emotional counterweight.
Watch Hiroshima soon after any Malick film and you’ll sense a direct evolution from there to here, a line that brings us through the French New Wave (Cahiers du Cinema honored the film’s release with a roundtable discussion in which Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette wondered if Hiroshima was the most important movie ever made) and into 1960s European art cinema and their English and American equivalents (films like The Pawnbroker, Seconds, Point Blank and The Graduate played around with flash cuts and blurred the distinction between dialogue and voice-over narration). Visit www.ammi.org for more information.
