on characters and drama, sort of
Frost/Nixon was almost exactly what I expected, though to be totally fair maybe Ron Howard wasn't as bad as he could have been. He wasn't hitting Mendes levels of unsubtlety, anyway. (I just read a much more personal post from a friend about learning the difficult lesson that it's okay to accept the bad things in your life without saying to yourself, "It could be so much worse than this." On a much much more shallow level, it's okay to say a film was insulting and too obvious even when it isn't stooping to Mendesian voiceover and pantomime. Apologies to Laura for hijacking her epiphany for a shitty purpose.) Frost/Nixon is a good drama, with some great characters (Frank Langhella yes, Michael Sheen yes, but not to be overlooked: Sam Rockwell and especially Kevin Bacon). It's got nice parallels between two very disparate characters, each of whom have a self-destructive need to do things their own way, each of whom is teetering between a kind of life and death more important to them than mortality. It's got emotionally and morally complex characters and scenarios. The problem is, it's also got Real World style interview segments with the characters, Cliffs Notes for all of that. I mean, the characters keep talking to the camera and telling you the emotional or thematic content of the scene you just saw. Hey Ron, don't be a jerk. If you leave everything right out in the open like that, what's the point in ever watching it again? The more transparent you make things, the less engaged your audience becomes, because you've done the work for them. You think your audience is a bunch of bovine (popcorn-)bagfeeders who won't get all your subtle mastery unless you spell it out for them? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, dude.
I'll be honest with you. Happy-Go-Lucky was exhausting. My experience with Mike Leigh is limited to Naked (which I adore) and Vera Drake (which I thought was good), but I am familiar with his unique style of working with actors through improvisation to build characters, and then building the story from there. So really, I should have known what to expect; Naked was similarly exhausting, but where Naked had stark, bitter, intellectual cynicism rampaging through a city Godzilla-style, Happy-Go-Lucky has superhuman levels of optimism and cheeky energy staying buoyant in a world that has no use for it. That's not really what the story's about (or maybe, actually, it is), but that's definitely what the character of Poppy Cross is about, and I don't know any filmmaker whose work better suits the phrase "character piece" than Leigh. The films are the characters. But don't get me wrong. Sure, the first fifteen minutes of the movie had me wondering if Poppy was getting enough oxygen to her brain, but the story itself, the interactions of these myriad characters -- almost all of whom are educators of one kind or another -- is pretty brilliant and deft. The philosophy and worldview stuff felt for the most part better tucked into the story than David Thewlis's (beautiful) running-mouth monologues did in Naked. Basically, in case it isn't obvious, I'd call Happy the antithesis of Naked in all the right ways. If Johnny ever met Poppy, the universe would probably fold in on itself. I'm glad this film got a best-script nomination, but I don't expect it to get the win. (Maybe I'm too Johnny, not enough Poppy, to have faith.)
And lastly, hoping for even a fictional background on Frank Morris for TWOMP, I finally sat and watched Escape From Alcatraz. Disappointingly (and not surprisingly) I wasn't given any history for Eastwood's Morris, and because I've been reading about the actual events it was interesting to see all the liberties they took with it -- but, like Frost/Nixon and The Reader and every other film ever made about real events or people, I don't look to Hollywood to give me history lessons; I look to Hollywood to give me good drama. I care about the story being told and what it means as a story, not as a reenactment. The character of Richard Nixon is fascinating, but did the real Nixon ever have a reflective moment one night wherein he realized his opponent was too easy a conquest, and then drunkenly call up David Frost to incite a fighting will inside him, thus through his own need for a good fight bringing about his own political demise? Yeah, probably not. But it makes for good drama when Langhella's character does it! Similarly, making Frank Morris noble, and putting some of the pieces of the story in the hands of other characters to spread it out, that probably makes for better drama. Additionally, after finally seeing this 1979 film, I realize how much The Shawshank Redemption is just an overpolished knock-off. But that's okay, too, because they're both good drama, and little else. Escape didn't exactly knock my socks off with its insight into... well, much of anything. But it was fun to watch, and it might have helped me get in the heads of the imaginary characters, the Giants Instead of Windmills, at the heart of The World of Missing Persons.
Which I am supposed to be writing, right now. This very second.
Oh, sweet workdodge.