Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

August 15, 2003

Sophomore jump

Distributors have started previewing some of their Toronto premieres for critics: on Wednesday, I saw Sofia Coppola's second feature, the mostly sublime Lost in Translation, and all my friend and I could do afterwards is take a very long walk and talk and drink into the night. Gee whiz! It's a feat of levitation, contemplation, mood and love, love, love: I'm looking forward to talking to Coppola about her story of two lonely souls (Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray), lost in Tokyo, deprived of their indifferent mates, adrift in an empire of signs without meaning, only recognizing a fellow forlorn face across the bar in the Tokyo Park Hyatt, across a generation or three. There's a vernacular grace to their wanderings, which reminded my colleague Scott Macauley of "early Wenders": I'm still happily recalling Lance Acord's images, the superb score (among a plethora of songs, there are compositions by My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields and Air's Bsrian Reitzell) and most of all, Coppola's regard for the human face.

Machines against the rage

In Danny Boyle's gloomy, unexpected summer hit 28 Days Later, a virus ruins a corner of the world, a manmade insult that makes bloodthirsty zombies of its victims, a little thing called "Rage."

Fury and spleen, anger and invective: cinema misses these things. Fury signifying something, rather than the usual less-than-primal impulses we see on screen nowadays: a sense of entitlement, a frenzy of provincial self-love, say. Audiences continue to trickle into Boyle's dreary vision, even if they don't seem attracted to a movie like Gregor Jordan's Buffalo Soldiers, which also dares traffic in doubt and scorn and satirical thrust. Perhaps the cynical mood of that much-delayed movie is more off-putting to a larger audience than Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland's vision of love in troubled times, and Joaquin Phoenix's substantial charm only goes so far when a peacetime military is being parodied.

Dirty Pretty Things, directed by Stephen Frears from a screenplay by Steven Knight, who was one of the co-creators of "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?," is a more classically controlled story, a rich genre entry both cosmopolitan and veddy English, that turns the stuff of urban legend--the misplaced human organ in the hotel room--into a thriller about London's underground, of commerce that is tolerated--using immigrants to fill unwanted jobs--and commerce which is unspeakable--body parts as a telling symbol for the exploitation of humans in general. (And who wants to be an illegal immigrant?)

"The hotel business is about strangers and they will always surprise you," one of the bads tells dignified, quietly heroic Okwe, the central character, a Nigerian-born overnight desk clerk at a flash hotel, who, after a suppressed dark incident in his past, has striven always to do the right thing. Twenty-five-year-old Chiwetel Ejiofor, who has made a mark on the London stage, gives a performance of such fluent complexity that one cannot imagine the range of movies he will make in the next twenty or thirty years. Think of the transparent but profoundly effective grace of Michael Caine or Gene Hackman: Ejiofor quietly embodies that kind of control in each and every scene he's in. And in its quiet, sure yet pulpy way, Dirty Pretty Things also engages other issues. It leaves us wondering, how much brainpower and cleverness goes to waste in an ostensibly multicultural world, or should we say, a multinational world, which refers to the statelessness of corporate entities rather than the geographical origins of individuals?

Get thee to a distribbery

So what's human life worth? Terror, scorn, anger, let's bring them together now and consider Peter Mullan's commanding The Magdalene Sisters, a sustained howl against affront and dishonor. His Venice Golden Lion-winning marvel is a concentrated yowl of righteous indignation, and whatever its flaws in demonstrating the horrors visited upon its composite characters, the white-hot intensity of the actor-writer-director's gaze gives us a wrenchingly cathartic drama, a brilliant, unrelenting screed against exploitation and injustice.

Ireland has had its wealth of moral crusades through the centuries. One that persisted until 1996 was the Magdalene Laundries, sponsored by the Catholic Church to imprison young women who were thought to endanger the morals of the land, whether an unwed mother or merely cheeky. Their families signed them over to the Laundries, for a lifetime with no pay for penance for their flaws.

Mullan's earlier feature, Orphans, was a quirky black comedy about four siblings dealing with the death of their mother, mixing anger, quirk and outright surrealism in an impressive stew. The Magdalene Sisters,however, in its blazing fashion, bears the same passion and is a major advance upon his best known role as an actor, playing the raging alcoholic at the center of Ken Loach's My Name Is Joe.

Since its debut in the United Kingdom, The Magdalene Sisters has caused outrage by spokesmen for the church, but few of the complaints of sensationalism against Mullan's muscular indictment mention the tyranny visited on the young women during their imprisonment. Intriguingly, Mullan finds room in his inventory of cruelties for a commanding performance from one of the wicked figures, Sister Bridget, a Nurse Ratched of the wash, played with sadistic relish by Geraldine McEwan. There is no rest for the wicked, it's said, and Sister Bridget knows no rest when disciplining the wicked.

The lead actresses play their roles as innocents, as tremulous strays: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), who shames her family by accusing a local boy of rape at a wedding reception; unwed mother Rose (Dorothy Duff) and unregenerate flirt Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone). Her crime? The sort of beauty that makes boys bold. What community can encompass that without fear of social decline?

Mullan does not fear going over over-the-top. The movie ends with a stab at narrative closure which does not ring true, yet the fact that the laundries and their shame persisted past the mid-1990s, but are now history being unearthed in documentaries (one of which inspired Mullan), offers the sort of hope one wishes upon many other indignities in our present moment, in other cultures and our own, our twenty-first century dystopia.

 

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