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

August 29, 2003

Border Control

Another confusing week. Three and four movies a day are being previewed in advance of the Toronto International Film Festival, and I'm wending my way through Chicago's Underground Film Festival.

Alongside Buenos Aires, it may be one of the most party-centric festivals I know, and I'm a couple of hours away from seeing audience reaction to a short that I acted in, and on Saturday, the premiere of a documentary I directed. The tenth edition of CUFF occasioned a reflection on the state of Chicago filmmaking and the state of mind of Chicago filmmakers, which you can find here along with a glib timeline of events in Chicago's checkered yet colorful history of movies and moviemaking here.

My legs - and spleen - got some exercise after the offense I felt at one of the movies I've seen in advance, a sour satire that is the first fictional film I've witnessed to use images of the destruction of the World Trade Center in a way that seems sordid. (I'd just revisited the 11'09'01 omnibus a few hours earlier, which didn't make things any easier.) I'll write more about that bit of grit after its Toronto
debut.

Tween: a rock and a hard place

Production designer Catherine Hardwicke's directorial debut is actually an electrifying gem, seething with adolescent anger and onrushing visual vitality. It's also a potential tragedy, a deeply felt, shockingly detailed horror film about contemporary Angeleno girlhood, so hyped-up it could be called "Requiem for a Teen." Evan Rachel Wood (Simone) is startlingly fine as the girl gone wrong; Holly Hunter, as her indulgent, drink-prone mother, radiates hapless sorrow. Co-star Nikki Reed was 13 when she co-wrote the story and turned 15 in May; put in politest terms, she looks far older than her years. And Hardwicke's camera has a viral energy, hurtling forward like words out of a mouth that doesn't know how much hurt they can cause.

The 48-year-old writer-director, hair in long blonde braids, tells stories with the openness and glee of someone much younger. She's the kind of observer and admirer of detail who, without missing a breath or losing a beat during a long story, inserted the compliment "nice socks!" when I crossed my ankles. She always intended to direct, but never managed to make the deals. An undergraduate degree in architecture led her, post-UCLA grad school, into production design, working on movies like Suburbia, Three Kings and Vanilla Sky. Several years back, she was dating Nikki's father and became "stepmother or whatever." "She's an old soul," she says, referring to Reed. "Even when she was 5, she had this adult character, always interesting and challenging to be around. She's always been more fun to hang around with than most of my friends."

"I knew her in a really fun way, " she continues. After four years, she and Nikki's father broke up. "I wanted to stay close to her. I started by getting my hair cut by her mother. We were this happy
post-nuclear family." But Nikki grew distanced as the years passed. "She became precociously, fiercely angry with her mother, father and brother, lashing out." Hardwicke looked for something her young friend could pour herself into. "I had the instinct that creative things might be the idea. I thought of acting, but I was worried that would make her more vain. But she went to intense workshops, Hagen, Meisner, at 12 and 13. I wanted her to do something with these years, something more than just eyeliner and makeup. We went rock-climbing, surfing, taking pictures and art classes." But it was acting that clicked. "She learned sophisticated technique, had great coaches. I made these little short films, but it wasn't enough."

Almost joking, she suggested they write a role for Nikki, since John Cusack had done that for himself with movies like High Fidelity and Billy Bob Thornton made his career with Sling Blade." She tried interesting Nikki in "Pride and Prejudice." That quickly bombed. "When you put the time in, the effort, kids open up." Then they tried a wacky teen comedy. It wasn't working. Nikki was tempting trouble. "Let's do something about your life," Hardwicke says she suggested, "instead of you going out, picking up guys and smoking pot." Nikki started telling stories about the intense trouble many of her friends were getting in. "I realized that the things they were doing were more compelling and potent than anything we could make up. I asked her, do you know what an indie film is? Do you know what Sundance is? I wanted her to know what a really low-budget film was." (Thirteen's budget, cobbled from several sources, was under $1.5 million for the twenty-four day shoot.) They spent six days in early January 2002 working. "I said, we're gonna write that screenplay. And it was the proverbial bolt of lightning. The first draft was maybe fifteen pages longer. And for a lot of reasons, the adults didn't get a fair shake." Yet she knew that these vital, self-destructive girls they'd created were the heart of the story, obsessed with looks and makeup and finally, how to feel. The movie opens with a shocking scene, which Hardwicke shorthands as "just punching the shit out of each other."

"These were wild emotions. Talking to her as we worked, I was seasick from all the shifts, her anger
and alienation. But I wanted to draw her out and understand it."

On future projects, there are elements she wants to stay "indie." Of the small budget, Hardwicke says, "There was freedom, no one telling me, make Tracy more likable. No more of the usual mid-course comments, 'Let's make them more identifiable.'" But it all comes back to her friendship with Nikki. She recalls her own childhood in a "little tiny town in South Texas," and says, "everyone forgets what they did. It's really scary. I think how young we were when there were all these major makeout times, full on."

Empathy was no problem in making the film, but child welfare laws were. Hardwicke fills in some of the rules about working with children. "You get nine-and-a-half hours total. That includes lunch, hair
and makeup." She laughs. "You cannot bribe the welfare worker. You cannot pay a meal penalty. You cannot trick them." An assistant kept revising Post-Its on Hardwicke's video monitor. "Twenty-seven minutes until Evan leaves. We're losing the kids in three minutes. We're losing the kids in two minutes. I heard it so much, 'Losing the Kids,' that almost became the title."

Merchant of spinach

When I hear the words "Merchant and Ivory," most times I reach for my remote control. Their previous movie set in the almost-present day, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, is one of the few of the production duo's movies I've ever truly treasured. But Home Vision Entertainment has just released two of their earlier movies - 1984's The Bostonians and 1979's The Europeans - and as I recalled, they're as limp as a bad handshake.

Lovely to look at, but as intellectually stimulating as pudding. Par for the tepic course. When I heard that the 75-year-old director, James Ivory; his garrulous, gregarious Indian party-giver of a producer, Ismail Merchant; and stock screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala had decided to produce Le Divorce, from Diane Johnson's smart yet frothy novel, I had my hopes up. The quirky charms of Soldier's Daughter over the unbearably stolid cadences of 2000's The Golden Bowl? It sounded like an ideal late picture for the veteran director.

And the blondes leading the blondes! Naomi Watts, freshly gleaming in her newfound stardom after Mulholland Drive and The Ring; Kate Hudson doing the bubbly post-Goldie Hawn thing; and even Glenn Close. Plus French veteran Leslie Caron, the brilliant Brit Stephen Fry, the seldom well-used yet brilliant Stockard Channing. And did I mention Bebe Neuwirth?

I'd love to just keep repeating the names of the cast like an incantation to bring about another movie. Let's mull over the company name, "Merchant-Ivory." The names, twinned, suggest either a kind of burnished artifact, or a neatly constructed yet soulless product. They're after ivory, one of the most beautiful of organic substances, yet they're merchants at heart, carpentering together their peculiarly decorative yet unmemorable shop windows into the consumerist soul.

It's a cheap play on words - good for a quick paragraph - but I was bored. The trailers promised a romp. A bit of naughtiness. Cheeky French naughtiness. Mais non. (I sat in the dark watching Le Divorce this weekend with a friend who hadn't seen it either, wondering why I shouldn't just go out and buy an air conditioner already.)

Kate Hudson plays Isabel, a young, still-unformed American who leaves her wealthy, privileged life in Santa Barbara for some time abroad, visiting her stepsister, Roxy (Naomi Watts). Isabel's a flirt, still a child, unlike the smart woman of the novel. Roxy's suddenly a pregnant single mom (and an unlikely, emotionally indulgent poet) when her French husband dumps her for another woman. She lets it happen. She hardly protests. To anyone who's read the novel, it's just a setup for Johnson's smart take on culture clash, European politics and the ugly symbolism of EuroDisney. But amid a groaningly large cast, which causes a kind of terrible pacing, like Robert Altman on antidepressants.

Instead of centering on Hudson, who could possibly play a kind of Holly Golightly, we instead get annoyed by all the prissy, smug folk on screen: When we return to Isabel, she's debating whether to become the mistress of a 55-year-old relative of the French side of Roxy's family (Thierry Lhermitte). Of their pairing, there's no convincing behavior or rationale spoken aloud. Conveniently, it simply happens. He likes young flesh. She's a flake. (I found myself muttering "Icky-icky-icky-icky-icky-icky." Holly-go-away.)

It's soap, but you still feel unclean. Somehow, the mock aristocratic Merchant and Ivory seem more arrogant than any cliche; you could knit up about the French. Merchant is a notorious gourmand and chef, and you'd think the movie was indulging some worthy foodie-porn with Isabel's reflection of her pampered days and nights with her sugar papa, "I felt especially guilty about the pleasure and interest I took in the restaurants we went to," she says. Could it be a perversion? I don't know. If a perversion is something boring to viewers and tepidly framed and lit, then yes.

Watts has presence to burn, but in each successive film, Hudson seems less mature than her groupie character in Almost Famous. As she seems to grow younger, Merchant, Ivory and Jhabvala have gone whole-hog sclerotic. The characters are idiots, the movie a sad waste of a lovely city and some good actors who surely dawdled over many meals more memorable than this unprofiterole.

 

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