by Marty & Martha Roth
This month two long-awaited treats, O Brother, Where Art Thou? by Ethan and Joel Coen and
Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, finally made it to town -- very different
pictures, but both big, ambitious, and full of good things.
Tiger tells a tale of enduring love, rebellious girlhood, and female friendship against an
amazing sweep of martial arts choreography. Set in an unspecified period in an Old China
where politeness, honor, loyalty, and chastity regulate human relations (and no mention of
footbinding), it offers a shining contrast to life in the postmodern welter. Although the
film seems to be made for Western tastes, it treats the myth of China with great
reverence.
The story itself is typical heroic romance: two lovers, who just happen to be skilled
martial artists, yearn in silence for years without ever daring to speak or touch; a demon
hag driven by sexual revenge devastates the kingdom; and a dashing barbarian bandit
abducts an accomplished and wilful young princess.
Not all the elements are equally interesting. The love story between Li Mu Bai (Yun-Fat
Chow) and Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) grows tedious at times, but the film is an unparalleled
feast for the eyes. Lee and his cinematographer Peter Pau, a veteran of Hong Kong action
films, have done magical things: not simply the grand martial arts set-pieces, but the
look and feel of a world in sumptuous detail. But of course it is those aerial
ice-capades, those set-pieces where flying floating soaring tumbling figures clash and
part that make this film so compelling--in one fight Shu Lien has to step on her
opponent's foot to keep her from flying away. Our favorite is a balletic combat set atop a
bamboo forest.
O Brother is another idiosyncratic piece of Coen comedy, expressing once again the love
and fascination these two Minnesota Jews have for the WASP cruelty of the arid south and
southwest. Immediately identified as a mock epic adaptation of Homer's Odyssey to redneck
country, the film follows the evasive maneuvers of three escaped convicts, a slick-talking
dandy (George Clooney), a degenerate brute (John Turturro), and a sweet idiot (Tim Blake
Nelson) through the Depression South. Along their way they encounter prophets, sirens,
thieves, a violent one-eyed maniac, a musical genius, and the Ku Klux Klan.
Like most of the Coen brothers' high-toned cinematic romps, Brother sprawls a bit, doesn't
quite jell as a narrative, and is vulnerable to race and gender critique. But thank heaven
for their skewed vision of America. Their film teems with so many rich moments that these
criticisms feel misplaced. Where else in the cinema today can you experience the narrative
freedom, downright fun, and, let's say it, little jolts of pure pleasure, that come with a
Coen film? The references are patchy and seemingly incidental--a few Odyssean parallels, a
few moments of homage to the late great Preston Sturges (including the title)--though a
friend showed us that the KKK episode is a point-for-point repetition of the Winged
Monkeys' drill in Wizard of Oz.
George Clooney grows in quality, depth and stature with each role. As for the
ever-dependable acting genius of John Turturro--well, we thought Turturro was marvelous
and John Goodman all wrong in The Big Lebowski, and here we thought just the opposite. Tim
Blake Nelson, an actor unknown to us, almost steals the show as a simpleton who drawls his
way through a script that lags a half hour behind everybody else's. Supporting actors are
mostly brilliant, especially Charles Durning shaking his gigantic tush in a victory dance.
As for women, well, other than a few high-quality moments from Holly Hunter there are
none, which suggests that the real title of the film should be Sister, Where Art Thou?
O Brother's soundtrack amounts to a wonderful anthology of old-timey blue grass music.
Still, it was a bit disconcerting to have Delta blues totally ignored in a film where one
of the characters is a thinly disguised version of Robert Johnson, picked up on the road
just after his famous midnight meeting with the devil.
David Mamet's State and Main is a nicely done satire about an under-financed film crew and
the havoc they wreak trying to shoot a movie in a small New England town. Alec Baldwin and
Sarah Jessica Parker are hilarious as the big stars but William H. Macy and David Paymer
as director and producer, respectively, keep things moving. The plot involves Philip
Seymour Hoffman, as the film's writer, getting together with Rebecca Pidgeon as the owner
of a local bookstore, and that's not nearly as much fun as the deliciously bad behavior of
the crew.
Steven Soderbergh's new film Traffic might be called the Intolerance of the drug war,
split as it is among four alternating visual and dramatic sites: drug war in Mexico
(mostly marijuana), drug war in the States (heroin and cocaine), the corridors of
policy-making power, and life among the addicted children of privilege (a lot of
free-basing). The stories gripped us, as they always will, but they failed to illuminate
the ghastly stalemate that is our current hemispheric drug policy.
An excellent cast peoples each of these story threads: Benicio del Toro and Jacob Vargas
as anti-drug agents in Mexico; the repulsive Michael Douglas as a new anti-drug czar,
insensitive to his ex-hippie wife (Amy Irving) and preppie addict daughter (Erika
Christensen); Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán as dedicated, incorruptible DEA agents; and
Catherine Zeta-Jones and Steven Bauer as San Diego socialites caught up in accusations of
trafficking. There's a scene to treasure when Douglas attends a Georgetown reception and
meets a raft of legislators, many played by themselves including senators Barbara Boxer
and Orrin Hatch and Massachusetts governor William Weld.
The point of the scene, beyond celebrity cameos, is that each person gives him different
advice, and the advice cancels out in the end. We're left with a story told by James
Brolin as the outgoing czar: When Nikita Krushchev left office he gave his successor two
letters, with instructions to open the first when he got into his first tight spot and the
second when he got into another. The first said, "Blame everything on me"; the
second, "Write two letters."
Soderbergh's great strengths are his intelligence--the dialogue is smart, and smartly
paced--and his elegant eye, and he knows how to get good value out of mediocre actors.
Ultimately, however, for all its performance cool Soderbergh's war on drugs is just the
same old "War on Drugs"--messy, obstructed, heartbreakingly slow but, wait a
sec, there is hope, we are winning! Hurrah!! There is no suggestion that some drug users
do not become addicts and, above all, no mention of decriminalization, which is the only
conceivable alternative to the present sinkhole of time and money and homegrown
totalitarianism. Lacking these perspectives, Traffic celebrates the War on Drugs and is
far from the movie we hoped for from Soderbergh. We had to wonder about the influence of
the DEA and FBI, both agencies that cooperated with the filmmakers, because there isn't a
bent DEA agent in sight, although plenty of leaks in the organization, and not a whisper
that the U.S. government itself might traffic in controlled substances to fund certain
adventures without subjecting them to legislative scrutiny. Still, any Soderbergh film
beats none at all.
What do you do if your directing debut, a high-intensity British gangster film called
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, is admired for its qualities but doesn't do
particularly well in the US market? If you just married Madonna, you make it again, and
that we're sorry to say is what Guy Ritchie has done in his new film, Snatch. This time he
adds Hassidic jews, American gangsters, and British blacks to his gravel-voiced Cockney
homicidal maniacs, all holding on for dear life to an ever-accelerating criminal caper.
The film is both bad and insulting but we must praise Brad Pitt as an unintelligible Irish
Gypsy bare-knuckle boxer. I guess if viewers don't respond to this one, Ritchie will by
God make it a third time.
Theater pickings were slim this month and, except for a lavish production of the
Sondheim-Lapine musical Into the Woods at the Ordway, all from the experimental end of the
spectrum: The Bronte Project at Red Eye theater and two British entries in the Walker's
Out There 13 series: the Gob Squad's Safe and Improbable Theatre's Spirit. Into the Woods
depends heavily on technical effects; the music sounds like Sondheim practicing and the
book is smart-alecky and thin. Neither Bronte Project nor Safe quite managed a degree of
effective dramatic realization, and we'd like to pass over them in relative silence. The
Improbable event, however, filled us with delight and made us believe again in the magic
of theater (one of the last times we believed in this was last spring when some of the
same people who work with the Improbables, mainly Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, came
here with their production of (Shock-Headed Peter). McDermott, Guy Dartnell, and Lee
Simpson performed Spirit, an original script, with brilliantly simple props and puppets.
We saw these same three actors two years ago in 70 Hill Lane as part of Out There 11, and
we hope they'll keep coming back.
