by Marty and Martha Roth
Because of a low-grade allergy to director Lasse Hallström's brand of whimsy, we avoided
Chocolat when it first came out, and only a bleak February Sunday with virtually nothing
else to see drove us into its sticky embrace. We emerged with nostalgia for such
precursors as Babette's Feast, but must report that it wasn't as sickly sweet as we'd
feared. The story, of a free-spirited single mother who opens a chocolatier in a
provincial French village, lacks credibility. But Hallström has a good eye, and the film
is made with such loving attention to details of architecture, furniture, and food that it
becomes high-quality eye candy, good for a pleasant couple of hours.
Such as it is, the plot involves small-town snubs and ancient quarrels which are mostly
dissolved in cups of rich, foamy chocolate blended by the heroine with secrets handed down
from a Latin American grandmother. A tiny subplot introduces a temperate love affair
between senior citizens John Wood and Leslie Caron, complicated by a geriatric dog, and we
could have done with a lot more of them and a lot less of Binoche, whom we found tiresome
in the central role. But she is surrounded by an able company of character actors,
including Judi Dench, Alfred Molina (who must have as many extra teeth as a shark), Lena
Olin, Carrie-Anne Moss, Peter Stormare, and Johnny Depp, who becomes stronger and more
interesting with every role. Why is the sight of a pot of chocolate being stirred so
satisfying? See Dušan Makaveyev's Sweet Movie, which emphasizes the kinetic likeness
of chocolate and another squishy brown substance.
One last bad-tempered note: twelve years ago French director Claire Denis (Beau Travail)
made her debut with a film also called Chocolat, about the French occupation of West
Africa seen through the clear eyes of a small girl. Denis was born and raised in French
West Africa, and her film has great delicacy and bite; never confuse it with this one.
Speaking of distinguished character actors, Sean Penn's messy new film The Pledge has many
more good actors then good ideas or even good roles. The script, from a Duerrenmatt novel,
asks us to believe that a retired policeman (Jack Nicholson) will jeopardize his pension,
his future, his relationships, and ultimately his life trying to fulfill a pledge he has
made to the mother of a murdered child. Penn doesn't really know how to tighten the
strings of such a story, and we found this long film tedious. Instead, Penn indulges in
the directorial equivalent of conspicuous consumption, flinging before us cameo
performances by actor du jour Benecio Del Toro, Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren, Tom Noonan,
Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, Sam Shepard, Lois Smith, and Harry Dean Stanton. Robin
Wright Penn plays the female lead with an almost total absence of glamor, for which we
were grateful. You take what you can get.
A cut up from The Pledge, we thought, was Sam Raimi's The Gift, a thriller about a
small-town widow who has psychic powers and scrapes a living reading the cards for her
neighbors. The beautiful and interesting Cate Blanchett almost brings off this role, but a
Southern accent defeats her in the end. The script, by Billy Bob Thornton and Tom
Epperson, begins strongly but deteriorates fast, and except for Blanchett's Annie Wilson,
most of the characters suffer from extreme underdevelopment. Raimi's trademark quick cuts
start to look silly about halfway through. Struggling with their skimpy roles Giovanni
Ribisi, Greg Kinnear, Hilary Swank, and Kim Dickens don't have much to do, but Keanu
Reeves gives the performance of his career as a wife-beating good old boy.
And speaking of Johnny Depp, the guy gets around; he plays two small but striking roles in
Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel's provocative film made about and from a novel by gay
Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, who left in the Mariel expulsions and died of AIDS in New
York in 1980. Fidel Castro's harsh, homophobic statements and his regime's repression of
gay sexuality have always been difficult for supporters of the Cuban Revolution to
understand, even with the knowledge that pre-revolutionary Havana was a sex-tourism
destination for many North Americans who exploited young Cuban men and women. Before Night
Falls is a riveting look at what that repression meant for gay Cubans.
Arenas, who was born in grim rural poverty, supported the revolution until it betrayed
him, and Schnabel's film contains convincing images of the tension between bohemia and
revolution. Gifted, rebellious, and seductive, Arenas can't have been an easy person to
like but Spanish actor Xavier Bardem plays him with great charm and sweetness. Wondering
when we'll get back to Johnny Depp? He plays a transvestite prisoner with an immense
rectal capacity for smuggling and in the next scene a macho policeman with slicked hair
and a penis the size of a sashweight.
Sean Penn turns up, too, in a small role, and Michael Wincott, and probably other actors
one might recognize, although Schnabel made bewildering decisions, like having Bardem
speak the voice-over narration in barely comprehensible English, while many conversations
in Spanish are subtitled. Schnabel, who is a painter, seems more interested in the visual
momentum of his film than in the script, and it is restlessly beautiful.
French director Agnès Varda, now in her seventies, received a retrospective last month
from Walker Art Center, at which we saw her most recent film, The Gleaners and I, a long,
lovely meditation on the related activities of gleaning and scavenging or scrounging, or
garbage-picking. French law provides access to private farmland after crops have been
harvested by anyone willing to glean fruit or grain that has been missed by the
harvesters, and the film begins with a look at literally tons of potatoes discarded by
commercial sorting equipment because although edible they're outside the size requirements
of the finicky market. We see corn, tomatoes, grapes, apples, and figs being gleaned, and
we also see urban scavengers visiting the good garbage bins where supermarkets,
restaurants, and bakeries discard food.
Varda enters her film and turns it from documentary to testament, speaking of film-making
itself as a kind of gleaning and weaving her body and her feelings into the loose-limbed
narrative. In the end, it seemed to us that she pretties up the hard reality of a life of
scrounging - as she prettied up adultery in Le Bonheur or feminist struggle in One Sings,
the Other Doesn't - but it has a fresh sting to it. Gleaners is likely to receive a
commercial release, and we recommend it - sort of.
Another fresh and biting film that is not likely to show commercially, George Washington,
marks the debut of a young filmmaker, David Gordon Green. Thanks to University Film
Society, Twin Cities audiences got a look at it in February. Green set his actors on a
ravaged landscape near Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and his cinematographer, Tim Orr,
finds unexpected gorgeousness in a rusty boxcar coupling or a bulldozer scooping landfill.
With a cast of mostly unknowns, mostly African American pre-adolescents, Green's
meandering film captures the aimless dangers and glamors of the last summer vacation
before high school.
We forgot, last month, to tell you about Thirteen Days, Kevin Costner's homage to the
Kennedy administration and its behavior during the so-called Cuban missile crisis. The
film is undistinguished but watchable, with nice performances from good Hollywood
character actors in the roles of Dean Rusk, Robert Macnamara, Adlai Stevenson, and other
Sixties politicos. Its salient point, that the Kennedy brothers believed the country was
in imminent danger of a military coup, sank home; we watched it mere days after the
inauguration of the Bush administration which does represent a military takeover.
Costner has committed far worse in his new picture, 3,000 Miles to Graceland, a dumb heist
flick that sucked us in with a cute trailer. Costner and Kurt Russell as Elvis
impersonators? Sure, might be fun. Well, it's not. Director Demian Lichtenstein - you know
his parents read too much Hermann Hesse - takes a lame script, cranks up the sound track,
and adds psychedelic effects to no good end. Stay at least 300 meters away from this one.
Edward Albee's Death of Bessie Smith must always have been that playwright's attempt to
climb into Tennessee Williams' shoes, and Theatre Latté Da's skillful production
unfortunately emphasized its weakness. Director Peter Rothstein decided to insert the
figure of Smith herself into the play, and jazz singer Shirley Witherspoon made a gallant
try at impersonating the raucous Empress of the Blues. It's always a pleasure to hear
Witherspoon sing, even if her version of “Gimme a Pigfoot” was a little too
polite. Dan Chouinard's piano accompaniment was fine. Director Rothstein guided Latté
Da's actors in excellent performances and an imaginative staging, but the play was just no
match for them; as the sexually disappointed, viciously racist nurse, Carla Noack deserved
much better. We glimpsed Albee's attempt to fold racism, misogyny, class prejudice and
warped sexuality into a single bundle - the Nurse - but it just doesn't work very well. As
George Carlin might say, the Sixties (when Death premiered, in Berlin) were good to him.
Theater in the Round served up a Peter Shaffer play, Lettice and Lovage, originally
written as a vehicle for Maggie Smith. We're always grateful to TRP for letting us see
plays that no other local theater produces and for the generally high quality of their
productions. In the role of Lettice, an imaginative woman who guides tourists around a
stately home and gets in trouble when she embroiders her spiel with sensational details,
Maggie Bearmon Pistner did an excellent job, but the play is too flat and frontal for
TRP's staging; except for the first scene, in which Lettice shepherds four separate groups
through Faustian House, her narrative sprouting alarming inventions with each repetition,
the script defeated director Linda S. Paulsen's attempts to open it out of its TVscreen
frame.
