500 Days of Summer (2009)

Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2009. Directed by Marc Webb. Starring Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

We had the chance to see this movie just a few days ago during this year’s Nashville Film Festival, which has reached its fortieth edition, and it was really a pleasure. 500 Days of Summer is a little jewel of an independent film, witty, tender, hilarious at times, and never pretentious. It centers on the relationship established between its two main characters, Tom and Summer (thence the title), who gradually come to find out that their approaches to love and their expectations from their relationship differ greatly. It’s a simple but compelling story very well directed by Marc Webb, who chooses not to chronicle the love affair in a linear fashion but rather prefers to constantly jump ahead and back in time as he tells the story. This works very well because it gives the audience a better idea of the feelings of the characters at different stages of their relationship, and at the same time, it occasionally achieves interesting comic effects.

This non-chronological way of approaching the story is just one of the many metafictional devices employed by Webb, who proves to be rather conscious of viewers’ expectations about storytelling and filmmaking. Thus, the movie begins with the blatant announcement that it is a story of boy-meets-girl but not a love story. In our opinion, however, 500 Days of Summer is, indeed, a love story—perhaps not a conventional love story, but one that stresses different understandings of the ideas of love and steady relationships and ultimately dramatizes the clash between the way we expect our lives to be and the things that reality has in store for us.

Even though Webb sometimes introduces a narrator, the favored point of view is that of Tom’s. This enables us to have direct access to his perceptions of Summer: we constantly see her through his eyes, and little by little, we come to realize that some of the images of her that he is construing are erroneous. And perhaps because of this narrative device, the character of Summer comes across as not as deep and well-rounded as it could have been. Both Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt give fine performances as the protagonists, and the picture contains several funny parodies of French and Swedish art films and popular culture in general. This movie was certainly a pleasant surprise for us, proving once again that it is possible to make a good film out of a simple story provided that someone takes the time to find an intelligent way to tell it. And Webb, in his first full-length feature, clearly succeeds.

Anton&Erin.

Ladies in Lavender (2004)

UK Film Council/Baker Street, 2004. Directed by Charles Dance. Starring Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Daniel Brühl, and Natascha McElhone.

Ladies in Lavender may well be the archetype of the movie that lays a quite interesting foundation but that fails to build on those initial premises. Even though it's compelling and very beautifully put together, its screenplay ends up coming across as a good chance that's been wasted away. In the end, it looks as though British filmmaker Charles Dance hadn't dared to follow the road less traveled, and we can't help but feel that, if trodden, that road might have led him closer to a more satisfying work of art.

Set on a remote English coastal town a few months before the outset of World War II, the film tells the story of two sisters, Ursula (Judi Dench) and Janet (Maggie Smith), whose uneventful life is dramatically altered by the unexpected appearance of the young Andrea (Daniel Brühl), whom they find lying unconscious on the beach. The plot is built around a study of the relationship between the youth and the two elderly ladies, but in our opinion, this study is sometimes lacking in depth. For instance, the presence of Andrea awakens Ursula's yearning for a life that she never had the chance to live, and she plunges into nostalgic memories of a past that never existed. As she grows old, Ursula's innermost longings and desires come to the surface as she looks back on her life and is overwhelmed by the wonder of the many things that could have been but never were. Yet the treatment of this aspect of the plot comes across as rather shallow, and we certainly wish that it'd been pushed a little further. The same could be said of the influence that Andrea exerts on the small community that inhabits the tiny village: even though at first it looks as though the film is going to delve deeper into this issue, it's eventually overlooked in favor of Andrea's passion for music.

Nonetheless, in spite of these drawbacks, the movie is quite entertaining, and its scenes are drenched with emotion and occasional humor. Judi Dench and Maggie Smith prove yet again that they're magnificent performers, and Daniel Brühl and Natascha McElhone add to the consistently high interpretive quality of the film. Overall, then, we do recommend the watching of Ladies in Lavender, a film that is further embellished by its picturesque setting and its beautiful, dramatic music. Yet we wish that Dance had been a wee bit more daring in his approach to the telling of the story—it surely would have gone a long way...

Anton&Erin.

The Others (2001)

Cruise-Wagner/Sogecine/Escorpion, 2001. Directed by Alejandro Amenabar. Starring Nicole Kidman, Fionnula Flanagan, Christopher Eccleston, Eric Sykes, Alakina Mann, and James Bentley.

By the time he made The Others, Spanish director Alejandro Amenabar had already proven his abilities behind the camera with two outstanding thrillers, Thesis (Tesis, 1996) and Open Your Eyes (Abre los ojos, 1997). The latter even spawned a far inferior Hollywood remake entitled Vanilla Sky (2001), starring Tom Cruise. But with the highly acclaimed The Others, the wunderkind of Spanish cinema really became an established director, gaining international recognition.

Filmed in its entirety on location in Spain, although set in the English Channel Islands, The Others is a Gothic horror tale told with imagination and gusto, a loose reworking of Henry James's classic novel The Turn of the Screw. One of the reasons why the movie is so effective lies in its plot, very cleverly constructed and developed at just the right pace. Amenabar excels at creating a ghostly atmosphere, building the tension gradually by means of noises, whispers, an elaborate use of light and shadows, and a magnificent soundtrack that perfectly punctuates the most dramatic moments.

The narrative, basically confined to the dimly lit space of an ancient mansion, attempts to blur the limits between time and space, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The characters' existence is dominated by doubt, fear, longing, and bouts of madness, as Amenabar strives to make sure that the viewer can't clearly distinguish between what is real and what isn't. In such a context, the atmosphere outside the stately walls of the mansion becomes a leitmotif throughout the film. The grim tones of a gray-colored sky, together with the thickness of the ever-present fog, underscore the fact that the characters are in the dark about their past and their present, about their own existence.

The Others turns out to be the perfect vehicle for Nicole Kidman to show once more that she's an excellent actress. Her character, tormented by a past that she's somehow forgotten and by a present of loneliness and grief that she strongly dislikes, isn't an easy role to play, yet she handles it with great elegance and taste. The rest of the cast, laden with fine British actors such as Fionnula Flanagan, Christopher Eccleston, and Eric Sykes, matches Kidman's great performance. Don't expect The Others to be just another bone-chiller populated by ghostly figures and full of special effects. It's actually a delightful, well-constructed little Gothic story whose unexpected twists and turns will keep you at the edge of your seat.

Anton&Erin.

I'm Not There (2007)

Killer Films, 2007. Directed by Todd Haynes. Starring Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, and Charlotte Gainsbourg.

It's true that Bob Dylan has gotten to be somewhat like a twentieth-century Don Quixote. Like Cervantes' famous knight-errant, he has taken on many different personalities and reinvented himself endlessly. In I'm Not There, director Todd Haynes tries to explore the many faces of the cultural icon from Minnesota, from his early years as a protest folksinger in the early '60s to his embracing of religion in the late '70s. Yet we think that, despite some fine performances by Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Ben Whishaw, and Richard Gere, Haynes fails because the movie comes across as a little too fragmentary, and sometimes very frustratingly so.

There are some interesting qualities to the screenplay, though: for instance, Haynes has six different actors embody six different sides of Dylan's life, and each one of these characters bears a different name, although they are all clearly Dylan. They all share enough common traits to ensure that the idea works, but at times, Haynes puts too much emphasis on aspects that don't seem to add much to the overall portrait of Dylan as a person and as an artist. We were constantly frustrated by the fact that once a story seemed to be starting to unfold, it was suddenly brought to an abrupt end, sometimes not to be picked up again at all.

One of the best elements of the film is clearly the soundtrack. The use of Dylan's songs in the film is satisfactory, even in the cases when it isn't his own version of the tune, and they are very well intertwined with the events in his life. However, we believe that not very much emphasis has been put on showing how the events in Dylan's life shaped his work; there are touches of that here and there, but Haynes seems to be more interested in American history than in Dylan's personal life as it influenced his songwriting. There's no doubt that those who are in the know about Dylan's biography will benefit from it as they watch this very different biopic, yet we sometimes felt that even being familiarized with the Dylan saga isn't a source of very much help.

All in all, I'm Not There paints a portrait of Bob Dylan's life as a sort of chaotic fragmentation, yet we're sure that there's way more to Dylan than just that. And perhaps, as in the case of Don Quixote, a single movie is incapable of containing all his greatness.

Anton&Erin.

The Happening (2008)

20th Century Fox, 2008. Written and Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, and Ashlyn Sanchez.

Whoever told M. Night Shyamalan that it's acceptable to write a story without justifying the key elements of the plot? That's exactly what he does in The Happening: he proposes an interesting idea (people who, for some unknown reason, are drawn to killing themselves), but the idea never gets anywhere. The movie never explains the reasons why this happens, but rather prefers to leave it up to our own imagination: perhaps it's terrorism, or air pollution, or an evil coincidence, or maybe a combination of all of these. Nothing really happens in the movie, and everything seems to come out of the blue.

If you're hoping to see a well-developed film, with a beginning, a middle, and an ending, this is not the one for you. We went to see it at the theater and came out of the room with the feeling that we'd been swindled by the story. Its premises are interesting, but the possibilities that these premises offer are totally wasted away. That's not to say that Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel don't do a good job: they are good actors, but they are stuck in a story that is not only unbelievable, but that actually makes no attempt at verisimilitude. In our opinion, The Sixth Sense (1999) is undoubtedly Shyamalan's best work, and The Happening is a clear example that either he's run out of ideas or he's become a little lazy at screenplay writing.

Anton&Erin.