Alvy_Singer73

Merchant-Ivory films, and all their stuffy descendents, have

historically been great soporifics for me. Show me even a

commercial for "Howard's End" or "The Wings of the Dove" and I'm

slumbering like a baby inside of a minute. I'm not sure, then, why I

went to see "House of Mirth." I'm not an "X-Files" fan, which

means Gillian Anderson wasn't a draw for me, Eric Stoltz played

his last good role almost seven years ago in "Pulp Fiction," I loved

Laura Linney in "You Can Count on Me," but I don't think I'd see a

movie just for her, and Dan Ayckroyd can't even remotely be taken

seriously anymore. So why *did* I go? The buzz, I guess. The

word on the street was that "House of Mirth" is a great film, and so,

against my better judgment, I sallied forth. And in this case --

pardon the switcheroo -- the buzz is absolutely 100% correct.

Everything I dislike about period pieces is present here -- the

restrictive manners, the uncomfortable-looking costumes, people

with names like Sim Rosedale -- but this time around it didn't

bother me. Much like "Dangerous Liaisons," one of "House of

Mirth"'s big themes is exposing the conventions of the time as

outright hypocrisy. By the end of the film, we see the era's

standards as being almost solely responsible for its tragic

resolution. And I can certainly get behind that. In short, the

conventions aren't just window-dressing; they're a subtle

accomplice which allows the characters to behave as they do. But

I get ahead of myself.

"House of Mirth" tells the story of Lily Bart (fantastically played by

Gillian Anderson -- her performance almost makes me wish I

watched "The X-Files"), a woman in turn-of-the-20th-century New

York who defies all the things that women of that period are

supposed to do: she plays cards, she doesn't want to get married,

she kisses men who look like Eric Stoltz in a chaperone-less

apartment. This seems to be of great concern to everyone but Lily;

she's having a fine old time, regardless of what everyone else

thinks. But then she gets into money trouble with Gus Trenor (a

marvellously miscast Dan Aykroyd -- so miscast that after a while I

was actually cheering for him to pull it off), which leads to public

humiliation at the hands of Bertha Dorset (the wicked Laura

Linney), which leads to an ever-steepening downward spiral,

revealing Lily's supposed "moral turpitude" for all to see. "House

of Mirth" is a tragedy in the Greek drama sense of the word, with

Lily's tragic flaw being her unwillingness to change, her reluctance

to conform to the dictates of society. I won't give away the ending,

but tragedies, as we all know, end badly.

The film is an adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel of the same

name, and I fully confess to sitting there in the theater with a big

goofy grin on my face as writer-director Terence Davies layered the

plot twists in ever-tightening spirals. It is the strength of Wharton's

novel (and Davies's adaptation) which makes the movie work; the

source material (unlike the execrable "Hannibal") is impeccable. I

mention this because the acting certainly doesn't help matters any.

Anderson, as I mentioned, is fantastic, revealing Lily's character

with equal doses of anguish and steel, and Linney, while not as

fine as in "You Can Count on Me," is good, bitter fun. The rest of

the cast, though, won't be collecting an "Excellence in Ensemble

Acting" trophy anytime soon. Ayckroyd I've dealt with, Stoltz is as

unintentionally weaselly as ever, Anthony Lapaglia (as the

aforementioned Rosedale, one of Lily's suitors) is Smarm Central,

and Terry Kinney (as Laura Linney's husband) just looks mopey

and sad all the time. That this didn't detract from the film is a

testament to Davies's work, and the excellence of Wharton's novel.

"House of Mirth" isn't a good movie to see for anyone looking for a

swell night out on the town (then again, nothing released so far

this year fits that particular bill), but those of you who prefer arsenic

to sugar will like this immensely. Our current crop of screenwriters

and directors could do much worse than examine this film for a

master class in how to execute a complex plot, and how a film's

setting can be just as much a villain as any flesh and blood

character.

First of all, let me go ahead and state my unpardonable bias right off the bat: I am a big fan of both Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. I thought Pitt's work in "Fight Club" was genius, and I loved every sappy, cliche-ridden moment of "Notting Hill." There. I feel much better now (and while I'm on a roll -- I think Kevin Costner is criminally underrated). The big question, though, when I sat down to watch "The Mexican" was: What version of a Pitt / Roberts movie would this be? For every challenging, well-written film they've done, there's also a dud lurking in the shadows. So, would this be "Seven" or "Seven Years in Tibet"? "Erin Brockovich" or "Runaway Bride"? The answer, if I can keep a foot in both camps, is a little bit of both. And all that saves it from "I Love Trouble" territory is an actor best known for his work on television.

Much has been made of this Pitt-Roberts pairing, the two $20 million-plus superstars joining forces for what would presumably be a megawatt jolt of charismatic nirvana. Well, let's just stop right there. Roberts is no doubt deserving of the superstar billing -- the streak she's on at the moment is, in a word, unprecedented. Pitt, on the other hand, as much as I admire him, should really be glad he's making what he is, and that no studio honchos have caught on to the fact that he's only been responsible for one big runaway hit, and that was "Legends of the Fall," almost seven years ago. "Seven" was such a crafty, gimmicky movie that it would have been a hit without him, and "Interview with the Vampire" starred another little actor named, oh, Tom Cruise. Apart from those two, what do we have? "Meet Joe Black," anyone? How about "The Devil's Own"? "Sleepers"? One of the reasons I like Pitt is that he searches out risky material, but he seems to be more a superstar in theory than in practice. So "The Mexican"'s publicity department handicaps the movie right away by giving it a hype that it couldn't hope to meet.

The story itself is Tarantino-lite / pseudo film noir silliness that we've seen a hundred times in the wake of "Pulp Fiction." Jerry (Pitt) is assigned to travel south of the border and retrieve a gun (rumored to be cursed) for his crooked boss, played by Bob Balaban with his usual delectable smarminess. Complicating things is the fact that Samantha (Roberts), Jerry's addicted-to-self-help girlfriend, dumps him and takes off for Vegas. It's on this trip that Samantha is, oops, kidnapped by Leroy (James Gandolfini), a thug ostensibly hired by Jerry's boss to make sure he doesn't make off with the gun once he has it in his hot little hands.

For the next hour we cut back and forth between Jerry in Mexico and Samanta and Leroy in Vegas (among other places), and this is my one big criticism of the film. These scenes are cut together so that they stand on their own as little vignettes. That sounds nice, but what happens is that, with each fresh cut, we meet some new characters, get introduced to a subordinate conflict, solve that problem, and then -- screeeeeeeeeeech! -- slam on the brakes and cut back to the other half of the couple, ruining whatever momentum had been accumulated. After eight or ten repetitions, I couldn't help but feel that director Gore Verbinski is only the latest in the attention-deficit-disorder school of directing. There are some nice touches within these scenes (a phone conversation between Jerry and Samantha, an important recurring fascination with traffic lights), but they don't add up to much. Not helping matters were the obnoxious sepia-toned flashbacks wherein we see the variations to the cursed gun myth (complete with the totally inappropriate whiring and clicking of an old-school movie projector), and loads of wild 'n' wacky plot twists that most people will see coming a mile away. Oh, and there's also an unforgivably obtrusive product-placement gaffe involving Balaban and a bag of Doritos.

What makes the film worth seeing is James Galdofini as Leroy, the hooligan with a secret. I freely cop to the fact that I've never seen an episode of "The Sopranos," and therefore was largely unprepared for the excellence Galdofini would bring to this role. Leroy could have been just another stereotypical gangster character, but as inhabitated by Galdofini, he comes off as conflicted, tortured, and very, very human. Pitt and Roberts certainly look nice during their brief time together on the screen, but Galdofini is the real deal. In a movie that wants so badly to be postmodern and cool, Leroy is the living, breathing, romantic heart that shows what could have been.

Films like "Pollock" always leave me at a loss when I have to describe them to others. For one thing, it's long been a labor of love for director / star Ed Harris, which maybe causes me to have more sympathy for the picture than I should -- after all, I'd hate to ream a project that he's spent so much time and energy developing. For another thing, I usually find biopics a bit crippled because, in most cases ("Pollock" included), I already know the plot, and without the plot to get lost in, I'm left to look at little things like, you know, the acting, writing and directing. Lucky for Harris (and my conscience), then, that the acting is uniformly great, the direction is mostly seamless (and downright kinetic at times), and the writing, while not being great in the "Casablanca" sense of the word, serves the story well. "Pollock" dodges all the pitfalls that often turn biopics into boring history lessons.

The film picks up with Jackson Pollock the Unsuccessful Drunk (Harris), dabbling in surrealist painting and proclaiming Picasso to be a fraud. There's enough promise in his work, though, for him to gain a girlfriend, Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden); a benefactor, Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan); and a professional critic, Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor), who champions his work in print. From there we watch Pollock take the express train to art world superstardom, becoming one of the world's foremost abstract painters.

The fly in the ointment, though, is Pollock's notorious temper, aided and abetted by his equally notorious alcoholism. Life in New York City is doing his personal life no favors, so he and Krasner move to the countryside, and it's here that he stumbles upon his "drip method" of painting, granting him another wave of fame and recognition. It is this sequence, in which Pollock makes his pivotal discovery, where Harris's talent as a director comes to the fore. Although we're aware that we're watching an actor perform a discovery that was made by someone else more than fifty years ago, it's an exciting, dynamic moment as Harris dances around his canvas, flicking paint from his brush in a blur of motion. It doesn't come off as staged or phony, but as a moment of genuine discovery, and for those moments we might as well actually be watching Jackson Pollock revolutionize the art world.

From there, though, ego, alcohol, and the mechanics of change all prove to be Pollock's undoing, leading, of course, to his untimely demise. Through it all, Harris seethes with a feral intensity, giving a performance that should rightfully win him an Oscar (and check out the dramatic weight gain at the end. Tom who?). Harden, his co-nominee, is also excellent (although she's stuck uttering lines like, "You've done it, Pollock. You've cracked it wide open."). In lesser hands, Krasner could be just another version of the screeching, wailing, put-upon wife, but Harden bolsters the anguish with a fine layer of anger; the torment of a woman who loves the person causing her misery, but who is unwilling to let go of the principles which led her to enter and maintain the relationship on her own terms.

"Pollock" ultimately succeeds because we know how it will end, we clearly see how unpleasant and deluded the artist had become, and still we can't look away. Harris's labor of love serves as an auspicious debut for someone who, at this stage, seems just as skilled behind the camera as he is in front of it.