Tuesday, April 30, 2013

The Extra Man

First Impressions:

There is a good movie inside The Extra Man, but plodding pacing and a few significant missteps work against the premise. But before I look at those, I want to look at what I see as the main theme of the film: Shame.

Louis is ashamed of his urges towards lingerie, and deeply uncertain of his sexuality. He loses his job. Henry is deeply ashamed of his poverty and his advancing age. Gershon seems ashamed of his high and girlish voice, which would explain the menacing appearance he adopts for most of the film.

This lack of comfort with oneself runs through the entire film, and could have made for a compelling narrative... but it doesn't.

The film doesn't seem to know what it is. Is it a showcase for Kevin Kline? Is it about Louis and his struggles? This is a core issue. Louis in the novel is probably a deeply interesting person, but his meek demeanor causes him to almost vanish into the background for most of the film. Henry feels more like the star of the film, and the poster art conveys that as a selling point. The problem is, this isn't Henry's story.

I love John C. Reilly's work, but something that probably worked well in the novel falls flat here: Gershon's girlish voice. They would have been better off dubbing him with another actor's voice if they wanted to commit to the incongruity, but Reilly's falsetto feels so put on that it's impossible to buy it as Gershon's natural voice. Having Reilly sing in his natural tone only accenuates the falsity of it, and Henry's explanation of "Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? When he sings he has a human voice," rings so false that I wanted to smack the director.

Katie Holmes' character fails to work as well, but I don't blame her for this. Mary is probably supposed to represent the normalicy that Louis craves and the femininity that he thinks he wants to realize... but Mary comes across simply as another user, another person who takes advantage... and isn't eccentric enough to mask it or make it interesting.

This takes us back to the director. Henry and Gershon are in a comedy, while Louis and Mary are in a character drama. The entire film feels muted and melancholy with jarring moments of wackiness.

There's a good movie here about dealing with the shame one feels for not being "normal", or young, or wealthy... a good movie about finding oneself in reduced circumstances... a good movie about holding on to an old image of oneself that no longer applies.

I wish I had seen it.

Monday, April 29, 2013

Me and You and Everyone We Know

First Viewing Reflections:

I want to say it's an exceptionally odd film, but in some ways it seems like one of a string of films about quirky and ostensibly broken people trying to find connection. It's not generally the kind of thing I like. I mean, I can't stand most of Wes Anderson's stuff, which I would place in this same milieu.

By the end of the film however, I grew to appreciate this reflection on fragmentation, isolation, and the desperate need to connect with someone without any of the skills or guidance needed to do so gracefully.

This isn't a film about plot, but about portraits.

A man floundering after a divorce, unable to communicate meaningfully with his children and ultimately reduced to a misguided self-immolation in his panic.

A woman who spends most of her time looking at photos of other people's lives, narrating the words she would want to hear if she was the one living in the snapshots.

A son who moves zombie like through the film, only showing any trace of personality when talking to his baby brother, and in the end with the much younger girl who lives next door.

A wide eyed child, being raised by everyone and no one.

Two girls, driven by vanity and curiosity as they explore their own sexuality. Ultimately willing to lose their virginity to a man they don't find attractive "because it won't matter" ... or because her best friend tells her to.

A man who can only communicate his desires, which he knows to be highly inappropriate, via extremely public signs taped to his window, but when confronted with actually committing to performing them (or being confronted with the reality of what he has written) cowers in fear.

The art curator who dismisses work out of hand, until she finally begins to recognize her own loneliness in the artists work.

A elderly man who finds love so very late in life, with a woman who is about to die.

The film meanders back and forth between these people and their interconnections. They are all tied together by tenuous threads, usually without being aware of it. Real contact between them is frequently anonymized. Cell phones display unlisted numbers, or the numbers of workplaces. Sexual exploration takes behind a screen, or with a couch cushion over the face.

Disfigurement is another repeated theme. The burned hand. The scrawled upon photograph. The work FUCK emblazoned across a car window. The photo of the AIDS patient and the verbal response "email wouldn't exist without AIDS... without fear of contamination."

In the end, the young are forced to find meaning for themselves. The young girl looks at the chaos of the world and orders her own private space with a hotel-like precision. The young boy walks home through a dangerous part of town and has sexually explicit chats online. The father begs his children to ask him questions, and is met with silence. When he himself asks them a question, he discovers talents he knew nothing about.

And above all, there is fear. Fear of discovery. Fear of loneliness. Fear of connection. Fear of being rejected. Fear of being wrong.

Is this a hopeful film? Perhaps. The two teen girls, on the brink of doing something they would most likely regret, escape and run down the street, laughing and smiling with relief and true happiness. The art dealer affirms not the multimedia piece about isolation, but a new piece about love and connection (the artists only work done WITH someone else). The same dealer confronts the person who she feels most understands her and finds a child who gazes on her with curiosity, and ultimately acceptance. The defaced photo of the bird is placed in a tree, as if placed in it's natural habitat (although it is not a bird, but a photo of a bird and so the illusion of finding a home is subverted). The youngest of the cast explores the curious impersonal sound at sunrise (and again, the child is wandering around his neighborhood in his sleep clothes, unattended) to find that it is the Morse Code of another human being... simply passing the time.

In the end, the characters are set free from isolation to varying degrees. But the question of illusion remains. Will any of these more human connections grow? Are they more or less ephemeral or real then the fractured and disconnected acts we've seen earlier?

Ultimately, are all we doing is passing the time?