"Scarface for Douchebags," or The Stockbroker as Tragicomic Antihero

“Now you’re not naïve enough to think we’re living in a democracy are you, buddy? It’s a free market and you’re a part of it” –Gordon Gekko, Wall Street (Oliver Stone, 1987)

“At the end of the game, you count up your money. That’s how you find out who's best. It's the only way.” –Bert Gordon, The Hustler (Robert Rossen, 1961)

 Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) starts with an ad for Stratton Oakmont; the commercial makes us believe the brokerage firm is a golden American institution, a pillar of financial stability, as traditional, trustworthy, and established as if the Mayflower passengers had etched the very name into Plymouth Rock. Cut to the nightmarish circus of a rollicking party on the trading floor of the company—not unlike what we’ve imagined went on in Rome before the fall (all but the roller-skating chimp and snorting coke off hookers, of course)—and then freeze-frame on the billionaire brokers tossing a dwarf at a huge velcro target, literally and figuratively abusing the Little Guy. Stratton Oakmont is America, its founder proudly proclaims in the ad. How horrifying is it to realize that he just might be right?

The tale that follows the fictional commercial amounts to a nonstop barrage of drug-fueled decadence adapted by Terence Winter from real-life stockbroking swindler Jordan Belfort’s memoir. The book is a distant relative of the truth, it’s been said, and the film is a distant relative of the book. The humorous, “honest” movie poster of The Wolf of Wall Street created by Uproxx titles the movie “Scarface for Douchebags.” Although obviously meant as a joke, the film’s framing as a crime movie points to the many parallels between Scorsese’s film and the gangster genre, and raises the question, is Belfort even worse than the cinematic mobsters the director seems to draw inspiration from? The filmmaker might be the best cinematic connoisseur of charismatic sociopaths, and Henry Hill or Nicky Santoro ain’t got nothing on Leonardo DiCaprio’s titular wolf. The film’s brokers are avatars of an age of heedless self-indulgence and greed, gangsters with fountain pens instead of guns, slicing and dicing your bank account and putting your savings in a vise rather than your head.

It has long been accepted that the mob has always been a cinematic stand-in for the underside of American capitalism. As Frederic Jameson eloquently puts it in “Reification and Utopia,”

“When indeed we reflect on an organized conspiracy against the public, one which reaches into every corner of our daily lives and our political structures to exercise a wanton ecocidal and genocidal violence at the behest of distant decision-makers and in the name of an abstract conception of profit—surely it is not about the Mafia, but rather about American business itself that we are thinking, American capitalism at its most systemized and computerized, dehumanized, ‘multinational’ and corporate form” (145).

Parts of this essay have appeared previously in my review of The Wolf of Wall Street.

Overpowering the Voiceover: Female Subjectivity and Sound in Klute

Some critics have called Alan J. Pakula’s neo-noir Klute (1971) progressive and radical in its positive depiction of an independent, sexually liberated woman; others have argued that the construction of the female character is no different than that found in classic noir, and that Klute actually operates in a profoundly anti-feminist way. This essay seeks to explore the reasons behind these diverging interpretations, locating the source of the difficulty in assessing the main female character’s power over the narrative in the disjunctive relationship between sound and image in the film. In marked contrast to the classic noir cycle, in Klute the story is filtered through the subjectivity of the female character, who poses a distinctive challenge to the patriarchal order and the foundation of the heterosexual couple. At the same time, there is a disconnect between the words she speaks in voiceover and the actions we see unfold onscreen that actively works to undermine her point of view. It becomes increasingly difficult, then, to say with any certainty whether the film’s central female protagonist can be considered an active subject or a passive object presented for the male gaze. 

"Must Be Exhausting": Nihilism, Irony and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir

“The Absurd is not in man… nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is the only bond uniting them.”

–Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

 “That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you”

–Al Roberts, Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)

Bunny Lebowski: Ulli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.

The Dude: Ah. Must be exhausting

– The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998)

Joel and Ethan Coen, the double-brained, quadruple-handed creative entity behind some of the most boldly original films to come out of the post-New-Hollywood generation, have created and maintained a unique, unmistakable signature style, a willful blend of darkness, humor, and sophistication. The sixteen movies the brothers have written, directed, and produced to date mostly limit themselves to the confines of two recognizable registers, film noir and comedy. Prior to the darkly comedic unraveling of noir themes, characters, and motifs in such postmodern works as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), the Coens were already making (self-)consciously comic use of noir plots and stylistic techniques through their characteristic mix of irony, poetry, and drama. Commentators, noting the pair’s cold, cynical treatment of characters and their fiercely, hyperconsciously intertextual play on films past, have sometimes described the Coens’ work as emptied out stylization or as unnecessarily grim, pessimistic, and even amoral. Using Blood Simple (1984), the filmmakers’ first feature effort, I will argue that far from social, moral, and political apathy, what emerges in the films of the Coen brothers is a consistent, if occasionally nihilistic, philosophy of human experience. The directors’ work manages to repurpose and revitalize conventions of past cultural forms in a way that is meaningful to the present moment. Perhaps even more importantly, their films amount to a deeper investigation of the human condition that is as serious and engaged as it is humorously macabre.

Train of Thought: Tourism, Travel, and the Self-Conscious Spiritual Journey of Wes Anderson’s "The Darjeeling Limited"

A taxi hastily makes its way down a narrow city street in an overhead long shot that soon movies in a zipping, zooming motion to meet the car head on, destabilizing the viewer and isolating this small vessel in a sea of stereotypical exoticism that, the soundtrack informs us through the shorthand of the theme from Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar, must be India. Throughout the scene, the business-suit-and-fedora-wearing passenger, played by Bill Murray, alternates nervous glances at his watch with nervous glances at his surroundings as he’s jolted the backseat of the tiny cab, whizzing through colorful, crammed South Asian scenery full of pedestrians, animals, buildings and cars that present nothing more than obstacles on a hurried drive to the train station. It’s clear he’s on a time table, not taking in the environment as much as moving through it as fast as he can, the tension increased by jumpy, jagged juxtaposition of quickly traveling shots. There is something specifically American in Murray’s appeal, and seeing him in the opening sequence of Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited only works to further emphasize the foreignness of the setting relative to its protagonists.

Charting unknown territory no less than in the director’s previous film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Murray’s unnamed character presents a stereotypical image of the privileged, white, insensitive, ignorant American abroad. Of course he is late, and when the cab driver pulls into the station, Murray runs away without paying and, barely looking back at the people behind him, cuts the line at the counter to buy a ticket, all before breaking into a sprint after the moving train, in the first of four of Anderson’s signature slow motion processions in the film, this one to the Kinks’ elegiac “This Time Tomorrow.” As he awkwardly strives forward he’s slowly overtaken by Adrien Brody’s character, who enters frame and film from right, outpacing Murray and clambering aboard the racing titular train as Ray Davies wonders “This time tomorrow where will we be/ On a spaceship somewhere sailing across an empty sea…  This time tomorrow what will we see/ Field full of houses, endless rows of crowded streets/ I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t want to see/ I feel the world below me looking up at me/ Leave the sun behind me, and watch the clouds as they sadly pass me by/ And I’m in perpetual motion and the world below doesn’t matter much to me.” The sequence is undoubtedly comedic, but there is something mournfully poetic in the use of music, in Murray’s silent, defeated figure, slowly receding into the background as the train passes him by, and in the soft, bittersweet smile that plays on Brody’s lips as he watches the older man left behind, a soulful and ultimately sad expression that will take the rest of the film to explain.

Parts of this essay have previously appeared in “Baggage: Objects and Spaces as Markers of the Emotional Journey in Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited.”

What Brody’s Peter and his brothers, Francis (Owen Wilson) and Jack (JasonSchwartzman) Whitman, must leave behind in Anderson’s film is not only Murray’s surrogate father figure—the actor’s notable and surprising absence throughout the rest of the movie shadows the absence of the Whitmans’ deceased father—but everything that this peripheral character represents. The central trio of wealthy white Westerners embarks on a (very self-conscious) spiritual journey across India by rail not merely for the sake of seeing the world, but also for the healing of personal ailments. Their journey, at first nothing more than a forced family march to enlightenment, complete with laminated itineraries and detailed user instructions for spiritual rituals, combines an exploration of traveled space with an investigation of psychological processes of change and transformation. The brothers’ displacement and entering of a new territory is specifically what prompts the characters’ reassessment of their own existence, encouraging them to rethink their worldviews and paradigms and move, significantly, towards the creation of a new community. By the end of Anderson’s film, The Whitman brothers will have stepped away from the safety of home, the familiarity of objects, the security of material comfort, and the need to plan and control everything around them; they stop being tourists and become travelers. In embracing the danger of uncertainty and the possibility of community, in their family as well as with the Other, they go against typically Western notions of rationalism and individualism to begin to understand and accept a new way of life.

High School Confidential

Roger Ebert opens his review of Rian Johnson’s debut feature Brick (2005) with the following quote from Elaine May’s A New Leaf: “You have preserved in your own lifetime, sir, a way of life that was dead before you were born.” The line is more than appropriate, considering Brick is, in a surprisingly straightfaced manner, carrying on in its own lifetime a style of film that was dead long before it was born. At the same time, the depth of feeling and sincerity that runs through the film makes it seem utterly, breathlessly alive. In part nostalgic for a time and a style long passed, in part playing with and updating the conventions of the classic noir, Johnson’s film transposes the snaking plots and sneaky moods of gritty detective fiction to a contemporary high school—90210 goes noir, or what we would imagine a David Lynch or Coen brothers reimagining of Heathers might look like.

The movie, which hums with constant menace and sparks with hipster slang, was awarded the Sundance Film Festival’s Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision in 2005—and, whether or not you can take its premise seriously, there is no denying it is a work of originality and vision. Brick is an intriguing experiment in determination that unashamedly demands your attention, “one of those movies than seems not made but born—a small masterpiece that’s perfectly strange and strangely perfect” (Patterson). The combination is surprising, but what is even more surprising is the extent to which it works. The question begs to be raised, why is the Hammet-Chandler school so readily compatible with actual school?

City Lights (1931) Analysis

The Tramp, wearing tails, drives around in a Rolls Royce.  He spots a man smoking a cigar and patiently follows in the car until he drops the butt. The character jumps out of the Rolls, fights off an old, ragged bum who had himself bent over to pick up the cigar butt, grabs it, sticks it into his mouth, leaps back into his Rolls and drives away smoking; the assaulted bum looks on in stunned silence. This little comic bit, one of the countless memorable scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) is more than just a funny sight gag; it is a glimpse into a way of life and into the underlying metaphor of many of the filmmaker’s works. The sequence underscores much of what the great artist’s career was built on: the contrast of wealth and poverty, surface riches and actual need, appearance and essence. What the Tramp needed was never financial success—he was destined, from the time of Chaplin’s Essanay shorts, to fail at attaining material rewards. What the character wanted was of a more spiritual nature: love and acceptance into “proper” society. Most of the time, he was doomed to fail at attaining that as well.

Read my analysis of Chaplin's The Circus here.

Dismantling Narrative Conventions and the American Dream in "A Cool Million" and "The Big Lebowski"

Nathanael West and Joel and Ethan Coen have never been known for playing it straight. A Cool Million, subtitled The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin, and The Big Lebowski can be read as satires, if not parodies, of the American Dream of success. Their denial of coherence and lack of narrative discipline, deemed post-modern, their refusal to be constrained by the imperatives of conventional narrative and formal purity can be related to the way these works challenge the assumption that achievement is desirable and possible through hard work. Another connection between the novel and the movie is in the main characters’ embodiment of the Jewish folk character of the ‘schlemiel’—the clumsy, inept, charismatic character that stumbles from one situation to the next, pushed around by circumstances that are not of his own making. In following characters that are not in charge of their own destiny through convoluted plots that are ultimately absurd and somewhat incoherent, Nathanael West and the Coen brothers challenge not only narrative and stylistic conventions, but the conventional ideas of progress and improvement through work.

Harold Lloyd and the American Dream: How Speedy Turned into Willie Loman—and Back Again

A young man, straight out of high school, with hopes of a dramatic stage career, hangs around the Edison Company studio, watching the actors, stars as well as lowly extras, walk through the gate. Unable to get work in the legitimate theater, he has turned, temporarily he hopes, to films. But access is denied. All of the directors have their favorite extras, and all of the favorite extras have passes to get through the studio gate in the morning. Unknown, with only one day of work in the movie industry on his resume, playing a Yaqui Indian no less, the man waits and hopes. One day, however, he notices that when all the extras return from lunch, in full makeup, no one asks to see their passes. He devises a plan right there and then. Dawdling away his morning, the young man makes himself up lavishly during the noon hour and joins the returning crowd at one o’clock, slipping in, with a casual wave to the gateman, for the afternoon shooting. The year is 1913, the young man Harold Lloyd. The actor was dogged, inventive, self-made, compensating for what he lacked in experience, training or talent with sheer energy, bounce, and push. It hadn’t occurred to him yet that he would someday play himself.

Lloyd’s entry into the studio that day—and therefore the movie industry— reads like a partial scenario for one of his later films. “He can do anything he tries,” the smitten sweetheart says in the first reel of Never Weaken (1921). It is not only her love for Lloyd’s character that engenders this type of unquestioning faith. Harold the character, as well as Harold the actor, could do most anything he set his mind to. In his best thrill comedies, he generated sympathy not only because he was liable to drop to his death at any moment, but also because he simply refused to. In film after film, Lloyd put himself in danger and emerged unscathed; he got the money, got the girl, and, most importantly, got ahead. His trials, tribulations, and ultimate triumphs spelled the facet of the American Dream on which his mass appeal was built: a mediocre individual and how much he can accomplish through the right combination of hard work, luck, and pluck.

A perfect example of his unwavering climb (this time to success and popularity rather than up a skyscraper) presents itself in the narrative of The Freshman (1925), directed by Frank C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. A small-town young man with wildly unrealistic dreams of college, Harold Lamb—and what better name could underscore his innocence—seems the least likely person on the planet to become popular, but giving up is a foreign concept to him. By the end, he has everything he ever wanted: his classmates’ respect and adoration and a beautiful girl who loves him. The future has never looked brighter; there is no way this young man will not win in life as he did on that football field, or even, hopefully, taking fewer falls and hits. Twenty years later, in Preston Sturges’ characteristically disenchanted Mad Wednesday (1947), the once hearty  and hopeful Harold, now bearing the purposely bureaucratized last name of Diddlebock, is slow, broken, bent, a sad parody of the dreams he had as a boy, of Lamb’s triumph as well as the falsity of idealistic American clichés that triumph was built on. Lloyd’s silent characters embodied the hopes of the nation in the twenties, but his naïve optimism had no pull on a post-Depression era audience in the sound period. The homely, small-town values had betrayed him as well as the viewers; the tools required for success in this world—significantly, in Sturges’ film an urban one—were of a much more cynical nature.

The 400 Blows (1959)

Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows is one of the most important films of the French New Wave and one of the most intensely moving coming of age stories ever to be put on screen. The director’s first film, made before his 27^th birthday, the movie is an exemplar of Truffaut’s best qualities as a filmmaker: his clarity, honesty, directness, his simplicity and deep feeling. A semiautobiographical movie, The 400 Blows follows the 12 year old Antoine Dionel (Jean-Pierre Leaud, who would reprise the role another four times), typecast by his mostly absent parents and socially incompetent teachers as a troublemaker and a liar, and lets us share in his minor joys and sorrows. The film’s personal nature is made obvious even before the opening credits, when we find out the film is dedicated to influential critic of Cahiers du Cinema and Truffaut’s mentor, Andre Bazin. The sense of intimacy and immediacy continues through the first few shots of the movie, long fluid takes of the middle-class quarters of the city in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. This is a Parisian’s Paris, seen in traveling shots of the empty streets and buildings and low angle shots directly under the tower, not the postcard cityscape establishing shots.

Baggage: Objects and Spaces as Markers of the Emotional Journey in Wes Anderson’s "The Darjeeling Limited"

 Objects and spaces define the near-maniacally meticulous, color-coordinated, carefully framed and trinket-filled worlds of Wes Anderson’s films. Characters’ possessions and surroundings create and communicate their identities and serve as markers of their gradual evolution throughout the movies, the changing relationships between objects, spaces and characters defining their transformation as they undergo emotional and often physical journeys. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the director’s The Darjeeling Limited (2007), the director’s most conventional road movie to date. The film features all the trademark characteristics of a Wes Anderson movie: a nostalgic concern with the past and an exploration of childhood, “literal or prolongued” in the form of young men in a state of arrested adolescence clambering for spiritual fulfillment, sibling rivalry and family drama, absent parent(s), feelings of meaninglessness, repressed grief and suicidal depression, tonal tension between irony and sincerity, and almost obsessively detailed composition (Orgeron 42). It also contains Anderson’s most blatant—and blatantly, self-consciously clichéd—exploration of the journey theme and its reflection in the film’s production design, costuming, and setting.

Through the Looking Glass: Buster Keaton’s "Sherlock Jr."

Over sixty years before Woody Allen had his characters pop off the screen and into the film’s reality in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Buster Keaton had done the reverse. In Sherlock Jr. (1924), the most silent of all silent clowns played a movie projectionist studying to become a detective. Falling asleep in his booth, he dreams himself into the picture, simply walking down the aisle and into the movie-within-a-movie, where he finds he is at the mercy of film space and film time. While he stands still, maintaining his space-time continuity, the “unreal,” cinematic environment surrounding Buster undergoes the editing process. His universe instantaneously shifts from a park to a desert, to an ocean, to a snowdrift, and the character, although maintaining complete control over himself and his actions, is powerless against the filmic montage that changes his physical surroundings.

The scene epitomizes and exaggerates the conditions in which Keaton the filmmaker has placed Buster the character throughout his career. In film after film, he battled immense natural forces and huge mechanical objects which were beyond his control; in film after film, he simply reacted to the environment and the situation as pragmatically as possible, generally in ways that would solve his problems. Again and again, with elegance, poise, and superb command of his body—at once the most malleable and most tensile of physical objects—Buster made impossible physical stunts look not only possible, but effortless. He used no stunt doubles, no tricks, no sleights of camera or editing.

Keaton’s creative ideas as director, his inventiveness and determination, parallel his ideas as a clown. When cinematic wizardry is used, as it is in the montage sequence of Sherlock Jr., it makes Buster’s life harder, not easier. But the sequence is more than just stunting. It is perhaps Keaton’s clearest realization of the cinema’s mechanical basis, his greatest expression of control over the first and ultimate machine of his career—the camera, that unique mechanical object capable of representing and reshaping reality at the same time. Because, as much as Sherlock Jr. pretends to be about something else, it is a film about film. By taking us inside the picture alongside Buster—and constantly telling us we are, indeed, watching illusion unfold—Sherlock Jr. drops its light comedic premise (about a young man’s wish to become a detective and his romantic troubles) and becomes an almost abstract, unwaveringly funny, look at cinema itself.

The Middle of the Road: Alexander Payne’s Journeys

 “I had been sitting on this Nebraska script even when I did Sideways,” writer-director Alexander Payne said in May 2013. “But I didn’t want to go back to a road-trip movie right after that. I was really tired of shooting people in cars. It’s a drag” (qtd. in Alexander). Despite these misgivings, the filmmaker returns, again and again, to road trips. Recurring throughout Payne’s work is the idea of a pivotal physical pilgrimage that doubles as a journey of self-discovery for his typical protagonist, a damaged but basically good person riddled with unease and inner disenchantment.

In About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), The Descendants (2011), and most recently Nebraska (2013), Payne cannot help but place his characters on physical, psychological, and emotional journeys, ones that might not have a clear destination but which will take the protagonists—and the viewers—to completely unexpected places. More often than not, origin and destination merge, and the characters end up where they had started; they return home, whether that is symbolized by an actual location or by family connections or romantic relationships. The writer-director utilizes the dynamics of the road movie not to express the more common theme of a yearning for escape, but instead to emphasize the psychological primacy of belonging, establishing and—significantly—accepting one’s true home.

Click HERE for my analysis of Payne’s NEBRASKA: “One for the Money, Two for the Road”

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston make the perfect pair of ivory-skinned wraiths in maverick moviemaker Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. These fabulously aloof, effortlessly stylish creatures are the coolest people you could imagine. They were hipsters before it was cool to be a hipster—a few centuries before, actually.  In the film’s hypnotic opening sequence a spinning 45-rpm record fills the screen, and Wanda Jackson’s witchy, bewitching wail fills your soul. The image dissolves into a revolving bird’s eye view of two silent, still figures, she surrounded by countless stacks of books strewn across the floor, he reclined in a couch amid vintage guitars and vinyl records, miles apart yet seemingly in the same room. Round and round they go, the camera circling closer and closer, inviting you to follow down the rabbit hole of this dark, delirious, delicious film. These bloodsuckers might be after your hemoglobin, but their story and style will start seeping into your veins as early as that first shot. Jarmusch’s undead really know how to live.

"Safety Last!" and the Most Iconic Image in Silent Comedy

The quintessential Harold Lloyd character is the affable, bespectacled boy next door, anxious to get ahead, not very good at anything, but willing to compensate through sheer energy, bounce, and push; he is the comedic embodiment of the American Dream—what an ordinary man can achieve through a lot of hard work. The filmmaker’s success, as well as that of his characters, is that rare American miracle, the improbable, inspiring accomplishment that couldn’t possibly happen, but did. Safety Last! (1923), Lloyd’s most famous film, tells the story of a small-town young man on the make in the big city, trying to save up enough money so he can marry the woman he loves. Why a story of material betterment and romance should culminate on top of a skyscraper, only Lloyd could tell you. But it is in that juxtaposition of gag and thrill, at the intersection of improbability and idealism, that Lloyd’s specific brand of movie magic transpired. Benefitting from careful plotting, an impeccable sense of timing and tight, functional, unobtrusive editing rhythms, certain sequences of Safety Last!, which follow’s Roach method of accumulation ratherthan Sennett’s madcap speed, can serve as perfect models of how to construct a gag, develop it, twist it, scramble it, then redevelop it, twist it again, and top it. 

The Two Faces of January (2014)

Drive screenwriter Hossein Amini’s directorial debut takes its title from the English derivation of Janus, the two-faced Roman god who stands at the cusp of the new year, simultaneously musing backward at recent lessons and experiences, and peering forward to the murky and elusive future ahead, a guardian at the crossroads of the past and present. The reference implies the twin forces of duplicity and shifting circumstances that swirl in the fragrant atmosphere of The Two Faces of January, an old-school, sly, seductive Southern Europe-set tale of moral compromise and misdirection. Based on the Patricia Highsmith novel of the same name, Amini’s film has its own two faces; it’s at once an involving character drama and a gripping suspense movie, a pleasurable period piece of precision and class and a tight and tidy thriller as shrewd, sleek, and scintillating as its characters.

The Immigrant (2013)

A great classicist, James Gray has often been called painterly, operatic, novelistic. It’s as if we have forgotten what good cinema looks like, searching other media for a comparison, assuming the heft and heart of art and literature is somehow outside the movies’ grasp. Gray’s The Immigrant, which premiered last year at Cannes and is just now hitting theaters, is a romantic tale that hides its monumental scale and subject in plain sight, a subtle, soulful masterpiece that cuts to the very heart of the American experience. Wrapping big themes in an intimate embrace, the film feels both epic and personal. It not only reminds us of what film used to be, but also of what it could be once again. A story of survival and redemption for the characters, the movie surely accomplishes the same for a very specific, straightforward kind of filmmaking that I haven’t seen in a very long time.

A mournful, mesmerizing meditation on the immigrant experience, the movie opens on a slow zoom of the Statue of Liberty shrouded in foggy mist, its back turned to the camera. From that first moment, The Immigrant unfolds in the foggy, misty gap between the promise the statue embodies and the harsh realities newcomers encounter when that promise turns its back on them. Later in the film, Lady Liberty will make a second appearance, this time as the main character’s cabaret costume, a sad parody of the ideals represented by the statue. The woman is asked why she came to America. “I want to be happy,” she mouths gently, her voice breaking with infinite sorrow. In another show, a magician levitates before the Ellis Island detainees, who are for the most part awaiting deportation to their home lands, assuring them that anything is possible if they believe—“The American Dream is waiting for you,” he says at the end of the act. How appropriate that the pep talk comes in the middle of a con act.

Nebraska (2013): One for the Money, Two for the Road

After making side trips to California’s Central Coast and Hawaii for Sideways (2004) and The Descendants (2011), Alexander Payne takes to the road yet again, this time in his home state, for Nebraska (2013), a wistful ode to small-town Midwestern life and the quixotic dreams of stubborn old men. Payne’s prairie-based old-age odyssey begins, appropriately, on a busy stretch of highway. 

A small, solitary figure shuffles along the side of the snow-fringed road, stooped and scowling in the wind. His determined trudging is interrupted by a police officer, who asks where he’s coming from and where he’s headed. Wordlessly, the old man points back and then forward. This is a man who, like his surroundings, seems to have outlived his usefulness; he has that self-involvement the way someone does when he’s staring death in the face, bobbing and weaving along that highway to avoid his inevitable mortality. His journey is a last, valedictory gesture designed to give meaning to a life. He seems confused, but there’s a heartbreaking purity, a blankness to him, as well as a hunger and a ferocity, that feel terrifyingly real. Without saying a word, he has hit upon a deep and eloquent truth: like the character, that’s all we really know in life—that we came from back there and we’re going forward on the road, regardless of where it might lead, because we have no idea what the end destination is or where we’ll end up anyway. 

NEW: PAYNE'S About Schmidt, Sideways, The Descendants Analysis HERE

In surprising ways, his odyssey resembles those of Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity, DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Walter Salles’ Motorcycle Diaries (2004). The protagonists of these works are all younger than Payne’s character; they have had different life experiences; they travel different lands. But, through each of their journeys, they seek the same meaningfulness, defining their own identities in relation to others and to their environments, looking for a place they belong, and trying to establish a human connection.

Quelle Girl: "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," Film and Book

A stylish, simply yet elegantly dressed young woman steps in front of Tiffany’s on an empty New York street. Large, dark glasses cover her eyes, a tiara sits upon her frosted beehive, she is dripping pearls, and her slim, long black evening dress perfectly matches her black sandals. A soft, sweet song evokes a mood of melancholy yearning as the golden light of dawn washes over the scene. When Audrey Hepburn watched her reflection in that shop window in 1961, she set the entire tone and look of a movie and created a character that would come to inhabit the minds and hearts of the public for decades to come.

Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” first published in the November 1958 issue of Esquire, was adapted by director Blake Edwards and writer George Axelrod with a light touch. Dealing with comedy, romance, and poignancy in a swanky Upper East Side setting, the movie follows Holly Golightly, a charming, carefree, independent New York party girl, and her upstairs neighbor, writer Paul Varjak (George Peppard). While the film hews closely to its source material for the most part, maintaining much of the pungent, comical, racy dialogue (with some lines tuned down to Production Code standards), the few liberties it does take are not insignificant. The tone of Capote’s story was harder and more cynical; Edwards makes it soft and sentimental, bestowing upon it a Hollywoodized happy ending, dropping some characters and adding others, and turning the subjective point of view of the novella objective, and its narrator, a dispassionate admirer and friend, into a romantic interest.

***This is not a review of the film, but a comparative analysis of the Capote’s novella and its screen adaptation, and it contains spoilers.

Lone Star (1996) Analysis

 Lone Star embodies both simplicity and complexity. With quiet, watchful, and soft-spoken intelligence, director John Sayles displays broad social and political awareness, without ever losing sight of the human scale. He focuses on macro-political issues that he intertwines with the personal, demonstrating how universal concerns affect the lives of ordinary individuals.

At some point during the first act of the film, a scene seemingly unrelated to the rest of the movie takes up a considerable amount of screen time. This is a school meeting where disgruntled parents argue about which textbook would be more appropriate for their children’s history class. Pilar (Elizabeth Pena), the teacher, is desperately trying to appease them by explaining that all she was trying to do was present her students with a more complete picture. “Now that’s what’s gotta stop,” a concerned mother blurts out. What they are actually arguing about in the racially diverse and intolerant small town is whose version of history they should cover. And everyone in Rio County seems to remember the past a bit differently. The director is also bent on showing us, the viewers, the complete picture in this multi-layered narrative of the present and past of this disjointed community, from multiple points of view. Brief, meaningful encounters like this make up the movie, which plunges us directly into the action and lets us figure out on our own exactly how the pieces of the puzzle fit together. Like Citizen Kane, Lone Star brings us closer to the truth through each vignette, while Sam (Chris Cooper) acts as our go-between, our guide.

sex, lies, and videotape (1989) Analysis

Few movie titles have been as literal as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, writer/director Steven Soderbergh’s tour-de-force debut feature. And although the first word of the title makes a promise that a more conventional, Hollywood film would deliver on, Soderbergh’s very personal, wry, and grown-up comedy of sexual manners is all talk and almost no action, at least not onscreen, where all we get is white static. Sex, like everything else in the lives of its four protagonists, is treated in an adult and intellectual manner. Filmed in real settings, on a shoestring budget in the director’s hometown of Baton Rouge, with a cast of mostly unknown young actors and focusing on controversial subject matter, the movie was an overnight sensation when it was screened at Sundance, later going on to win the grand prize at Cannes. Just like James Spader’s Graham, an outsider who rides into town in a ’69 Cutlass, challenging the dysfunctionality of the American Dream through his very being, Soderbergh provides a new, alternative view of what American cinema is and what it could be. The ‘independence’ of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, its uniqueness, lies in both its content and form, if more pronounced in the former.