Quotes of the Day
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING
Directed by Peter Jackson
Starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Viggo Mortensen
Well, it's back. The film event of the millennium — three superb films re-creating J.R.R. Tolkien's epic series of novels — reaches its climax with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. For the third December in a row, the year is capped with a robust cinematic retelling of the war of Middle-earth, as the hobbit Frodo (Wood) and his fellowship of humans, elves, dwarfs and the wizard Gandalf (McKellen) surge into battle against the dark power of Mordor's Lord Sauron.
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The king in the story is the hunky human warrior Aragorn (Mortensen). But Jackson is the true lord of these Rings. The New Zealand auteur spent seven years on the trilogy, collaborating on the scripts with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. He chose and directed this perfect cast, orchestrated the smashing visual effects — Tolkien's bestiary on the march in fantastical realms. In Return, the giant trolls, four-tusked elephants and flying, screeching serpents of Mordor will amaze adults and may startle small children. The spider monster Shelob, creeping up on Frodo and mummifying him in a silken straitjacket, offers a delicious horror-movie frisson.
Viewers don't play this movie like a video game. They are seduced to live inside it. In one brilliant visualization, the hobbit Pippin (Billy Boyd) manages to light a bonfire at the top of Gondor to alert his distant comrades to a military victory. On a far hill, a second fire is lit, its flame echoed on farther mountaintops, on and on into the dawn. At last, it's wartime.
The Ring films, like Master and Commander, celebrate old-fashioned martial virtues: honor, duty, comradeship, sacrifice — soldiering on, under an immense, sapping burden. Though the trilogy percolates with bracing adventure, it is a testament to the long slog of any war. Pain streaks the faces of the film's stalwart warriors. They know the enormity of their foe and know that the child hobbit who bears the Ring is far from them — surely in peril, perhaps lost forever. At one point Aragorn asks Gandalf, "What does your heart tell you?" and in a little movie epiphany, the wizard's face briefly warms, brightens, and he says, "That Frodo is alive."
The boldly choreographed battles are really a diversion from the story's great drama: three little people — Frodo, his companion Sam (Sean Astin) and the ex-hobbit Gollum (Andy Serkis and a lot of CGI geniuses) on their way to Mount Doom with a mission to destroy the Ring. Cringing and crafty, Gollum is the rebellious servant, subverting Sam's selfless impulses, trying to twist allegiance of the pallid, ailing Frodo away from his friend. (So poignant are Gollum's turbid emotions, and so persuasively is this computer critter integrated with the live performers, that he deserves a special acting Oscar for Best ... Thing.) The devotion of Sam is inspiring. His plea to Frodo--"Don't go where I can't follow!"--makes him the film's real hero.
At 3 hr. 20 min., The Return of the King occasionally slows to a trot. There's a long middle passage where half a dozen characters in turn muse and fret at length. After the climax there's a plethora of meetings and farewells, most of them extended versions of the goodbyes in The Wizard of Oz. But Jackson is entitled. He surely felt that he and his companions of the Ring had waged their own hard, heroic battle and that sentimental adieus were earned.
They are, too. The second half of the film elevates all the story elements to Beethovenian crescendo. Here is an epic with literature's depth and opera's splendor — and one that could be achieved only in movies. What could be more terrific?
This: in some theaters, the Ring trilogy will be shown back to back to back. What a 9-hr. 17-min. trip — three huge installments, one supreme enthrallment. Ecstasy trumps exhaustion in the reliving of a great human quest, a cinematic triumph. --By Richard Corliss
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG
Directed by Vadim Perelman
Starring Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly, Shohreh Aghdashloo
Kathy (Connelly) is a woman in disarray. She's a recovering drug addict who cleans houses for a living and — a fatal flaw — lets her mail pile up unopened. Colonel Behrani (Kingsley), late of the Shah's Iranian air force, is her opposite. He's got it all totally, tightly together. He has one job on a road-construction crew, another as a convenience-store clerk. And he is, by hook or crook, eventually going to give his family an American life comparable in privilege to the one they enjoyed in the old country. Specifically, that means a house near a beach.
Even more specifically, that means Kathy's house. Among her ignored letters are bills dunning her for back taxes on her home — the one she grew up in and loves passionately. The law appears at her door to evict her, and she spends the rest of this sad, curiously moving film fighting the county and fighting the colonel, who acquires her house, at less than its worth, by paying off the old taxes.
A real estate wrangle is not the first place movie folks would normally go for drama. But that reckons without the strength of the characters Andre Dubus III created for his novel or the detailed care with which writer-director Perelman has brought them to the screen in his first feature. The minute we meet them all (including Iranian actress Aghdashloo, who is great as the colonel's timorous, sweet-souled wife), we sense that we're in the presence of darkly fated lives.
Connelly's Kathy may be flaked out, but she has the kind of self-destructive strength such people can muster when they are fighting for the shreds of their history, their last hope of respectability. Kingsley's work as the colonel is simply astonishing, just possibly the performance of the year. He's a prissy, legalistic sort of man who feels that his hope of claiming a corner of the American Dream is being savaged by a crazy lady. And his growing rage, made the more terrible by his effort to control it, is harrowing to behold.
As reversible misunderstandings grow into irreversible tragedy, it slowly dawns on you that this is a superior, heartbreaking film. --By Richard Schickel
STUCK ON YOU
Directed by Bobby Farrelly and Peter Farrelly
Starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear
On those rare occasions when you think about them, you do kind of wonder how Siamese (or to use the more p.c. word, "conjoined") twins manage the more intimate aspects of life — having sex, going to the bathroom, rolling over in bed. Quite nicely, according to the Farrelly brothers. A little too nicely, for fans of their raucously transgressive films such as There's Something About Mary and Dumb and Dumber.
In Stuck on You, the Farrellys have twinned those likable actors Damon and Kinnear — the former playing Bob, the shy, anxious sibling; the latter playing Walt, a more outgoing type — and the best material in the film is about their goofy adeptness in sports and work. But then the plot sends them from humble Martha's Vineyard to glamorous Hollywood because Walt wants to be, of all things, an actor. This isn't a bad idea, and there's some fun stuff as he finds unlikely success hobnobbing with Meryl Streep and co-starring with Cher.
But Bob falls in love, which makes him simpy; success dulls Walt's edge; and when they have an operation to separate themselves, they discover that they needed each other more than they knew. At this point, the picture starts administering glucose injections into America's already sugar-laden bloodstream. The Farrellys need to remember this: Sappiness is easy, comedy is hard. --R.S.
MONA LISA SMILE
Directed by Mike Newell
Starring Julia Roberts, Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhaal
Can a school sue for libel? Wellesley College might have a case against this well-intentioned weepie, set at the Seven Sisters school 50 years ago (and partly shot there last fall). To judge from the Lawrence Konner — Mark Rosenthal script, Wellesley bred its bright students to be overachievers in the kitchen, not the workplace, and it attracted snoots and rich brats who'd haze a new teacher with their contempt — even if that teacher was Roberts.
Roberts (who's pretty good in an impossibly saintly role) is Katherine, a Berkeley grad who was hired as an art instructor but teaches the girls How to Live. She's the paragon of wit, grit and liberality. Everyone else is a mess. The teachers have guilty secrets that the viewer will deduce long before they are revealed. The students — bigoted or spiteful or weak — must have their minds shaped and bent by Katherine, then confess their sins to the world. Her technique: personal liberation through public humiliation.
With Katherine's lectures on the dead-artists society, the movie seems to tout rebellious originality. In fact, it's a lesson in emotional conformity. Each character is given a single trait to pursue into caricature: Dunst's icy schemer, Gyllenhaal's neurotic man chaser, Julia Stiles' timid intellectual. Actors' rolled eyes, grimaces and fretful pouts quickly cue viewers to the stereotypes. And every 15 minutes we get what the film thinks is its money shot: Roberts' smile.
Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment? --R.C.
BIG FISH
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Ewan McGregor, Albert Finney, Billy Crudup
Boy, did we want to love this one! Burton, master fabulist, filming a script by John August (he wrote the zesty ensemble comedy Go), adapted from Daniel Wallace's much cherished novel. Dreamboat du jour McGregor heading an attractive cast. Magic realism rampant on a bed of family angst. Should work.
Doesn't, though.
You recall the boy who cried wolf? Edward Bloom (Finney) is the man who cried fish. He loves telling stories of his wondrous adventures as a young man (in which he is played by McGregor). But to his son (Crudup), the tales just smell fishy. Will the two men reconcile on Dad's deathbed? Could Edward's lies be true?
Old Burton hands will spot the grasping trees from Sleepy Hollow and the identical homes from Edward Scissorhands. The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures (a lawn draped in thousands of daffodils). The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.
Big Fish makes a big push for transcendence, but the strain shows. It's like trying to push a daydream uphill. --R.C.
GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING
Directed by Peter Webber
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Colin Firth, Tom Wilkinson
Girl With A Pearl Earring is pretty as a picture — a picture, let us say, by Johannes Vermeer. Its reconstruction of 17th century Holland, where the old master painted his breathtaking portraits, is stunning. Unfortunately, the characters inhabiting this landscape in Webber's film are merely stunned. You've never seen so many people talking and walking so slowly or registering their emotions so unblinkingly.
It's possible that the lento rhythms of the film are dictated by the need to stretch what is really little more than an art-historical anecdote into a full-scale movie. Basically, all that happens in the movie is that Vermeer (Firth) entices his pretty, largely silent new housemaid (Johansson) into posing for the eponymous painting, while his patron (Wilkinson) lusts after her impotently. The film's dramatic high occurs when she finally takes off her cap and reveals her pretty hair.
All right, some obsessional undercurrents run beneath Girl's surface. The painter is obviously attracted to his model. He teaches her to mix his paint and guides her study of the play of light. Nothing comes of it, however, but glum expressions. There are a lot of cranky folks in the Vermeer household. An unhappy wife and a domineering mother-in-law do not make his life any easier, and the fact that he is a slow worker (he made only about 35 paintings in his career) doesn't help. But this material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard. Who knew that 350 years ago the Dutch were pioneering the first Prozac nation? --R.S.
THE FOG OF WAR
Directed by Errol Morris
Starring Robert McNamara
The enduring American delusion about the Vietnam War is that it was our trial, our tragedy. The memorial in Washington holds the names of 58,214 Americans but none of the 3 million Vietnamese who died in the war. The impact of U.S. decisions on the rest of the world was an issue barely considered by those in the White House or Pentagon.
McNamara began addressing that question long after his tenure as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The architect of U.S. Vietnam policy in the '60s, McNamara made news 30 years later by acknowledging his mistakes. This splendid appraisal by documentarian Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time) nudges McNamara deeper into the Big Muddy of his Vietnam logic.
Before Vietnam, McNamara helped plan the World War II fire bombing of Japanese cities, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. He stood on the brink of Armageddon in the Cuban missile crisis. Now he uses Morris' film stage as a platform and a confessional. McNamara is in charge here. It may be the first time in Morris' career that a subject has directed him.
The White House may not screen this film in the next year, but it should. This is spellbinding reality cinema about duplicity and, worse, ignorance at the highest level. --R.C.
- Richard Corliss; Richard Schickel