Romantic drama. Starring Lili Taylor and Guy Pearce. Directed by Toni
Kalem. (R. 111 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)
Based on the novel of the same name by Anne Tyler, “A Slipping Down Life”
has an oddness and whimsicality about it that can, at first, be confused for
authenticity. It stars Lili Taylor as a sheltered small-town woman who becomes
so obsessed with a local musician (Guy Pearce) that she carves his name into
her forehead with a shard of glass. Taylor, with her spacey Joan of Arc
quality, was born to play such skewed devotion, and the movie dresses up
Pearce so that he looks like every naive girl’s fantasy of poetic cool:
brooding, troubled and sounding a lot like Bono.
Unfortunately, what at first seems like observed, exaggerated truth soon
reveals itself as a series of writerly conceits being followed doggedly to
some logical conclusion. It’s like a series of what-ifs — what if she does
something crazy? what if they get together? — proceeding not from anything
organic but from an effort to add spice to a story. The result is something
specious, though occasionally lively. I suspect the speciousness might have
been ameliorated with a more arch take on the story, but writer-director Toni
Kalem chooses to play it straight, going for tears and smiles, not smirks and
laughs. “A Slipping Down Life” is often maudlin, often labored.
Still, good actors help. For all the essential falsity of the material,
Taylor and Pearce bring an anguished truth to their portrayals. The musician
has the advantages of higher status and genuine indifference in his first
contacts with Evie (Taylor), and yet Pearce, from the beginning, lets us see
how unsettled he is, having to deal with a woman more committed, more
genuinely weird and more effortlessly observant than himself. Taylor’s
challenge is nothing less than to hold the movie together, by making us
believe in Evie’s eccentricity and her radiant kindness. She almost does it.
“A Slipping Down Life” premiered at Sundance in 1999 and is just now
making it to theaters, so if you’re wondering why Pearce and Taylor are
seemingly ageless, that’s why. Finally, it’s probably not worth noting, but
impossible to resist mentioning that Kalem, a first-time director, is also an
actress and currently plays Big Pussy Bonpensiero’s widow on “The Sopranos.”
– Advisory: This film contains strong language and sexual situations.
– Mick LaSalle
‘Love Me If You Dare’
Romantic comedy-drama. Starring Guillaume Canet and Marion Cotillard.
Directed by Yann Samuel. (R. 94 minutes. In French with English subtitles.)
Only in a French romance could this happen. Two young people are arguing
in the middle of the street, blocking traffic. They ignore the driver beeping
the horn behind them and then, as an expression of contempt, they climb onto
the guy’s car and start making out. When they finally jump off and run away,
we’re not supposed to wonder where these selfish, deluded, narcissistic,
repellent young idiots get their nerve. We’re supposed to think l’amour,
l’amour and be charmed.
“Love Me If You Dare” has to be one of the least charming French romances
to find American distribution in recent years. It stretches to the snapping
point the French tendency to forgive lovers’ transgressions, while presenting
as love interests a pair of cretins whose casual cruelty and immature antics
render them entirely loathsome.
Then again, it may be wrong to look upon these characters as individuals.
Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard) are more like
principals in a writer’s elaborate gambit. They have a nonsexual, though
intense, attachment dating from childhood, an attachment based on a game in
which they take turns daring each other to do embarrassing and ridiculous
things. When they reach adulthood, these dares take on a destructive quality -
- though the victims are almost always not each other but innocent bystanders.
Critics sometimes naively complain that there’s “no one to like” in a
movie, as if people go to the movies to make friends. The odiousness of the
protagonists notwithstanding, the real problem in “Love Me If You Dare” is
that there’s no one to watch. The nature of Julien and Sophie’s shared
pathology renders them so limited, so lacking in emotional honesty, range or
potential for growth that watching them for 94 minutes is like watching single-
celled organisms under a slide for the same length of time.
Like your cat’s ear mites, the protagonists of “Love Me If You Dare” are
definitely alive. Yes, they are definitely doing things. But after a minute of
watching them, we’re ready to move on.
– Advisory: This film contains mild violence, strong language, nudity
and simulated sex.
– Ruthe Stein
‘An Amazing Couple,’ ‘After the Life’
“An Amazing Couple,” comedy; “After the Life,” drama. Both starring
Ornella Muti, Francois Morel, Dominique Blanc and Gilbert Melki. Written and
directed by Lucas Belvaux. (In French with English subtitles. Not rated. “An Amazing Couple,”
100 minutes. Runs through Monday. “After the Life,” 124 minutes. Runs Tuesday-
Thursday. At the Castro.)
“On the Run,” the first of director Lucas Belvaux’s three films about the
intersecting lives of residents of Grenoble, France, was about hate. “An
Amazing Couple” and “After the Life,” which complete his trilogy, are about
love, and are stronger and more engaging for it. Love trumps hate every time.
“An Amazing Couple” is charmingly offbeat in the vein of early Woody
Allen. The main character, Alain (Francois Morel), is a bigger hypochondriac
than Allen in any of his screen personas. Alain walks around tethered to a
tape recorder so he can give a blow-by-blow account of his symptoms. “Sharp
pain in back comes on suddenly,” he recounts, as if reporting the weather.
Alain’s conviction that he’s at death’s door leads him to dictate
constant changes to his will — providing generously for his wife, Cecile
(Ornella Muti), one day, only to rescind her inheritance when he suspects her
of an affair.
But the only other man she’s seeing is a local cop, Pascal (Gilbert
Melki), whom she’s hired to tail Alain because he’s been lying to her about
his whereabouts. When Pascal warns her that Alain may be playing around, she
dismisses the notion out of a touching belief in her husband. Her instinct is
right: He’s merely trying to cover up a routine surgery, which he naturally
believes will be the end of him.
Morel exhibits a flair for screwball comedy, playing Alain as a
combination of Mr. Bean and Monk. In one hilarious scene, he has his wife drop
him off at a train station, ostensibly for a trip to Paris, watches her drive
away and then hails a cab for the hospital to report more ailments to a doctor
more bored than alarmed. Cecile and Alain qualify as an amazing couple because
their love is strong enough to survive such nuttiness.
The newlyweds Pascal and Agnes (Dominique Blanc), the subjects of “After
the Life,” are amazing in their own right. She’s a morphine addict who has
concealed her 20-year habit from friends like Cecile. Because he’s hooked on
his wife, Pascal scores drugs for her through his connections in the police
force. But in a predictable plot turn, his illegal actions are discovered and
lead to his being blackmailed.
Blanc is completely without vanity in showing the physical deterioration
wrought by addiction. Her performance is as chilling as Lee Remick’s in “Days
of Wine and Roses.”
In order for each part of the trilogy to stand on its own, Belvaux has to
repeat scenes, which becomes distracting. But he provides a different
perspective every time. For example, in both “After the Life” and “An Amazing
Couple,” Pascal catches Alain with a young woman who could be his mistress,
but turns out to be his daughter. However, only in “An Amazing Couple” do we
hear her tearfully confide to her father that her boyfriend has ended their
romance.
It’s a complicated assignment Belvaux has given himself. Although he
falls short of acing it, he is to be commended for experimenting with the
possibilities of cinema.
– Advisory: Both films contain sexual situations and violent moments.
– Ruthe Stein
‘Bukowski: Born Into This’
Documentary about Charles Bukowski. Directed by John Dullaghan. (Not
rated. 130 minutes. At the Lumiere.)
When writer Charles Bukowski immersed himself in skid row, he wasn’t
slumming. He wanted to wake us up with a voice from the lower depths, and he
paid a price for cultivating that voice. In his words: “the rats in my dark
small room /very much resented sharing it /with me.”
“Poet laureate of the gutter,” ranter, sexual boaster, bane of the middle
class and lifelong outcast, the writer cultivated a persona that begs for
documentary treatment, and he gets a good one in “Bukowski: Born Into This.”
It’s the portrait of an artist who had neither time nor respect for literary
niceties — he was, in the words of publisher John Martin, a “man of the
street writing for the man of the street.”
Filmmaker John Dullaghan interviews Bukowski’s wife and ex-girlfriends,
and we hear from a number of the writer’s celebrity admirers and pals (Sean
Penn, Bono, Tom Waits, director Taylor Hackford), but most of the talking is
by the man himself. In footage from a variety of sources, Bukowski recounts
familiar stories, painfully visits the house where he grew up and even escorts
an interviewer around his old postal route (he worked for a time as a mail
carrier).
Fueling the poet’s work, we’re told, was rage against his father, who
regularly beat him with a razor strop. (”My father was a great literary
teacher,” Bukowski says. “He taught me the meaning of pain.”) In addition,
young Bukowski suffered from a severe case of acne that left him scarred. His
non-writing work life consisted of a number of what used to be called menial
jobs, including a long stint at the post office, as clerk and letter carrier.
He was also an alcoholic, whose drinking at one point caused him a near-fatal
bleeding ulcer. It was a breakthrough when Martin, his publisher at Black
Sparrow Press, could afford to pay him $100 a month to concentrate on writing.
Though pigeonholed by academics as part of the Beat movement, his
greatest renown, and success, came later, when he was adopted by the
counterculture. His reputation was cemented in 1987 when Barbet Schroeder
directed a film, “Barfly,” written by Bukowski about his own low-down
adventures in Los Angeles as a young man, played by hard-living Mickey Rourke.
And there were, of course, the readings.
Bukowski had a passionate Bay Area following, and his frequent
appearances here in the ’70s were the bookish equivalent of rock concerts. To
young people dying to be part of the literati, this was a chance to see living
history, an authentic bohemian wild man. Bukowski would amble out onstage and
sit at a small table that held a six-pack or a bottle of wine, sipping,
reading a few lines, sipping, reading. The audiences were large and vocal, and
the great man wasn’t shy about responding to friendly calls, or hecklers. His
performances did not disappoint.
What surprised some at those readings, and what comes across in the film,
is that, despite the boozing, the grizzled appearance, the often raunchy
content of his works, there was a soft side to Bukowski (at least in his later
years). In its most interesting moments, the film shows us a Bukowski who,
intentionally or not, undermines his roisterer image and reveals a much more
vulnerable man.
(Not that he was a complete sweetheart: Dullaghan also includes an
alarming sequence in which an angry Bukowski follows up a verbal tirade by
kicking his girlfriend on camera, and it’s not play-acting. Then again, he
later married the woman, and even cried at the wedding.)
By not glossing over these contradictions, the film raises a final
question: Was the mature Bukowski still a reprobate, or was he just giving the
customers what they paid for? The answer’s a secret that he took to his grave.
By the way, carved on his tombstone are these words: “Don’t try.”
– Advisory: This film contains vulgar language and a scene of domestic
violence.
– Walter Addiego
‘Word Wars’
Documentary. Directed by Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo. (Not rated. 78minutes. At the Roxie.)
Take the bright, competitive and quirky kids in “Spellbound,” the
marvelous documentary about the national spelling bee. Now imagine some of
those youngsters as grown-ups, add profanity, drug use and bad facial hair,
and you have a rough idea of what “Word Wars” is like.
Tracking four Scrabble fanatics as they travel from tournament to
tournament and eventually reach the U.S. nationals in San Diego, the film is a
thoroughly entertaining and hilarious look at a board game that’s an
occasional amusement for some — and a serious obsession (or disturbing
addiction) for others.
One need not play the game, or even own a board, to enjoy this film. And
along the way, it won’t hurt to learn the definitions of jerrid (a blunt
javelin), dourine (a disease of horses) or gentian (a flowering plant). Armed
with such knowledge, anyone can travel to Reno on his own dime — as does
one of the film’s subjects — and win a total of $175 for a fourth-place
finish in a tournament.
To say that the men featured in the movie are characters is an
understatement. One of them, Joel Sherman, a reed-thin, sunken-eyed introvert,
remains unemployed so that he can devote all his time to Scrabble. Bottles of
Maalox always by his side to calm his stomach, he goes by the nickname “G.I.”
Joel — as in “gastrointestinal.” Matt Graham swears by “brain-boosting”
pills to help his game. His home is littered with bottles of them, along with
obscure dictionaries that allow him to think up anagrams in his sleep.
Defending champion Joe Edley, who can be seen performing tai chi before
tournaments, offers this unironic explanation for his victory: “When I won, I
really felt like the universe was telling me what to do and I was just doing
it.”
Most riveting of all is Marlon Hill, who grew up playing the game in
inner-city Baltimore. Hill could put any trash-talking NBA star to shame, and
it’s a kick to see him using his gutter mouth (between routine puffs from a
joint) when going on about how crazy English is. His agility with the spoken
word nearly matches his remarkable skill in putting winning words down on a
board.
– Advisory: This film contains adult language.
– John McMurtrie
