Blue Is The Warmest Color

Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, the two young actresses who star in Blue Is The Warmest Color, deserved to share the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year with the director, Abdellatif Kechiche. In fact, I think they might have deserved more of a share than he did. Kechiche’s range of expression isn’t much more expansive than Christopher Nolan’s; his camera has a hammerlock on the girls, and most of the film’s storytelling relies on reading their faces, and, to a lesser extent, their bodies—which the director likes to have wiggling on top of one another, in the buff. In this context, I don’t think that the NC-17 material is pornographic, exactly, but it sure is an easy way for the movie to generate publicity for itself in a critical environment primed to hail girl-on-girl booty-slapping progressive. The shrewdness of making an art film with explicit sex scenes between two gorgeous women in 2013 and passing it off as radically broadminded (Kechiche to Reuters: “Everyone who is against … love between two people of the same sex must see the film”) reminded me of Beyoncé releasing her surprise album earlier this month and bemoaning that music these days is “all about the single, and the hype is so much that it gets between the music and the artist and the fans”—as if the surprise stratagem wasn’t a different form of hype that just so happens to have saved her millions of dollars. I think there’s more to what Kechiche is doing than that—but maybe not enough more.

The French title translates as “The Life of Adèle, Parts 1 and 2,” and I think I liked Part 1 better. In these scenes, Adèle (Exarchopoulos) is about 17; she has a pretty, gamine, chipmunky face, hair she must soak in a deep fryer, and a jaw that hangs down stupidly, as if her lower teeth were dumbbells. Adèle is not stupid, but she seems as intent on closing herself off as she is on opening up books. Nothing seems to draw her to her female friends; she doesn’t break the mold at family dinner, which her parents spend speechless, slurping spaghetti, in thrall to the TV; and when she finally gives in to the advances of a meatheaded but kind upperclassman, she’s terrified to find herself going through the motions, and that those motions produce no heat. When she confesses these perceived failings to Valentin (Sandor Funtek), her gay best friend, one can tell that she isn’t falling on her words here for want of trying; suddenly, she notices the ickiness of her hair. Funtek conveys his character’s gayness very subtly, and though out-and-proud Valentin offers Adèle some consoling words, it’s impossible to tell just how much he knows, even if it’s quite possible to induce how little she lets him know. Curiously, the gay club he takes her to is lighted mainly blue, but the lesbian equivalent into which she strays is the warmest, mellowest yellow. The blue is in Emma’s—Seydoux’s—hair as she approaches Adèle at the bar. I think the closed-in camera achieves intimacy with the adolescent girl here; I think it does so, and gives the lie to her solipsism, when Adèle brushes past her old friends to meet with older Emma in the school parking lot; and when she denies, later, what they met for.

The blue in Emma’s hair is artificial, but the blue in her Buddha eyes is not, and the dissonance alone is striking enough to pierce Adèle’s heart. She’s studying to be a painter, and her butch look is an invention: the chassis of an android from some better time and place than Adèle’s lower-middle-class naturalism. (This isn’t always the case, but Emma’s blue hair sends the opposite signal that a collar of the warmest color would.) Emma is the aggressor, the buyer of Adèle’s drink, and she senses that Dorothy has wandered in from Kansas. They talk Sartre and art, sketch (Emma) and get sketched (Adèle); and we see them suddenly transition from a kiss in the park to bliss in the bed in what Richard Brody calls “one of the most jolting cuts in the recent cinema.” But I disagree with him that the “intermediate stages of seduction or proposition” are skipped. It’s an earned release, for the girls and for the viewer—a resolution to an hour’s worth of ardor that radiates without getting lost and yet is finally found. (He is correct that “the sexual teasing of anticipation or [the] buildup of undressing” aren’t there, but that’s a different story. Adèle is too serious for teasing foreplay; what makes her sexy, perhaps, is her absence of wit, her absolute, unconscious liberation from the world of wit, which is to say: the world.) No, we don’t see them take their clothes off; but Adèle has been naked since Emma laid eyes on her, a meet-cute in a dream that Adèle later made wet.

The Great Gatsby

It’s hackneyed to say that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose effervesces like champagne; rather, I think, it’s closer to what champagne tastes like to someone who’s never tried it. His colors become tangible; his nouns liquify like verbs; and his emotions flow like gilded wreckage toward a horizon lit by dreams. It’s tonic as gin. It is also, probably, the first encounter most high school students have with lyrical fiction—if not lyrical anything. The Great Gatsby (1925), which is the shortest of Fitzgerald’s finished novels, seems to have been prescribed by a litterateur that he wrote into The Beautiful and Damned; the dandy pontificates, in an interview, “about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterward.” And though Fitzgerald treated that advice glibly, his irony was always brittle—with himself as its brunt. If ever a writer was equipped to chronicle his times for the sake of an unknowable posterity, it was him. He always saw the skeleton outlined in the beautiful form, and, to the literal-minded, this talent could be taken as prescience as it was followed by a great depression that was as harrowing to Fitzgerald as it was to anyone else. He may not have seen beauty in ruin, but he was tortured by how finer things, such as himself, went to rot; he saw beauty through the pain of that vision, and a sense of consolation in being able to appreciate it in its bloom. In his final completed novel, Tender is the Night (1934), self-dissolution was his subject. It was also his form. The same can’t be said of Gatsby.

Gatsby‘s reputation as a Great American Novel dawned at the end of the Second World War—a time when high modernist thought was disseminated to a postwar generation less disillusioned than Fitzgerald’s own, and it took the author for a martyr. In a time of organized affluence, the novel must have seemed to presage the flattening of the old money it’s ruefully soaked in; and though its balmy prose grandly evoked an era so recently past—and yet so legendarily lost—its symbols were as clear as the footnotes doted on by the schoolmasters the writer had kept in mind. Without the educational utility of Gatsby, it’s possible that Fitzgerald’s other great works would have dissolved with him; and if its obvious themes weren’t paired with its enchanted style, it would’ve been forgotten. But there’s a catch. When a prep-school boy called his roommate, Holden Caulfield, “old sport” in 1951, Salinger was winking at the irony. Snobs who quote Gatsby’s affectations, like people who watch Mad Men for the couture, are the Daisy Buchanans of the world. Unlike Fitzgerald, they see beauty and glamour as the same thing.

I would’ve pegged Baz Luhrmann as a Daisy; to my surprise, he ends up more like the schoolmasters—faithful and literal-minded. The D and the PhD. intersect, happily, in the scene toward the end when Gatsby tries to persuade Daisy to tell her husband, Tom, that she never loved him. He expresses more sympathy for Daisy here—and more distance from Gatsby—than Fitzgerald did. But Luhrmann does this at the cost of other blunders: He makes Nick a stand-in for the novelist, which is a rather offensive simplification of Fitzgerald’s relationship to his characters, yet deemphasizes Nick’s fling with Jordan Baker—the most modern of the book’s principals—thus nudging him into a bromance with Gatsby that awkwardly parallels Gatsby’s romance with Daisy. Fitzgerald, I’m sure, saw as much of himself in the moralizing outsider Nick as he did in Gatsby’s smile which “understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself”; that life-affirming grin was transferred, nine years later, onto a more obvious Fitzgerald stand-in, Dick Diver (the best gay-porn name in all American literature), in Tender is the Night—where it slowly turned upside down. There’s also inconsistency, not unusual, in Luhrmann’s attempts to bring the material “up to date.” In plot terms, this is at its worst when Gatsby complains that Daisy wants them to run away together, but he can’t do that because he has to keep climbing the social ladder. It’s an obvious indictment of Late Capitalism; but does it have anything to do with the Gatsby of the novel, who built a castle in the air out of that magic manna known as money, with luring the aristocratic Daisy as its sole object? He’s “better than the whole damn lot of them” because money is just a vehicle for him; to imply otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand the character. To “modernize” him this way is to kill him.

Moneyball

Moneyball is straight-backed popular art: a folk-hero biopic with a vision as bright and clear as one of Derek Jeter’s urine samples. It’s a year (2001-2) in the life of a crazily American “genius,” Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), who, as the real-life general manager of the Oakland Athletics, was the first person to put Bill James’s theories of statistical analysis into practice for a major-league team. Put simply, he was an algorithmic bargain-hunter; he made it possible for a small-market ball-club with a woebegone budget and “washed-up” players to compete with imperially prodigal sluggers like the Yankees. But the key to his hagiography is the fact that he took a chance.

Freaky things happen when egalitarianism, nonconformity, and competitiveness all commingle: It’s like inviting Kanye West, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé’s unborn child to the same party. But the movie gets its guests so good and plastered that they lapse into conviviality—of which Pitt’s G.M. is the human crucible. The actor puts on a great show. Although this Beane withholds what he feels—he doesn’t travel with the team, so as to resist bonding with players he may need to lay off—he makes no bones about what he’s thinking; and each thought gets transferred into a gesture. Beane’s aperçus bubble up like coffee in a percolator. What we see seems more like a salty hick than the real Beane, who was raised in San Diego and got into Stanford on scholarship (which he turned down, a decision the movie milks for drama); he seems more like a waggish Heartland all-star—like, in fact, Pitt. But the star is all in and totally convincing—despite playing an uncanny reflection of what seven-out-of-10 hetero guys see when they preen in the mirror. He may not have much money, but he sure has balls—base and otherwise.

For contrast, Jonah Hill plays Peter Brand—the desk jockey who introduces “sabermetrics” to Beane—with as little motion as possible. This Yale-educated goober seems aware that every time he does move, he flubs it up, so Hill acts with remarkable economy, combining his complaisant young nebbish from Get Him to the Greek with his stonefaced Cyrus. The writers throw in some perfunctory benevolent-jock / idolizing-nerd gags that redound to Pitt-Beane’s noblesse oblige; but even doofy old jokes can be told well, and I was not alone in laughing at them. (Besides, nobody’s at risk of taking offense; Brand is a fictitious version of Beane’s real-life collaborator, who was chronicled in Michael Lewis’s 2003 book. The same may not go for Spike Jonze as Beane’s ex’s new husband; he’s a rich ponce, and the condescension, sportive or no, is palpable.) It’s almost as if the supporting actors were all told to stay out of Pitt’s way. The athletes—like playboy nepotist Jeremy Giambi (Nick Porrazzo); Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt), the shy career catcher who Beane recruits as a first baseman; and David Justice (Stephen Bishop), whose once-bright star is fading—perform with the trepidation of men on their last legs. As the A’s field manager, Art Howe—the most sympathetic representative of the old guard—Philip Seymour Hoffman is superbly cast; he gives Hill’s underplaying a run for its money. He seems to have come out the womb as prudent as a grampa.