Win Win

When was it decided that wrestling was a sign of sensitivity? It was implied that the troubled teen of The Kids Are All Right might be sending his brah a love letter every time he held him in a headlock. Now, in Win Win, in defiance of the sum of modern hyperconsciousness—and codes that have been programmed into every halfway savvy comedy since 2005—the gay subtext has been revoked. Kyle (Alex Shaffer), the misunderstood kid du jour, finds his way by fighting; when he pins his opponents, he has his demons by the horns. No wonder he’s a champ.

Kyle is practically a foundling—the nominal ward of his rather nominal grandfather Leo (Burt Young, whose characters’ screws were never too tight), himself the ward of his court-appointed attorney, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti). A normally scrupulous lawyer, whose expanding family and modest practice are struggling to adjust to straitened times, Mike has taken on this responsibility so that he can receive an annuity from the state of New Jersey; Cindy (Melanie Lynskey), Leo’s meth-addict daughter and Kyle’s mother, is M.I.A. somewhere in Ohio. Enter Kyle—a bleached-blond, outsize stork dropping, waiting, in headphones, on grampa’s stoop. Unable to contact Cindy himself, Kyle is “adopted” by the Flahertys, too. He shadows Mike, who coaches the high school wrestling team, at practice; joins the team; and becomes its great white-haired hope. This laconic waif—who only looks like a “bad influence”—goes cold turkey on cigarettes and starts running laps at four A.M.; his opacity now registers as quiet charisma, and he befriends everyone, including the team pipsqueak (David Thompson). Even Mike’s wealthy pal Terry (Bobby Cannavale), whose dirty mind is doing laps of its own—around his ex-wife—is inspired. He becomes an assistant coach. Neither Mike nor Terry were all-stars when they hit the mat in high school; but now they have Kyle to live through—and, for the first time in ages, victories to look forward to.

Win Win never questions this vicariousness, which is sometimes the bane of parent-student athlete relationships. (Just ask the Emilio Estevez of The Breakfast Club.) But Tom McCarthy, who directed and wrote the script—he shares the story credit with Joe Tiboni, an elder-law attorney who was on the wrestling squad with him in high school—shows us how avidness for sports can transcend its value as simple escapism for people in trouble: a link that’s usually as broad as the shoulders of E.S.P.N. pundits, and thus an easy target for scoffers. Maybe the movie succeeds because it transcends simple escapism without ever transcending escapism itself. In the end, Kyle’s wins may signal long-term dividends but only short-term relief; Mike’s financial situation doesn’t improve. The film’s problem-play mechanics, and the neorealist look and sensibility, outsmart the sports narrative beneath—and yet Win Win thrives on its residual inspiration. Cannavale seems at first to have the ear-achingly obvious function of being the fount of enthusiasm that soaks through the dry flakes of indie irony; I felt the same way about him in McCarthy’s The Station Agent. He’s so in-your-face he seems skin deep. And yet we come to understand that all of Terry’s feelings are amplified; he needs this diversion; he has a bull horn attached to his heart.

Ajami

An elderly woman recently told me that when she saw The Silence of the Lambs, back in 1991, she couldn’t follow the plot. What would she think of Ajami? This Israeli import seems to be well-intended, and the international film-festival circuit tends to laud the good intentions of those whose cameras examine the streets on which downtrodden minorities attempt to peaceably cohabit. Say what you will about the conflict over Palestine, but most Israeli films that make it across the pond(s) seem to be on the ball; moral, political, and spiritual ambiguities are all accounted for in ways that—certainly before Sept. 11, and probably still today—may seem exotic to many American moviegoers. Take Ari Folman’s thoughtful, innovative Waltz with Bashir (2008), for instance, or Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005)—about a pair of antsy suicide bombers who underwent an American Graffiti switcheroo before detonating. The substance of Ajami—which takes its name from a seedy Muslim/Christian quarter of Tel Aviv—isn’t terribly crude or facile; but the structure is wildly overdone.

It’s the sort of synthesis that older generations would, in vain, adjust their hearing aides to comprehend: a neorealist thriller. (One could argue that classics like Carol Reed’s were in this vein, but his street scenes hosted movie stars.) The Italian neorealists who exposed the bombed-out penury of their native land generally told simple stories with a skeleton cast of nonprofessional actors. Plot-wise, The Bicycle Thief (1948) is nothing more than a poor old bloke trying to get his bike back and ending up as much the eponymous villain as the man who initially wronged him. Without explicitly falling into any partisan-political traps, Thief took society to task; a complex mess necessitates a complex solution. This seems to be the point of view of Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, who wrote and directed Ajami—and cast screen-virgin thespians, to boot. With one exception—by my calculations—all the crimes perpetrated here result from flukes; people are driven to crime by misunderstandings: by debts that, in a just world, they wouldn’t have incurred. Nineteen-year-old Omar (Shahir Kabaha) must protect his family from mafiosi that his uncle’s itchy trigger finger has offended; the Bedouin gangsters, in retaliation, whack a 15-year-old they’ve mistaken for Omar. (Omar dodges a few bullet-holes here, but the movie suffers a self-inflicted wound: We see little of how the victim’s family reacts, nor any apologia issued to them by Omar’s.) Another of the film’s protagonists—there are three of ’em—is the 16-year-old Malek (Ibrahim Frege); he’s resorted to crime because he needs to support his ailing mother. The backlash from one of the film’s two Romeo and Juliet-styled, religiously incompatible romances also helps to force Malek’s reluctant, tremulous hand.

Their liberal casuistry simplifies issues a bit, but Copti and Shani’s perspective is not intellectually disrespectable. It’s probably closer to the truth than any other criminological catchall; and it certainly goes down more smoothly than the tripe distinction between good and evil that’s been an interminable staple of the Hollywood diet—a shoot-’em-up lineage that was upheld by John Wayne and his spur-wearing ilk, continued by George Lucas’s Jedi, and has recently clogged the arty arteries of No Country for Old Men and The Dark Knight. But the makers of Ajami have taken their sentiments, jammed them into a blender with a couple dozen plots and an enormous, multilingual cast, and then flung globs of their pâté in every direction. Their storytelling has the pacing and stability of a food fight. The framework certainly isn’t random; the plot goop eventually congeals. But it takes well over an hour to get one’s bearings, and the collation would have been a whole lot fresher if the blender had simply been omitted, and the story served up straight. Everything is chopped up just so that one can see the filmmakers’ prowess in piecing it back together; they’re like chefs who want you to admire the cooking more than the meal.

As a friend of mine griped, Ajami ticks by in Inglourious Basterds time. It’s divided into chapters, but even they are not chronologically ordered. The characters eventually Crash into one another, but not before the viewer is caught in a morass of people and subplots; and since Copti and Shani keep the audience persistently on edge, the tone is often too monotonous to parse out the essentials. By the ending credits, I “got” most of it—some things, like the details concerning a pocket watch, were a little too smudged in there or convenient for me to buy—but I would have rather spent my mental efforts observing and comprehending the flavor of life in this country. (Ajami certainly isn’t propaganda for Israel’s tourism industry.) The characters are too harried to learn much about, and some of them are a little too easily innocent. Omar’s little brother narrates the tale; his function is merely to drain our sympathies. (This little artist is so sensitive he’s clairvoyant.) He relates his life in comic-book frames—maybe that helps to explain the hyperbolic narrative. Commercial jigsaw structures work for movies like Inglourious Basterds and Shutter Island because those films were, respectively, a trifle and an analogue for psychosis. (The former may have been a symptom of psychosis.) In Ajami, the puzzling construction holds our attention for the sake of holding our attention; it helps to sell the thesis, I guess, but it doesn’t correlate with the characters’ experiences. They are not confused; they have clear motives; they know what’s up. Why must we be stuck taking notes? The movie was almost certainly conceived for international distribution, but the filmmakers’ style makes non-Israelis feel like tourists whose G.P.S. devices have failed them. We’re in a sketchy neighborhood, and without a map—too busy fretting over the best way out to concern ourselves with the plight of the locals.

Where the Wild Things Are

A few months ago, a conservative politician callously derided a liberal bill, claiming that its “empathy” was just a slippery slope to partisanship. One does not need to be partisan—or even political—to realize that empathy is the last bastion of civilized thought. If empathy becomes a “partisan” issue, rather than something generally recognized for its social utility, then we’ll all be riding that slippery slope down the garbage chute. Fostering empathy may be one of art’s richest and most important faculties, but, as with life, empathy is but one ingredient in artistry’s stew. Empathy without rationality can make hearts bleed like burst pipes, and it’s not impossible to drown in that briny, bleary mess.

But, allow me to dismount my high horse of metaphorical grandiosity, and explain how my sermon relates to Where the Wild Things Are. Before lapsing into my own belletrism, I was prepared to quote the French film critic André Bazin, who said that “To explain [Italian neorealist filmmaker Vittorio] De Sica, we must go back to the source of his art, namely to his tenderness, his love … [T]he affection De Sica feels for his creatures is no threat to them … There is no admixture of pity in it … because pity does violence to the dignity of the man who is its object”—because I think the same could be said of director Spike Jonze’s treatment of the characters in Wild Things. But one should also consult American critic James Agee, who, three months after publishing a florid rave of De Sica’s Shoeshine (1947), retracted his evaluation. He ascribed his enthusiasm to the fact that the movie was “made from the heart, and so touched the heart”; its intimacy had allowed him to overlook what he later perceived as flaws.

I’m leery of overloading Wild Things, because it’s a film for which the anticipation has become wilder than the final cut. At best, the movie will become a beloved black sheep among kids’ classics. By his own admission, the director “didn’t set out to make a children’s film … [but] to represent, as honestly as possible, what it feels like to be a person trying to understand the world when you’re that age”; yet what he’s come up with isn’t really a children’s film, or a children’s movie for adults, or an adult movie for children. A wave of controversy has splashed against the protean nature of Wild Things—its lack of conventional narrative, plot goals, and even rainbow-bright sheen has kept financiers on edge. You almost feel you’re on the side of corrupt, literal-minded, dishonest, pedantic adulthood if sugar, spice and everything nice don’t gestate in your heart while the tale unfolds onscreen. (Some have argued that the filmmakers’ playful abstention from structure is like the work of John Cassavetes. What kid doesn’t clamor to see A Woman Under the Influence?) If you don’t react to the movie, you fear you’ve become an apostate poo-pooer on the concept of the inviolable artist—even if these particular artists cost their studio-patron something in the vicinity of $100 million. Well, I may be corrupt, but I’m hardly an adult; I feel affectionate toward Wild Things, but this is a movie to hug, not to make love to.

Of course not, you say; that’s cinematic pedophilia! Sure, sure—but I still think Wild Things falls short of greatness, and not because it’s a “children’s film.” Wonder and confusion and melancholy are indeed elements of youth, but so are excitement and silliness and an absence of limitations. Jonze’s venerated ability to merge “the realistic and the banal … with the fantastic and the extreme” is a touch too close to banal here; his deadpan was key in his Charlie Kaufman collaborations (in his other two features, he rejoiced in Being John Malkovich and the throes of Adaptation), but Wild Things is too understated. The movie failed to excite my senses; it lacked the tonic qualities of art which made Jonze’s other films so fun, and a select few kiddie pics scintillating. The Fall—directed by Tarsem, another music-video maker—was also made with love and empathy, and even a dollop of sentimentality; but Tarsem let the wild things loose, and embraced the sort of indulgences that captivated us as kids, and still captivate us as “adults.” This summer’s Ponyo was as squishily innocent as Wild Things, yet it had pep and spunk bursting from its gills; you felt its goofballs come at you like curve balls. Wild Things is heartfelt but tentative. The scriptwriters (Jonze co-wrote the film with novelist Dave Eggers) seem to have reverted too far into childhood; emotionally, the movie is about as outgoing as a reserved little tyke of the glasses-braces-pimples variety—charming, but turbid, too.

The Class

Taking into account its extremely confined setting, The Class is one of the most comprehensive movies I’ve seen. Nearly all of the film—which won the 2008 Palme d’Or at Cannes—is set within a secondary school in a Paris banlieue, and a majority of our time there is devoted to the French class instructed by M. Marin (François Bégaudeau). We learn a great deal about both the teacher and his students despite the fact that we never once bear witness to their “personal” lives; what we know of them is gleaned from scattershot wispy anecdotes. Save for one student’s mother, parents only make cameos, appearing briefly for parent-teacher conferences. The Class—which plays in France under the more fitting title of Entre les murs (between the walls)—is a raw slice-of-life wedged precariously between recess and homework.

As the French-language title implies, this slice is quite restrictive. The shooting style employed by the director, Laurent Cantet—documentary realism—does more than just lend surface authenticity to the narrative (as it does for action films); here, it actually makes thematic sense. These characters—both young and grown-up—are cramped by more than small classrooms. Cantet’s quick cuts and overlapping dialogue may be enough to make one crave Ritalin, but it’s the overbearing ambiguity of this world that one is actually reacting to. This response isn’t altogether pleasant, but it’s startlingly empathic. Like the students, we’re looking all over because action could erupt anywhere; and, because there’s no ordinary structure to hold on to—until a single plot line begins to take precedence by the end—one never has any expectation of what will happen next.

Even the characters, despite our intimacy with them, seem almost unstable—but this is by no means due to a deficiency of internal logic. Between hormones and cooties and the sundry other stresses exerted upon them, we never quite know how the characters will (or “should”) react; the teachers are frazzled, and the students haven’t the luxury of permanent alliances. It doesn’t hurt that the level of acting these kids achieve is superb. Adolescents are perpetually putting up a front, and these non-professional actors channel that better here than they would in a documentary. In a non-fiction film, they’d be more conscious of the way the camera is recording them; they’d be, in essence, playing themselves—specifically, the “selves” they’d tweet about or upload to Facebook. Here, they can channel their insecurities into characters. That the apples they play probably don’t fall far from the trees they are seems beside the point.

If I’ve hardly addressed the plot, it’s not because it’s negligible, but because it’s irrelevant. It’d be insolent to insinuate that “the plot is life,” so I won’t. Rather, I recommend one approaches this movie realizing that it’s not the plot that counts; this is an ensemble character study, so our attention is focused on how these characters interact, whether through desultory joshing or pent-up conflict. Our attention is kept by the authenticity of the filmmakers’ conception, the distinctiveness of the players, the way small character traits lave like pond ripples growing into tsunamis, and the pressures on lives simmering in a melting pot. (The 2006 racial riots in France make this last angle all the more cogent.) Marin and his colleagues are champs for surviving the Métro, boulot, dodo stress of intercity teaching, but Marin is—like his students—excessively human. He’s not an Olympian instructor like, say, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society; when a student is expelled, Marin may or may not be complicit. But, on the same token, the expulsion may or may not be justified. The Class refuses to flatter us with simplistic heroes; it enriches our respect for real heroes by showing us what they’re up against. Our sympathies are never coerced into flowing, but Bégaudeau and Cantet do shatter a dam.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire works for reasons that it shouldn’t; what works in it and what’s wrong with it seem inseparable. For the first two-thirds of the movie, one almost doesn’t expect that it will work at all, but the director, Danny Boyle, and the screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy (who adapted Vikas Swarup’s novel Q&A), pull us through. It’s not a great movie, but it’s a genial one—and its beautifully constructed structure is just about ironclad. The filmmakers at work here give the material exactly the treatment it needs, but I think that the underside of their achievement is that, even at its peaks, Slumdog exposes their limitations.

The story is simple—almost too simple. The eponymous “slumdog” is Mumbai street urchin Jamal Malik (played by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala as a youngster, and Dev Patel at 18). Shards of the caste system still seem to lay about Jamal’s India, and no matter where he walks, he seems to step on them. He witnesses such atrocities as the murder of his mother—executed for being Muslim—and a mob-run training camp for young panhandlers, at which the campers with the best singing voices have their eyes gouged out. (The mobsters are more successful when the beggars they pilfer from are blind.) The whole world seems to be conspiring against Jamal, his pure little lover Latika (Rubiana Ali, Tanvi Ganesh Lonkar, and, finally, Freida Pinto), and his brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala and, as a young adult, Madhur Mittal)—that is, until Salim murders the mob boss who ran the camp, aligns with a rival triad, and casts his younger brother out of his life. But Jamal and Latika—those poor, dreamy-eyed little sweethearts who aren’t old enough to consummate their love—still pine for one another. Latika is installed as the moll of Salim’s brutal new don, and hopeless-romantic Jamal finds himself on the Hindi-TV Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with hopes that this outlet may attract her attention. But Jamal can’t even catch a break there: His street-smarts lead him to answer all the questions correctly, but even the skuzzy host (who looks more like Dennis Miller than Regis Philbin) wants him to fail, and, suspected of cheating, Jamal is prematurely tossed to the police.

The brilliant structure uses the police interrogation as its crux; from that “present,” we flash back to a videotape of his appearance on Millionaire, and from there to the episodes in his life that allow him to answer questions like, “Who’s on the $100 bill?” (The cops here are, by the way, just as brutal as the criminals. When the movie opens on them electroshocking Jamal, the audience is cued to believe that these barbarians are part of the underworld.)

Boyle’s vision of India is bizarre—grandiose cynicism is mixed with a devout sentimentality, but at a level that seems below weltschmerz. India is a din, sunlit nightmare for its poor; it seems the only choices open to its least fortunate are crime or, in Jamal and Latika’s case, intractable romanticism—a dreaminess that’s as absurd as their bad luck. For that reason, Slumdog seems trapped at some primal level. We can’t buy the lovers as characters, and their assailants seem so purely malign in their intentions that we can’t imagine that Boyle or Beaufoy ever gave any regard for their motivations. (Most of the adults here are so unsavory that one wonders if the filmmakers intended to pander to eight-year-olds in time-out.) Slumdog is, unfortunately, that kind of movie—a fable. Good is pitted against evil, but it’s all okay: it’s part of a divine plan—or, in the movie’s pseudo-cryptic lingo, “it is written.”

But, boy, has Beaufoy written it! And Boyle has directed the hell out of it. And it works. Their methods are so vital, and their intentions seem so pure, that one could picture his film being conceived by a hardscrabble romantic like Jamal. Slumdog doesn’t feel like the work of a cynical hack—even a talented one. Hacks are too sane to bathe such limp material in entropic excess. Boyle humiliates, frustrates, and thwarts Jamal like an Old Testament deity, but sticks with him like a loyal friend; Boyle and Beaufoy throw so many hardships at the slumdog that it seems ridiculous, but their insanity isn’t sadistic—we’re worked up to want to see these two cardboard paramours united, but we don’t feel worked over. The filmmakers care, and want us to care, so their zest transcends what could have simply been cancerous over-stylization. The substance here is the heat beneath the style; but the paramours are still made out of cardboard.