Les Misérables (1934)

Harry Baur as Jean Valjean

Raymond Bernard's Les Misérables is, by leaps and bounds, the best adaptation of Victor Hugo's great novel. Part of the reason is that the nearly five hour length of the film enables Bernard to capture the breadth and depth of the work. There are numerous cuts, particularly Valjean and Cosette's stay in the convent, but they are slight compared to the versions that run under three hours.

Harry Baur's casting as Jean Valjean is another aspect in its favor. Most adaptations cast actors, as Valjean, who are more suited to the romantic role of Marius. I'm thinking of Fredric March and Michael Rennie in particular. Valjean, at the start of Les Misérables, is a rough-hewn brute and Baur captures this perfectly. He is also deft at portraying Valjean's moral regeneration after encountering true Christian charity in his travels. Bernard is able to exploit Baur's size. Whether he is raising a collapsed wagon or fighting off brigands at the Gorbeau house, Baur is convincing as a gargantuan force of nature.

The secondary roles are all superbly wrought. Charles Vanel, who hit his commercial stride in the 1950s, is a superb as Javert. He gives a fully rounded performance, devoid of the stock villainy employed by Charles Laughton and Robert Newton. Jean Servais captures the romantic intensity of Marius in what was only his fourth film. There are no glaringly bad performances, but I was particularly struck by the efforts of Orane Demazis (Pagnol's Fanny) in the thankless role of Eponine and Henry Krauss (who had played Valjean in a 1912 film adaptation) as the Bishop in his final role.

The technical aspects of the film are truly impressive. The sets by Lucien Carre and Jean Perrier are impressive, but have a lived in quality. The striking musical score is by Arthur Honegger. The cinematography by Jules Kruger is sterling. Kruger had collaborated with the director on Bernard's previous film, Wooden Crosses, a World War 1 film that outstrips either version of  All Quiet on the Western Front. As in that film, Kruger and Bernard employ a hand-held camera for the action sequences. In this case, this effect adds greatly in capturing the turmoil of the 1832 insurrection. One of the few directorial choices I didn't particularly care for was Bernard's use of tilted camera angels. This is appropriate in showing the scenes of injustice and strife, but I don't think it added anything to the dance sequence at Marius and Cosette's wedding. A former press photographer, Kruger had a long and fruitful career in film with such impressive credits as Pepe le Moko, Les Perles de la Couronne, and Abel Gance's Napoleon; in which a hand-held camera is also utilized during a childhood snowball fight.

Bernard is a neglected figure. Les Miserables and Wooden Crosses are his only films available on disc in the US. His presence on YouTube is slight and it seems very few film scholars outside France have seen many of his 34 films. Bernard's career suffered after the collapse of Pathe in 1936. A Jew, Bernard went into hiding during the Second World War and his post-war career never regained momentum.  Les Miserables and Wooden Crosses are available in a three disc set by Criterion. Highly recommended!

Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead

Douglas Tirola's Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon is the most underwhelming documentary I've seen in some time. A teenage fan of the magazine in the 70s, I was hoping that, at the very least, it would capture its' sophomoric humor. Despite the onscreen presence of such funny people as Tony Hendra, Chris Miller, Ann Beatts, Christopher Buckley and PJ O'Rourke, it did not even draw a titter from me. This is bad enough, but the film is extremely superficial in its analysis of the Lampoon's antecedents, its place in the zeitgeist of the 70s, and its influence on the comedy of today.

Part of the problem is that in its focus on the decline and fall of Lampoon co-founder Doug Kenney, the documentary has little time to spend on other, equally interesting figures such as Michael O"Donoghue. Also, the brief clips of the theatrical production of National Lampoon Lemmings are far more intriguing than the glimpses of the magazine's artwork and cartoons; which are stupidly animated. A lost opportunity. (8/10/22) 

Mad God

                 
Phil Tippett's Mad God, from 2021, is the most audacious and visionary stop-motion animation film since Christiane Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String. A journey through a dystopian terrain that resembles the more horrific landscapes of our world during the 20th century, the film is largely devoid of plot, dialogue, and characters, but has enough texture and detail to fill a dozen films. Like his surrealistic stop-motion animation forebears, specifically Jan Svankmajer and the brothers Quay, Tippett's work is a study of decomposition and reconstitution. Substances pour out of orifices and creatures are pulverized, but whatever juices and goo remains is recycled by other organisms. The circle of life, I suppose, but unlike The Lion King, this film is not for children.

Mad God is the first animated film I've seen that I've felt could have used more butterflies, rainbows, and unicorns, but, since Mr. Tippett toiled on this project for over three decades, I suppose one should cut him some slack for his monomania. Mad God resembles the grotty textures and bleak landscapes of Alexsei German's Hard to Be a God and Max Ernst's painting, Europe After the Rain. Like those works, Mad God portrays a world so fallen that it incurs the wrath of a deity as vengeful as the Old Testament Yahweh. 

M3gan: An Advertisement for Itself

                
Gerard Johnstone's M3gan is a compact and intermittently entertaining PG-13 horror film. The flick functions as the usual cautionary AI fable and an introduction to a distaff Chucky ready to be the face of a new franchise. No new cinematic ground is broken, but I can't complain about the film's craft.

Akela Cooper's script does a good job with its exposition. Allison Williams plays Gemma, a toy designer who is unexpectedly thrust in the role of guardian to her niece after a fatal auto accident. The trauma experienced by the young niece and Gemma's difficulty in transitioning into a parental role are well drawn. When a fully formed M3gan enters the film, some twenty minutes in, the relationship dynamics that she will ultimately disrupt are firmly established. Williams has matured into a pretty good actress. Her apple cheeked, dimpled chin, All American appeal initially masks her character's failings. As in The Perfection, she underplays nicely.

Johnstone gets good performances out of his cast with the exception of Ronny Chieng who, as the toy company CEO, is allowed to huff and puff to little effect. My main reservation about the film is its impersonality. It is a superior Blumhouse product, but a product nonetheless. I enjoy B horror movies, like Stuart Gordon's similar Dolls, with a more personal touch. Perhaps, I am foolish to look for more than product placement in a movie like this, especially when the film starts with, an admittedly amusing, faux commercial.

The Purple Plain

Gregory Peck and Win Min Than

Robert Parrish's The Purple Plain is an above average Gregory Peck vehicle from 1955. Peck plays a Canadian airman suffering from PTSD after flying bomber missions in Burma during World War 2. The film has two narrative sections. First, Peck falls in love with comely Win Min Than who helps him deal with his trauma and become whole again as a person. Second, the film becomes a tale of survival as Peck and two comrades crash in the Burmese jungle and try to make it out alive.

The print I saw (on MGM's own channel) was not up to snuff. The technicolor was faded at the end of reels and there were numerous scratches. A pity since Geoffrey Unsworth's cinematography is eye-popping. Sri Lanka stands in for Burma and the locales are beauteous. Peck is as wooden as ever, but as he is unconscious and or delirious for half the picture, the negative effect is negligible. Parrish gets good performances out of his mostly British cast and it is sad that this is the only film Ms. Than appeared in because she gives a sweet and winsome performance.

The courtliness of the romance is contrasted with lysergic flashbacks depicting the trauma of Peck's wartime experiences. Parrish's deliberate pacing and an evocative soundtrack heighten our feelings for his plight. Parrish has always interested me because I thoroughly enjoyed his memoir (the lively Growing Up in Hollywood) some years back, but have had a hard time tracking down the films he directed. I've seen two of his Westerns and found them to be better than run of the mill. The Purple Plain seems to be the most acclaimed film he directed and while not a masterpiece, is a worthy film.

Fury, Marat/Sade, The Artist, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream

Jean Dujardin in The Artist

David Ayer's Fury is the worst film I've seen in some time: visual sludge and ridiculous drivel. 

I lasted through the first half of Peter Brook's Marat/Sade and found it too in love with its own mannerisms to proceed.

Michel Hazanavicius' The Artist betrays a love of cinema for its own sake that outshines Brook's spasmodic Brechtian direction. The nods to various film classics and to the conventions of the silent screen are performed with a deft touch in this slight, yet winning Oscar winner. Hazanavicius has chose to go the full throwback route with a largely silent film in black and white that utilizes the 4:3 screen ratio. The direction is restrained and gives his talented cast room to shine. 

Jean Dujardin is particularly memorable as a Fairbanks-like silent lead who finds himself washed up when the talkies hit. The décor and costumes are spot on, giving a knowing lushness to the proceedings. Some thought this too lightweight and pleasant to be a Best Picture winner, but I prefer it to an overwrought, self-important turkey like Crash. 

Peter Bogdanovich's four hour documentary, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers: Runnin' Down a Dream, is an affectionate portrait of the musical artist. Much like Scorsese profiling Dylan, this is a paean to a rock star; albeit a minor one. Bogdanovich does touch upon the dark side (drugs, but no sex) of the music world, but is mainly concerned with celebrating the man and his music. For the casual fan, streaming this in bits is probably the best way to view this unwieldy, but endearing beast. (6/23/16)

Quick Takes. January 2023

The Promise

Chen Kaige's The Promise, from 2006, is a visually sumptuous storybook epic set in China during the Tang dynasty. Kaige's historical epics sometimes succumb to ponderousness, but this flipped out wuxia suits his operatic style. Kaige's most flamboyant and entertaining film.

Claire Denis' Both Sides of the Blade is the first of her films to leave me disappointed. The middle aged triangle at the center of the film is more torpid than torrid. The three leads were fine and I always welcome seeing Bulle Ogier, but the direction is listless and the attempts at topicality are poorly integrated. Perhaps the fault lies in Christine Angot's novel, but I thought Denis' Let the Sunshine In, her 2017 effort also starring Juliette Binoche, was feistier.

Paul Schrader's Dog Eat Dog is an ugly and repellant crime film from 2016. The spectacle of Schrader giving  Nicholas Cage and Willem Defoe enough rope to hang themselves means that this is a livelier failure than either First Reformed or The Card Counter. Schrader casts himself as the fixer or deus ex machina of the film, monikered "El Greco". An act of immodesty and hubris perhaps, especially since he is not up to the demands of Edward Bunker's script, derived from Matthew Wilder's novel. Perhaps it was a matter of economic expediency. Give this to Mr. Schrader, when he films sinners, you witness SIN writ large.

Nicolas Winding Refn's Copenhagen Cowboy, currently on Netflix, is supernatural folderol, but it is still the most successful project he has put his name to since Drive. What plot there is evaporates in a miasma of pink, red, purple and blue lighting. A good chunk of the audience will find the film slow, with the camera indulging in long, deliberate pans. I thought the strategy worked because Refn's exteriors and interiors embroider the fairy tale narrative with malevolent intent. Refn has never been one for Apollonian architecture and structure in his films and this series' first (and only?) finale is especially vaporous.  

John Byrum's Inserts, from 1975, is a one act, one set, five character film about a washed up director, played by Richard Dreyfuss, struggling to finish a stag film in 1930. The result is a predictable screed about the conflict of art and commerce in Hollywood. A good example of the obviousness of the project is that Bob Hoskins' thuggish backer, who dreams of helming a hamburger empire, is named Big Mac. The performances, however, are pretty good. Dreyfuss is well-cast as a self-pitying narcissist and Hoskins, Jessica Harper, and, especially, Veronica Cartwright make the most of what they can. 

The Human Stain

                
Robert Benton's The Human Stain, from 2003, sunk like a stone leaving no trace upon its release. This version of Philip Roth's justly praised novel had few critical defenders at the time except for Andrew Sarris who was Benton's lifelong supporter and, I think, a friend. I am somewhat reserved about Benton and avoided the film until my curiosity was piqued after reading and enjoying the novel. I mostly agree with A. O. Scott who described the book as "a B+ literary adaptation." 

Nicholas Meyer adaptation is a sensible and sturdy paring down of Roth's book. The children of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, (played by Anthony Hopkins) have been eliminated. This was a move that was necessary to keep the project under two hours, but lessens our sense of Silk's arrogance and insularity. Most of the academic politics of the book, Silk is a classics professor and former dean of a small liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts, have been jettisoned. This is not bad in itself, but it tilts the action towards the central romantic relationship between Silk and Faunia Farley, a member of the janitorial staff of Silk's college. This relationship is problematic both onscreen and on the page for reasons I will cite in a moment. Meyer shifts a concert Coleman and Faunia attend at Tanglewood indoors to a church which has no effect on the storyline, but must have delighted the producer for economic reasons. I appreciated that Meyer retained the basic structure of the novel, ending with a note of menace that could only have come from Roth's splenetic pen.

The meat of Roth's book remains. Silk has lost his position at the college after using a term that was perceived as a racial slur. He has been traumatized by this and his wife's subsequent demise. His romance with Faunia, who is dealing with trauma of her own, gives him a chance to spiritually regenerate and come to terms with a lifelong secret. Silk is a black man who has been passing as white for over forty years. The film, like the book, details his background in flashback. His repudiation of his family, and vice versa, is as effectively painful onscreen as it is in the novel.

Most critics in 2003 felt that the leads of this films had been miscast. I largely agree about Hopkins and Nicole Kidman's casting, but also feel the same about Gary Sinise who plays Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's usual stand-in and narrator. Sinise is neither old enough, nasty enough or Jewish enough. Like Hopkins and Kidman, Sinise is an outstanding performer who, like Hopkins and Kidman, is never bad, per se. However, even fellow goy John Cusack would have been a better pick. Sinise is too much a cornfed Midwestern All-American for the role. Fans of his screen work should hunt down video copies of his work onstage in True West and The Grapes of Wrath. I thought Henry Fonda's performance as Tom Joad would never be equaled until I saw Sinise play the same role. 

Silk is a problematic role for any white actor fill and, because of that, I'm not sure this film could be made today. Wentworth Miller, who is biracial, plays the younger Silk and he is an interesting counterpoint to Hopkins. Miller is a fairly wooden performer, but since his character is imprisoned by society's racial constraints, this is not fatal to his performance. Miller is convincing physically in the scenes depicting Silk's career as a Golden Gloves boxer. Hopkins is physically unconvincing: whether it be working the bag, making sweet love with Kidman or in dance sequences with both Kidman and Sinise. Physical grace is a key to this character who is out of touch with spiritual grace. The short sequence of Hopkins jogging with Kidman is particularly gruesome. Hopkins never floats like a butterfly in the role and only stings like a bee verbally. Whenever he is lecturing on Homer or eviscerating a colleague, Hopkins is in his wheelhouse and he does justice to Roth's bon mots. 

Kidman is not coarse enough for her role, but it is difficult to imagine any actress suited to a role that exists in Philip Roth's fervid imagination rather than reality. Faunia is a live for the moment gal who left a privileged background to plumb the lower depths where some greater truth resides, but only those found in novels. The character is saddled not only with dead children, but a vengeful Vietnam veteran ex. That character is the most unbelievably stock one in the book, but Ed Harris handles the cliched role with aplomb; at least he seems to be an American. Kidman certainly fills the role of a fantasy figure, but her lack of chemistry with Hopkins is palpable. Apparently, her chemistry with Roth wasn't much better.

Benton is too much the avid craftsman to concoct an abject failure. There are impressive supporting performances by Harry Lennix, Clark Gregg, Anna Deavere Smith, Margo Martindale, and Ron Canada. I found The Human Stain a tolerable entertainment, certainly far above such cinematic travesties made from Roth novels as Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint. The best film made from a Roth book is James Schamus' too little seen Indignation, but I have high hopes for Arnaud Desplechin's Deception.

The Human Stain was the final feature film from cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier to whom the film is dedicated. His films include Nurse Betty, Good Will Hunting, and the visually spectacular The Lovers on the Bridge. Gone too soon. 

Amsterdam

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington

I'm afraid I must join the chorus of disapproval in regards to David O. Russell's Amsterdam, a leaden farce. One of the many reasons the film doesn't work is the lack of warmth, charm, and humor by the three leads. In his previous films, Russell succeeded in engendering our empathy with his leads before having them run over post offices, lick armpits, spray acid on quail or jog around with garbage bags on. He tries this in Amsterdam by showing his lead trio surviving the horrors of the Great War and bonding in a bohemian menage in the titular city. He even quotes Lubitsch's Design for Living, but the leads just made me pine for Miriam Hopkins, Gary Cooper, and Frederic March. 

Bale is a fine, meticulous actor, but he does not exude warmth. This was why it was it was wise for Russell to pair him with the more genial Amy Adams in American Hustle. Margo Robbie is beauteous, but not warm or friendly. I am skeptical of her talent, but, perhaps, she may be a perfect Barbie. John David Washington has seemed a wan presence to me. He is pleasant in a stolid way, sort of an Afro-Am Gregory Peck with the attendant limitations. There are enough interesting performances in Amsterdam to make viewing it a barely tolerable experience, but not one I would recommend.

Halloween Ends

Jamie Lee Curtis and David Gordon Green

I am ambivalent about David Gordon Green's Halloween Ends. It is the franchise's best film since the original, but that is a low bar. I enjoyed the cast, even the relative newcomers, and appreciated the playful and satiric aspects injected by Mr. Green and his screenwriting cohorts. Still, this is a little too "for the fans" for my taste. Even though the fans of this series seem to either love or hate this film, I would not recommend it to anyone but a horror aficionado. 

I did enjoy the corporeal aura Michael Myers was imbued with. He is not the omniscient bogeyman of some of the sequels, but a solid presence who forms a secret sharer relationship with the juvenile lead. Myers' lair underneath an underpass recalls the tactility of the forest primeval of Green's debut, George Washington. Will Green ever make a film again as singular and individualistic as that one?

La Vie De Boheme

Matti Pellonpaa in La Vie De Boheme

Aki Kaurismaki's 1992 version of the Henry Murger book which was the source material for umpteen films, Puccini's opera, Leoncavallo's opera. and, yes, Rent, is one of his most audience friendly films. His deadpan absurdism is a snug fit with Murger's mix of humor and pathos. Timo Salminen's black and white cinematography gives a magical sparkle to a subject which threatens to submerge in a despond of realism. Kaurismaki's growing interest in the plight of refugees surfaces here. Over two decades later, Andre Wilms would reprise his role as the writer Marcel Marx for Kaurismaki in Le Havre, a film wholly focused on Europe's growing refugee crisis. 

Smile (2022)

Parker Finn's Smile had the tagline, "Once you see it, It's too late. " Truer advertising copy has rarely been written. A series of jump scares provided by a smiling demon, the film aims for horror, but achieves mild discomfiture. Finn's treatment of medical and mental health issues seems unsophisticated even compared to lowbrow fare like Cult of Chucky. A monotonous two hours with the occasional flourish of meaningless camera movements.  

Biff's Favorite 10 Books Read in 2022

            

1) Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood by James Lever. A send-up of the movie star memoir that is a mash-up of Hollywood Babylon and The Territorial Imperative. Scabrously funny. 

2)  Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. An account of Ms. West's travels through Yugoslavia with her husband and a cast of thousands in 1937. Of course, this is like describing Moby Dick as a book about a whale. 

I grew up in NW Baltimore. My favorite record store growing up was Record and Tape Collector on 409 W. Cold Spring Lane. The store closed decades ago.  It was next door to Alonso's, a neighborhood tavern with extraordinary burgers and good pizza. Alonso's still exists in a gentrified form. I took my future bride there in 1982 and at the table next to us Frank Robinson and Elrod Hendricks dined, drank, and reminisced, but I digress.

The record store had a bulging collection and a knowledgeable and helpful staff.  I remember one of them telling me yes, the Velvet Underground albums, which were only available as imports at the time, were worth the extra bucks. My friends and I would go on Fridays to check out the new releases. The staff would write capsule reviews and affix them to the demo copy. I remember the review of the Rolling Stones' last flirtation with greatness, 1978's Some Girls. It read: "Great Rock, Great Blues, Great Soul, Great Disco, Great Country." 

Similarly, Black Lamb contains multitudes. It is a travelogue, history, ethnographic exploration, cultural dissertation, and a gustatory delight with enough sex and violence for ten long seasons on HBO. It is quite lengthy at 1100 or so.

West captures Europe on the precipice of disaster, yet the book is leavened with humor, albeit gallows humor. The writing is superb throughout, as is West's moral probity:

                   "Violence" said Mussolini in the unmistakable accents of  moral imbecility, "is

                     profoundly moral, more moral than compromises and transactions." Time has

                     rolled backward. It seemed likely man was to lose his knowledge that it is wiser

                     being good than bad, it is safer being meek than fierce, it is fitter being sane

                     than mad. He was not only ignoring the Sermon on the Mount, he was forgetting

                     what the Psalmist had known. And since these things are true it was certain that,

                     once man had forgotten them, he would be obliged, with pains that must be 

                     immense, to rediscover them.

3) To Lie with Lions by Dorothy Dunnett. Ms. Dunnett's place in the pantheon of historical novelists is assured. She emulates Dumas' swashbuckling approach, but darkens it with a penetrating insight into the evil stratagems men and women devise. Some of her themes, particularly the rapaciousness of capitalist robber barons and the fluidity and tumult of sexuality, seem more germane with each coming year. Her books require more than a passing acquaintance with European history, in this novel's case, the late 15th century. Her books are liberally sprinkled with quotations in foreign tongues: French, Italian Latin, Greek, Arabic. Her descriptions are colorful, her narrative construction sound, and her timing impeccable. She is quite willing to unsheathe the rapier of her wit. The Holy Roman Emperor is "almost stupid, but not absolutely so." (pg. 579)

4) The Passenger/Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy. It strikes me that McCarthy's protagonists before or after Blood Meridian, the dividing line in his fiction between Southern gothic and Southwestern gothic , have all ended up on society's fringes or even its outer periphery. The inheritors of the mantle of the Western cowboy, like John Grady Cole in All The Pretty Horses, end up living under highway underpasses in Cities of the Plain. Bobby Western, the protagonist of The Passenger, ends up exiled to a shack in an attempt to escape shadowy agents. His sister Alicia, the protagonist of Stella Maris, enters a psychiatric hospital and commits suicide. McCarthy crosses a vector with Pynchon and DeLillo in this new, two volume work. These writers, and many more, address with alarm the growing power of America's surveillance state. As Andrew Sarris wrote of Fritz Lang, "in a century that has spawned Hitler and Hiroshima, no artist can be called paranoiac, he is being persecuted." A good chunk of 20th century art explores this strain of paranoia and it is certainly still present in the 21st century, both here and abroad.

5) Either/Or by Elif Batuman. Batuman's The Idiot seemed to me a holding pattern. The focus on Salin. Batuman's alter ego, and the brooding Ivan seemed like a rehash of Batuman's folie a deux with Luban in her first book, The Possessed. Salin is back in Either/Or, but Batuman has gotten back in touch with her funny bone. She regards Salin's youthful misadventures with rueful wisdom. Either/Or is the best sentimental novel in some time and the best academic novel since Lucy Ives' Loudermilk. 

6) The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan. A novel concerning Australian POWs and their Japanese captors in Burma during World War 2. Makes Bridge on the River Kwai read like a YA novel.

7) Mary Queen of Scots by Stefan Zweig. A concise and tart biography.

8) Gabriele D'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett.

An exhaustive and caustic biography. 

9) The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze. An economic history of Nazi Germany. The numerous charts are a bit much for those not in the field, but this is a compelling portrait of economic determinism.

10) Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Robinson's latest was, for me, her hardest to sink into. Perhaps because the first person narration of Jack Boughton accurately reflects the tangled thicket of his mind. Still, there are enough grace notes in this tome for a career in fiction. Robinson belongs on the list of possible American Nobel candidates including McCarthy, Charles Johnson, and Ishmael Reed.

I also recommend:

Night Boat to Tangiers by Kevin Barry

Within the Context of No Context by George W.S. Trow

The Searcher by Tana French

Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willet

The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Lion of Hollywood by Scott Eyman

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zahner

White Noise

                       

Noah Baumbach's White Noise, an adaptation of Don DeLillo's novel, is an example of two great tastes not tasting great together. Baumbach and DeLillo share an East Coast elitist's satiric sting, but Baumbach cannot conjure the writer's horrific alienation and anomie. Baumbach is too much of a mensch, his forte is bourgeoise New York Jewish humor not the hallucinatory horror which is a major aspect of DeLillo's work. A pertinent comparison would be David Cronenberg's film of DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis which better captures DeLillo's dark hues. 

A white elephant, a kluge, White Noise is, at least, an interesting failure. There are too many good actors in the picture for it to be devoid of interesting scenes. I enjoyed the contributions of Adam Driver, Raffey Cassidy, Sam Nivola (eerily channeling Jesse Eisenberg), Don Cheadle, and Lars Eidinger. The musical score by Danny Elfman and the production design by Jess Gonchor almost hold together a film that lurches from one important theme to another without establishing a consistent tone or vision. DeLillo's multiple themes, which include but are not limited to consumerism, environmentalism, drug abuse, crowd psychology and a critique of the fecklessness of academia, would seem better suited to the mini-series format. 

I was surprised by how much I disliked Greta Gerwig's performance. Her character needs to evince a sense of inner torment and depression. Instead, we get a glazed sadness. White Noise seems to function more as Marriage Story 2 than an adaptation of DeLillo. Baumbach has never been a vigorous visual stylist, but the demands of this project seems beyond him. This is particularly evident in the crowd scenes at the Boy Scouts' camp. Bill Camp's rant, in particularly, is ill-served by Baumbach's seasick mise-en-scene. 

The events pictured in White Noise should verge on horrifying. Instead, in Baumbach's film, they are kooky or mildly unpleasant. Only the last musical sequence shows what might have been, but ultimately, Baumbach is too tasteful for the material.

The Amusement Park

Lincoln Maazel is besieged in The Amusement Park

George Romero's The Amusement Park, filmed in 1973 and then little seen over the years, has been hailed as a lost masterpiece in some quarters; a judgement I find befuddling. The film was shot in three days with a budget of $35,000 financed largely by the Lutheran Council of Western Pennsylvania. The Council must have been attracted by the anti-ageism message of Walton Cook's script, but it is an awfully flimsy basis for a 54 minute film. The film uses an old man's nightmarish visit to West View Amusement Park as a springboard to decry various American ills and isms. It is not a bad fit for Romero critical vision of America, but the end result is as shambolic as the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

Lincoln Maazel, a mainstay of Pittsburgh theater and father of the noted conductor Lorin Maazel, does his best as the besieged elder. However, the net effect is that of a pretentious student film, well-meaning but ramshackle. Maazel would go on to appear in Romero's Martin, a much more effective vehicle for both their talents.