Examined Life
Director: Astra Taylor
The Informant!
Director: Steven Soderbergh
"We-are-two-legged-linguistically-conscious-creatures-born-between-urine-and-faeces-whose-body-will-one-day-be-the-culinary-delight-of-terrestrial-worms! That's us!!" So speaks, or rather raps, Cornel West at the start of Examined Life - and to better capture the breakneck speed of his spiel, the quotation should ideally have been presented unhyphenated, (allthewordsrunningintoeachothersemiintelligibly.)
I was only able to transcribe it verbatim because I watched the film via DVD.
For audiences in cinemas, such as London's ICA (where the film will play from 20th-30th November), without the benefit of "pause" and "rewind" options, much of West's wordsmithery will zap past like so much semi-intelligible verbiage.
However, if they're lucky they can pick up a transcript of the film's text in handy paperback form - Examined Life - Excursions with Contemporary Philosophers, yours for £13.99 - as they exit the building. And Astra Taylor - who "wrote and directed" the film, and edited the book - will be hoping that you may well depart the auditorium hungry for more mental stimulation in written form: Examined Life is one of those rare movies which explicitly positions itself as propaganda for non-cinematic forms of cultural expression.
Her ideal scenario, one suspects, would be for a viewer to dash home and immediately order the best of Plato, Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein from Amazon.
Not that such heavyweights are bandied around that much here. Apart from West, an inveterate name-dropper who apparently can't speak a full sentence without dragging in Christ, Charlie Parker, St Augustine, Martin Luther and/or Proust - the emphasis is on philosophy's practical, everyday applications. Taylor's mission is one of demystification - she's heard admitting the difficulties inherent in "the challenge of making a film about philosophy," and the result grapples, not entirely comfortably, with an in intrinsic existential question of its own: is this, really, a film at all?
There's nothing particularly "cinematic" going on here. Unusual, yes, thought-provoking, of course - but surely much better suited to the small screen (DVD or TV broadcast) than the large. The film is structured principally as a series of ten-minute monologues - bookended by a prologue and coda featuring West in brainstorming overload - in which individuals discuss their specific interests : Peter Singer on Ethics, Kwame Anthony Appiah on Cosmopolitanism, Martha Nussbaum on Justice.
Those "headings", by the way, are from the book rather than the film - all we get in the latter are crisp title-cards featuring the names of the speakers, and it's up to us if we want to know more about who they are and what they do. It's notable that all are English-speakers, shown in a range of urban and semi-urban North American settings - not a single turtle-neck wearing Rive gauche Gauloise-smoker to be seen here. The sole exception is Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian cultural analyst - by far the biggest "star name" on view, who has extensive experience of teaching at American and British universities, and who is here shown discussing 'Ecology' while sifting through London's detritus at a Southwark rubbish-processing plant.
Zizek, who's becoming such a regular feature in non-fiction cinema right now, was the focus of an entire documentary by Taylor in 2005 (simply entitled Zizek!), and Examined Life suggests that she's planning a similar stand-alone on West, who, uniquely, gets three separate bites of the cherry here. A little bit of his vaccinated-with-gramophone-needle intellectual show-offery goes rather a long way, however, and if there's any segment of Examined Life that deserves major expansion it's the one in which Taylor's sister Sunaura, a prominent disabled-rights activist, goes for a "walk" in San Francisco with feminist post-structuralist eminence Judith Butler.
The only segment to feature two protagonists, this late-in-the-day sequence (the book labels it 'Interdependence') manages to explore its concepts in a quiet, enticing manner that gives the viewer plenty to look at and listen to as well as intellectual meat to chew on. Elsewhere, the balance often tips too far towards the latter at the expense of the former - even though Taylor tries to sugar the pill somewhat with her use of punctuating inserts of buzzing city life and low-key instrumental music, the latter often being played, distractingly and superfluously, while the philosophers are spieling away.
From a film overflowing with ideas to one where any kind of inspiration is in disappointingly short supply. The Informant! is a self-consciously larkish adaptation (note that crazy exclamation mark!) of Kurt Eichenwald's book on Mark Whitacre, the biotech scientist who in the early 1990s blew the whistle on the shady practices of his employer. As played by a pudgy, jowly, decidedly de-glamourised Matt Damon, Whitacre comes across as neurotic, delusional Pooter of the modern corporate world. We're privy to his interior monologue, which isn't so much stream of consciousness as stream of conscience, as he negotiates some tricky ethical dilemmas with the eager help of the FBI.
Indeed, the disjoint between what we see and what we hear is the chief gimmick of Scott Z Burns' screenplay - he co-wrote Damon's most recent secret-agent caper The Bourne Ultimatum, and there's a nudge-nudge in-joke when Whitacre suggests he receive the FBI code-name '0014' because he's "twice as smart as 007." Whitacre isn't, we soon realise, quite as clever, or as self-aware, as he would like to think - and nor is the movie, which bumbles along quite agreeably for a time but starts to fall apart when the extent of Whitacre's deceptions and evasions (arising, we're told, from his bipolar mental disorder) becomes fully apparent in the third act.
This kind of material could easily have been played as a topical, serious indictment of corporate turpitude - but director Soderbergh, making copious use of a gratingly over-the-top score from Marvin Hamlisch and revelling in cheesy period detail (ugly hair, even uglier ties), goes to considerable pains to make his picture as lightweight and jaunty as possible. He's aiming for the polar-opposite of, say, Michael Mann's weighty The Insider (both films share a similar basic premise), and much closer to the snazzy, sunlit bounciness of Spielberg's neo-Mitty entertainment Catch Me If You Can - indeed, one critic has called The Informant! the "wacky little brother" of Soderbergh's previous whistleblowing picture, Erin Brockovich.
Though semi-forgotten these days, the latter did at least land Julia Roberts with her Oscar - and it's hard to discern much point in The Informant! apart from to provide Matt Damon (who's perfectly competent in a conspicuously showy role) a chance of his second gold statuette. He's already got one on his side-board for co-writing Good Will Hunting, of course - just a shame that he didn't get more involved on the screenplay side this time around.
 VIENNALE 2009 : FROM THE LAND OF GOLDEN PALMS
A record 94,800 tickets were sold for this year's Viennale - as the Vienna International Film Festival is invariably styled - representing what one official press-release crowingly described as "a considerable increase in the number of visitors."
Because of the crucial need to maintain relationships with sponsors and other funders, European film-festivals invariably trumpet box-office tallies and statistics in their post-mortems. And while it may seem slightly incongruous for an event as relatively august - even highbrow - as the 49-year-old Viennale to make such a big deal of such figures, it actually makes sense so long as the standard of programming remains at a reasonably constant high level.
Even in this culture-saturated city of Mozart, Freud and Harry Lime, it's quite an achievement for a festival whose regular totems include the likes of Jean-Marie Straub, Pedro Costa and Lav Diaz - not exactly household names - to be able to proclaim itself "a great public success" (2009 press-release) or "a festival for the public" (2008).
I didn't hear many, if any, grumblings of dumbing-down from this year's attendees, and the festival - run by Hans Hurch since 1997 - continues to pull off a balancing-act that can appear straightforward but which turns out, in most cases, nightmarishly difficult. Namely, to appeal to Josef/Josefine Publik and to the local, national and international cinephile/cineaste community of critics, film-makers and festival-programmers.
Among those professionals, the "buzz" was consistently enthusiastic. As one acquaintance put it in a post-festival e-mail, "Vienna was an intense and inspiring venue this year - I guess a lot of us are feeling a bit empty and melancholic after having all these wonderful meetings and talks with all the [hardcore cinephiles] that gathered there."
From the array of prints retrieved from the world's celluloid archives (the festival's trump-card has long been its juxtaposition of old and new) my personal big discoveries were the late Filipino legend Lino Brocka's Weighed But Found Wanting (1974) and Jaguar (1979).
The former was Brocka's eighth feature, but he called it his "first novel" - and I did keep thinking of those sprawling nineteenth century fictions of Eliot and Gaskell when watching this humanistic exploration of small-town prejudice. It covers pretty much every stratum of Filipino society while relating a rattlingly melodramatic plot of sexual hypocrisy, abortion, jealousy and young love.
Even better was Jaguar, a focussed, no-frills character-study of a tough-but-sympathetic young security guard who strays into the fringes of the big-city underworld. The story is essentially timeless - with only a couple of tweaks, it could be a John Garfield vehicle of the 40s or a Lucas Black remake for 2011 - but thanks to Brocka it feels utterly of its epoch, as the sound, feel, decor and costumes of disco-era Manila are captured in vivid, pungent detail. This Jaguar really does pretty much leap off the screen, punctuated by set-pieces of crunching violence yet always attuned to nuances of character development and penetrating social critique.
Alongside these still-potent vintage dishes from the Marcos-era Philippines, many of the newer titles might have seemed pallid fare. But I was much taken by The Woman with the 5 Elephants {full review here}, a Swiss-German co-production from director Vadim Jendreyko. Quite conventional in form but fascinating in content, this is the story of Swetlana Geier, an octogenarian Ukrainian who has devoted most of her life to translating Russian classics into German. She's shown returning to Kiev for the first time since 1943 - and the circumstances behind her departure provide the material for a sensitive and intelligent exploration of highly complex moral issues. Though not an obvious box-office sensation on paper, The Woman With the 5 Elephants turned out, most encouragingly, to be one of the word-of-mouth successes of this year's Viennale.
Fiction-wise, two films from France, while far from being the cutting-edge provocations for which the Viennale would like to be known, are worthy of note - not least because the presence of famous (or rather notorious) names at the head of their cast give them a decent chance of UK distribution.
Sarah Leonor's A Real Life is apparently the penultimate big-screen appearance from Guillaume Depardieu, who's popped up in several posthumous releases since his tragically premature death last year (including Edinburgh Film Festival highlight Stella.) This time plays a scruffily feral - but, needless to say, potently charismatic - small-time criminal who becomes romantically involved with a lovelorn, adventure-hungry supply-teacher. Familiar material, but handled with a knowing streak of humour and a particularly imaginative score featuring several old-school American folk anthems - the latter proving ideal, spare accompaniment for a 'love on the run' tale that subtly nods to its many cinematic forebears.
A more unorthodox tale of amour fou is Domain {full review here}, by Austrian-French-Lebanese writer-director Patric Chiha. Primarily a vehicle for Beatrice Dalle - now approaching grande dame sans merci status at 45, more than two decades after Betty Blue - this is a slow-burning, enigmatic drama about a 17-year-old's unhealthily close relationship with his mother's alcoholic, mathematician sister. Travels avec ma tante, if you like - and I did like, though Chiha's teasingly evasive, elliptical storytelling methods won't be to all tastes.
The same may well be true of what was for me the best new feature-length film at this year's festival, Peter Schreiner's superb Totò {full review here}. I suspected as much after seeing his 2007 Bellavista, but this follow-up - another character-study, shot on crisp monochrome video - confirms that while the 52-year-old Vienna-born Schreiner may not currently be among Europe's better-known documentarians, he's clearly one of the most adventurous and talented.
Totò is a documentary of an unusually oblique and challenging kind, following fifty-something long-time Vienna-resident Antonio 'Totò' Cotroneo, as he travels back to his southern-Italian birthplace: Tropea, a bathing-resort in Calabria. Even by the end of this 128-minute film it's still not entirely clear what it is that Totò actually does - is he a composer, conductor, poet, novelist? Or perhaps he's "just" a bloke - the kind of quietly charismatic, rumpled chap one might find in a bar with a glass in one hand and a well-thumbed hardback in the other.
And maybe that's what happened with Schreiner, who seems to have a rare knack for stumbling across unusual, engrossing individuals and then expressing their personality via his austere but utterly compelling film-making aesthetic. Here, disorientingly close close-ups alternate with panoramic vistas of Tropea's seascapes, and interstitial journeys by diurnal foot or nocturnal train. Schreiner patiently accumulates fragments which serve to illuminate both Totò and Tropea, so that by the end one feels intimately acquainted with both - as well as glimpsing those depths which must always lie beyond.
If Schreiner deserves acknowledgement as an established (if not yet sufficiently recognised) master of his medium, the Viennale also showcased a younger countryman who's very much a name to watch. 32-year-old Siegfried A Fruhauf's Palmes d'Or, reportedly made using 800 photographs taken during the Cannes Film Festival, is a six-minute blast of pure and uncompromising punk energy - as brutal and direct as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music in the way it assaults the viewer with too-fast-to-process images and a relentlessly blunderbussing, steamrollering sonic racket.
Perhaps the sole flat-out masterpiece I saw in my ten days in Vienna, Palmes d'Or - nothing if not a "cutting-edge provocation," is a bit like watching every film ever made, simultaneously, and in retrospect it feels like nothing less than the very end of cinema - both its destination/conclusion and its culminating justification. And where better to glimpse the end of that particular journey than the Viennale?
Neil Young
10th November, 2009
written for the 18th November issue of Tribune magazine
general release :
EXAMINED LIFE : [6/10] : Canada 2008 : Astra TAYLOR : 87m (ICA) : seen on DVD in Sunderland, 7th November 2009. [17/28]
THE INFORMANT! : [4/10] : USA 2009 : Steven SODERBERGH : 108m (BBFC) : seen 1st October 2009, Empire cinema, Great Park, Birmingham (press show - 62nd CinemaDays event). [10/28]
Viennale :
WEIGHED BUT FOUND WANTING : [8/10] : Tinimbang ka ngunit kulang : Lino Brocka : Philippines 1974 : 128m : Kunstlerhaus, 26th October : [21/28]
JAGUAR : [8/10] : Lino Brocka : Philippines 1979 : 100m : Gartenbaukino, 27th October : [22/28]
THE WOMAN WITH THE 5 ELEPHANTS : [8/10] : Die Frau mit den 5 Elefanten : Vadim Jendreyko : Switzerland/Germany 2009 : 93m : Metro, 25th October : [21/28]
A REAL LIFE : [7/10] : Au voleur : Sarah Leonor : France 2009 : 95m : Metro, 23rd October : [20/28]
DOMAIN : [7/10] : Domaine : Patric Chiha : France/Austria 2009 : 108m : Gartenbau, 27th October : [18/28]
TOTO : [8/10] : Peter Schreiner : Austria 09 : 128m : Kunstlerhaus, 28th October : [22/28]
Palmes d'Or : [*****/5] : Siegfried A Fruhauf : Austria 09 : 6m : Kunstlerhaus, 28th October : [13/13]
seen in Vienna, Austria at the 2009 Viennale (Vienna International Film Festival). Timings from catalogue unless underlined (= timed.)
full Jigsaw Lounge Viennale 2009 coverage
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