| This week's Tribune reviews : 'The Mist' [7/10], 'The Visitor' [7/10]', 'Chop Suey' (2001) [6/10] |
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| Friday, 04 July 2008 | |
 ------------------------------------------------------ The Visitor USA 2007 Starring : Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman Director : Thomas McCarthy ------------------------------------------------------ The Mist USA 2007 Starring : Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden Director : Frank Darabont ------------------------------------------------------ Chop Suey USA 2001 Documentary with : Peter Johnson, Frances Faye Director : Bruce Weber ------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------ SYDNEY Pollack may no longer be with us, his spirit persists in movies such as The Visitor, the deftly-told tale of a cold-fish academic discovering harsh realities of America's post-9/11 domestic policy. Geoffrey MacNab's Independent obituary for Pollack characterised the film-maker as "a liberal humanist: a director who specialised in intelligent, well-crafted mainstream movies which were not ashamed to trade in emotion but often also had a political edge." He might well have been talking about The Visitor, which proved one of the major word-of-mouth successes at last month's Edinburgh Film Festival. Audiences proved particularly receptive to the central performance by Richard Jenkins - long a veteran of supporting roles, and now enjoying a rare, decidedly belated, eminently welcome spell in centre-stage. The Visitor, in which he achieves the kind of impeccably-observed work which yields Oscar nominations, is likely to deal a further blow to his carefully-maintained anonymity. He's a slow-burning delight as Walter Vale, a sixtyish economics professor who - via a series of credibility-straining circumstances - befriends a young Syrian percussionist, Tarek (Sleiman). When arrested after a minor subway misunderstanding, illegal-immigant Tarek is taken to a detention-centre and threatened with deportation. Something of an emotional dead-zone since the death of his wife some years before, Walter is energised by the outrage he feels at Tarek's case and devotes his energies to his solving his pal's predicament. The Visitor may not be to everyone's taste - while solidly-crafted and impeccably-intentioned, there's the same kind of middle-of-the-road, safe-hands feel that took some of the edge off McCarthy's BAFTA-winning 2003 debut, The Station Agent. All of the Muslim characters on view are either intelligent, charismatic, beautiful, talented - or some combination of those virtues - and it might have made for better, less manipulative drama had audience-surrogate Walter become involved in a case of rather trickier, messier morality. The film is, however, designed to bring urgent issues to wide audiences - and on such terms, this old-style crowdpleaser must be measured an admirable success. CURRENT American society also comes under scrutiny - via rather different methods - in The Mist, based on Stephen King's superb 1980 novella. It's the third big-screen King adaptation from writer/director Frank Darabont after prison-set duo The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999). And while lacking in penitentiary institutitions, The Mist does trap its characters within a single building: a supermarket which becomes unlikely refuge for local citizens after their town is engulfed by thick, ground-level cloud. This precipitation is visibly a "fog," but is never referred to as such - solely to avoid comparisons with John Carpenter's classic The Fog (also from 1980, as it happens). Carpenter's script originated as a tribute to legendary horror-writer HP Lovecraft, and both King's and Darabont's Mist are also heavily influenced by the author - whose tales revolved around the irruption of hideous monstrosities from alternative dimensions. Here, as in Carpenter's movie, the fog/mist/haar/fret/miasma is itself harmless, but conceals a range of unpleasant beasties: an entire alien ecosystem, in fact, which regards its new human "neighbours" as tasty prey. Neighbourliness, and how communities co-exist, is an underlying theme of the film - which sees the besieged survivors splinter into feuding factions: a hysterical religious group led by Bible-quoting crackpot Mrs Carmody (Harden, suitably barnstorming), and a more 'rational' element which includes commercial-illustrator David Drayton (Jane). It's the latter's quest to protect young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) which provides much of the tale's focus - and produces a stark, intense, unusual denouement which was widely blamed for the picture's disastrous US box-office. Indeed, for a time it looked like the film was heading straight to DVD over here - a harsh fate for a film which ambitiously combines monster-movie pyrotechnics with philosophical disquisitions. The results are uneven - the former aims let down by slightly substandard CGI and TV-style hand-held camerawork, the latter undermined by making Carmody a caricature of misanthrophic fanaticism - but The Mist nevertheless provides more to consider and debate than the vast majority of multiplex fare, while achieving much creepier and nastier moments than the general run of horror product. WE'VE had to wait several months to sample The Mist, but it's taken nearly seven years for audiences to taste Bruce Weber's Chop Suey - apart from one-off screenings in selected arthouses in 2002. It now obtains belated commercial distribution as part of a touring Weber retrospective alongside his best-known picture, Chet Baker profile Let's Get Lost, plus canine chronicle A Letter To True (set for August 1st). Documentary film-making has become a rich-man's personal indulgence for seminal fashion-photographer Weber - who's never going to have the impact in cinema that he has in other media - but Chop Suey is a little more than merely a whimsical trifle. The "film" is free-form scrapbook with two main strands: a portfolio of photospread-type situations ‘starring' high-school-wrestler-turned-male-model Peter Johnson; and a mini-biography of Frances Faye, raucous nightclub pianist-singer of the 50s and 60s, as recalled by her longtime assistant and lover Teri Shepherd. Every few minutes Weber embarks on tangents that feature Robert Mitchum and Dr John, travel-writer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, actor Jan-Michael Vincent, legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, AIDS-victim stylist Don Sterzen (to whom the film is dedicated), uber-surfer Christian Fletcher and his family (who were President Nixon's next-door neighbours in California), and Brazilian jiu-jitsu champ Rickson Gracie. Essentially a gadfly-energetic kind of elaborate home-movie, Chop Suey is nothing if not self-conscious and self-justifying, with a constant stream of epigrams flashing by via text or narration ("the work is the life"). By far the best and most entertaining come from Vreeland - so much so that it's a cause of real regret that Weber never got around to making the aborted film on her (which he mentions in passing) before her death in 1989. The acerbic, unexpectedly earthy grande dame of fashion single-handedly justifies the price of admission as she extols the virtues of skateboarders and eulogises Elizabeth I in a manner that sums up the daft, giddy, intoxicatingly decadent spirit of Chop Suey to a camp T: "She loved flowers, and everything in the palace was alive." Neil Young 24th June, 2008  THE VISITOR : [5/10] : USA 2007 : Thomas McCARTHY : 103 mins (timed) : seen CineWorld cinema, Edinburgh : 21st June 2008 (public show : £6.40 : Edinburgh International Film Festival) THE MIST : [7/10] : US 07 : Frank Darabont : 126m (BBFC timing) : seen CineWorld cinema, Great Park, Birmingham : 7th June 2008 (press show - CinemaDays event) CHOP SUEY : [6/10] : USA 2001 : Bruce WEBER : 98 mins (BBFC timing) : seen Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle : 23rd July 2002 (public show) : original review
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