BIGGER THAN LIFE     
   "Once in a while, Cortisone can get a little tricky" - sage advice from a medic treating a small-town teacher (James Mason) with the very latest "miracle drug." The good news: he's duly saved from near-certain death. The not so good: his increasing reliance on the substance - of which he obtains additional supplies from a kindly, well-meaning chemist - means he develops delusions of grandeur, then rampant megalomaniac tendencies that threaten his sanity, his community standing and his family.
   Luckily his wife (Barbara Rush) can still see the man she married beneath his newly monstrous, hardline-reactionary personality - in a widescreen, boldly-coloured, extravagantly-scored and engagingly full-blooded melodrama that has the essential lineaments of a mid-fifties science-fiction chiller, but ultimately develops into a tear-jerking paean to patient uxoriousness and wifely fortitude (and works just fine as such, largely thanks to Rush's nuanced portrayal.)
   While it's tempting to interpret Bigger Than Life as a critique of Eisenhower-era dysfunctions, it's explicit that the ills detailed here are primarily the result of physical rather than social factors. That said, one could argue that our bow-tie-sporting hero/villain exacerbates his symptoms through overwork - blithely disregarding class-barriers, he initially supplements his income by working shifts on a taxi-cab switchboard - and that his Cortisone "addiction" is a handy, topical, not-too-controversial stand-in for more commonplace drugs and/or personality-disorders.
   But while the stultifying conformism of the suburban locale is economically sketched as background, the story becomes a portrait of the extreme mental derangement of a specific individual - one whose case is so unusual that it can't really function as a metaphor for wider issues. Moral: 'Do Not Exceed The Stated Dose.'

CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN
   California Company Town presents a haunting but pressingly topical tour around some back-of-beyond, well-rusted corners of the 'Golden State' - the kind of unprepossessing, semi- or entirely-abandoned locations where even documentary film-makers seldom venture to tread - tracing the rise and fall of the industries which formed the "manufactured" landscapes we see today.
   Director Schmitt, who studied under James Benning at California's CalArts, and now teaches at the college alongside her mentor, gives us privileged access to over a dozen carefully-selected sites - old timber-mills, military-bases, and factories - each of them one-time boom-towns, with housing specifically built to house the workers. But when the work dried up, the industries moved on - leaving ghost-towns in their wake.
   Schmitt's subdued narration sounds like the voice-over from a schools' science TV-show or American FM radio: calm, meditative, detached in its apparent neutrality. But listen to what she's actually saying, and there's no mistaking the fierce engagement (with politics, geography, history, economics) on display here. Her choice of the "archaic" 16mm format, which is itself on the verge of becoming obsolete (even Benning has now moved over to digital), meanwhile gives the film an oddly timeless feel, as if the images could have been shot at any point over the past half-century.
   She interpolates tantalising samples of archive materials - include one priceless newsreel, Heritage of Splendor, narrated by Ronald Reagan, presumably some time before he became the state's Governor - which comprise a treasure-trove of boosterism down the decades, a savagely ironic counterpoint to the modern-day detritus of failed enterprises and broken dreams.
   Essentially an illustrated agit-prop lecture about the ills of unfettered, anti-union capitalism - in the ruefully head-shaking, tut-tutting vein of Mike Davis's seminal non-fiction tome City of Quartz - it is also a stately and elegaic critique of how the ownership of land and of the means of production were allowed to fall into some very inappopriate hands indeed.
   With a running sub-theme of religion and misplaced faith, it's a tale of unrealised potential and what might have been, though the visits to each life-is-elsewhere location - heralded by a white-on-black 'chapter' break - are sometimes perhaps a little brief, and we're often left wanting to learn much more about each specific area (especially when the laconic voice-over leaves the images to speak for themselves.)
   While the cumulative tone of this sedately-paced anti-travelogue is inescapably sad, this isn't merely a gloomy, depressing leftist jeremiad: demanding but rewarding, the film discovers destinations that aren't that far off the beaten track (busy highways are often glimpsable in the middle-distance), where Schmitt's camera captures some moments of ephemeral, unlikely beauty amid the wreckage. Her film is punctuated with ironic counterpoints and juxtapositions, underscored with a wry, leavening humour. This includes the very final 'chapter' - whose location won't be revealed in this review as the surprise is part of the effect - and which stands as a deftly persuasive Cassandra-call to those presently employed in the "boom" industries of the early 21st century.

GENOVA
   While he's odds-against to enjoy the kind of worldwide success currently being enjoyed by his near-contemporary Danny Boyle - both are British directors noted for their prolific output, unfussy consistency and occasional collaborations with scriptwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce - Michael Winterbottom has confirmed his position near the front rank of European film-makers over the past half-decade with 9 Songs, A Cock and Bull Story, the unfairly overlooked A Mighty Heart and now Genova.
   None of these are quite at the level of his finest achievement, 24 Hour Party People - which was, not coincidentally, the movie he's spent the longest making - but Winterbottom now has such a fluent command of his medium that he can make unpromising, half-baked material seem fresh and engaging.
   And Genova, in lesser hands, could so easily have fallen very flat - indeed, the somewhat low-key narrative development may well give some impatient viewers a sense of bathos and undernourishment by the time the credits roll. There isn't a great deal "to" this glimpse into the internal dynamics of family life in the aftermath of a shattering trauma - but the picture's expert attention to character, atmosphere and tone is sufficient that the absence of earth-shattering (melo-)drama is perhaps more a strength than a weakness.
   Executed with a beguiling boldness and rapidly-edited vibrancy, and with a particularly inventive approach to music and scoring (pop and classical cuts are deployed to illuminate character as much as establish mood), Genova is very much its own beast, but there are certain discernable influences: there's a touch of Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now in the basic set-up, whereby grieving academic Joe (Colin Firth), widowed by the car-crash death of his wife Marianne (Hope Davis) - after an accident partly caused by his youngest daughter, Mary (Perla Haley-Jardine) - relocates his family to to the old Italian coastal city of Genova.
   There's no mention of the anti-capitalist disturbances - and their brutal suppression - which propelled the city, also known as Genoa (though never referred to as such here), into the world's headlines earlier in the decade, and certain sequences have a travelogue feel, as if Winterbottom was in the pay of the local tourist authorities. But - rather like the Bruges of Martin McDonagh's In Bruges - the film ultimately takes a somewhat ambivalent attitude to its picturesque, historical surroundings, one that may not lead to a new influx of visitors. Because, as Mary and her wilful 17-year-old sister Kelly (Willa Holland) explore their new home, a more sinister vibe starts to intrude - and the city, with its seamy alleyways and dead-ends, often feels as threatening and labyrinthine as Roeg's Venice.
    There are also shades of another film which is often (wrongly) lumped in with the "horror" genre, namely Robert Wise's The Curse of the Cat People from 1944, in which the spectre of a deceased mother returns to keep her lonely offspring company. Here it's impossible to know whether Mary's glimpses of Marianne - in adjoining buildings, on the street, in her own bedroom - are actual hauntings per se or only visualisations of the child's fantasies. But they give an ethereal, intriguingly metaphysical aspect to a film which, by contrast, is consistently convincing at evoking the quotidian realities of the relationships between parents and children and, in particular, between siblings.
   Young Haley-Jardine turns in a fresh, touching performance as the guilt-racked Mary, while Holland displays considerable potential as the hormonal Kelly, who's delighted by the temptations on offer while her father is tied up with work or his own romantic entanglements. On the latter front, Catherine Keener doesn't have a great deal to do as Joe's old college flame, a long-time Genova resident who shows the newcomers the ropes - likewise Davis in her fleeting, enigmatic appearances. In any case, both of them got a trip to Genova out of Genova. And so, in a way, do we.

Neil Young
26th March, 2009

BIGGER THAN LIFE : [7/10] : US 1956 : Nicholas RAY : 95m : seen 14th March, Cubby Broccoli cinema, National Media Museum, Bradford
CALIFORNIA COMPANY TOWN : [7/10] : US 2008 : Lee Anne SCHMITT : 77m : seen 15th March, Cubby Broccoli
GENOVA : [7/10] : UK 2008 : Michael WINTERBOTTOM : 94m : seen 18th March, Pictureville cinema, NMM

all timings from BIFF catalogue
all screenings seen via complimentary tickets, Bradford International Film Festival

Jigsaw Lounge Bradford 2009 index-page

Neil Young has been International Programming Consultant for the Bradford International Film Festival since 2005