By Dan Cohen, our Santa Monica Reporter
“The Skeleton Twins,” a terrific documentary, and a look back at a “restored” classic.
The first lifelike drama of the fall, “The Skeleton Twins” has opened at one of the local theaters and there hasn’t been a better adult, English language movie since the Oscar nominees finished their theatrical runs late this winter. That’s right, it’s been that bad a year. There were several noteworthy foreign films, numerous compelling documentaries, and a few well-crafted features aimed at teenagers, like “The Fault in Our Stars,” but I can’t recall a single adult drama, either indie or studio, that stayed in my memory beyond the end credits. That may change as the fall ushers in the year’s Oscar hopefuls, but for now we have this small gem.
The “Skeleton Twins,” so nicknamed for costumes they wore as children, played by Kristin Wiig and Bill Hader, are deeply conflicted fraternal twins, the kind of characters the two parodied to great comic effect during their years on “Saturday Night Live.” But while there’s a healthy dose of humor in Craig Johnson and Mark Heyman’s acutely observed script, “The Skeleton Twins” is not a comedy. But it is a pleasure to watch.
The movie opens with the kind of coincidence that only happens in movies, as two, long estranged siblings, one on the east coast, the other on the west, contemplate suicide at the same moment in time, for what turn out to be similar reasons. While the device smacks of convenience, it effectively launches a problematic reunion that acts as a catalyst for an engaging drama. And while the movie tackles their messy lives with sometimes uncomfortable candor, we relax in the presence of two actors who seem to effortlessly inhabit their characters. The two leads are well supported by Luke Wilson and Ty Burr, who bring inspiration and a degree of sympathy to largely unsympathetic roles.
This is Craig Johnson’s second turn as director, but based on the work here, I’m eager to see his first, “True Adolescents,” which escaped me when it came out in 2009. In addition to a sure visual sense he demonstrates a fine sense of pacing. He rarely stays in a scene longer than it takes to make a point and to keep us in suspense as to how events may reverberate in the future. Even when events turn dark, Johnson maintains a light touch. This is harder than it looks; so often directors and writers who take on small scale domestic dramas step down hard on key moments in a misguided attempt to add weight. Not so here.
“The Skeleton Twins” is another in the fairly recent flurry of movies and TV shows where gay characters take their place in the landscape just like everybody else, with little fuss made over their sexual preference. Hader and Wiig seem completely comfortable together, even when their relationship approaches the breaking point. Recommended.
Keep on Keepin’ On
“Keep on Keepin’ On,”
Earlier I mentioned the recent output of notable documentaries. Surely one of the best is “Keep on Keepin’ On,” which is as suspenseful as the best fiction films. It may not play the local multiplex but it will keep you glued to a TV screen when the DVD is released.
The elements are basic, primal, and as old as the idea of storytelling itself: an aging master continues to mentor a protégé through debilitating illness, constant disappointment, and public defeat. In this case, the master is Clark Terry, a ninety year old jazz trumpeter with a virtually unparalleled career as both a performer and a teacher. Terry mentored Miles Davis and Quincy Jones and was the first black player to be recruited by Johnny Carson for the Tonight Show band. He cut hundreds of records in a carreer that goes back almost as far as American jazz itself. The protégé, young and gifted in his own right, idiosyncratic terms, is a blind piano player named Justin Kauflin, who, after a valiant attempt to break into the jazz world in New York, was forced to move back to his family home.
Terry, who suffers from a host of ills, in addition to his age, is 89 when the story begins. And though Terry believes in Kauflin, the music world remains unkind to the young player. Years go by.
Terry’s diabetes worsens while Kauflin, in spite of his talent, flounders. Both, in spite of the odds, remain steadfast.
A first time director, a surfer from Australia, stumbled into this story and stayed with it for years, until it came to a remarkable conclusion. How and why is the substance of a narrative that manages to find its characters’ feelings without using sentimentality as a crutch. Not coincidentally, there’s also a lot of great music.
“The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly,” restored.
The most fun I had at the movies this past summer, and maybe all year, was at a screening of a digital restoration of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Spruced up to look its best on the big screen, and with the addition of 15 minutes or so of footage formerly deleted from the American version, Sergio Leone’s epic take on the American west seems as singular and ambitious as it did more than 40 years ago, when the film was first released.
While the sound is still lacking—it’s still a chore to endure the dubbed soundtrack, despite the fact that Clint Eastwood, the late, great Eli Wallach, and even Lee Van Cleef provided their own voices for the English speaking version—the movie’s blazing colors and massive scope held an almost full house at our local repertory theater in complete thrall for its three hour running time. It was funnier, fresher and more audacious than I remembered and appeared to connect with an eclectic crowd of all ages.
When it first arrived in this country, our critics generally dismissed “The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly” as tedious and overwrought. It was the third in a trilogy of Italian “spaghetti” westerns that featured Clint Eastwood as “the man with no name.” The first in the series, “Fistful of Dollars,” a spin on the Japanese classic, “Yojimbo,” was critically reviled. The second, “For a Few Dollars More,” an original screenplay, was received with a yawn. But world- wide, audiences applauded Leone’s long takes, extreme close ups, and anarchic mood swings. And then there was the fabulous music of Ennio Morricone.
I was a teenager when the film played at an old barn of a theater called The DeMille inmid-town Manhattan. The morning it opened I read the bad review in the New York Times and went in spite of it, thinking that I would leave if it was as bad as the critic said it was. Within minutes of the great opening animation I was smiling. The movie made my day.
I couldn’t tell you exactly where the new footage has been inserted, although the civil war sequence–if not the best of its kind, very nearly that—seemed more expansive than the last time I saw the film, on a DVD, maybe ten years ago. The climactic battle, in which hundreds of men die in the attempt to take control of a useless river crossing, comes across as far more absurd and futile than the protagonists’ obsessively vain search for a dead man’s gold. Leone clearly knew what he was doing when he threw the American Civil War between his characters and their objective.
I don’t know whether this newly digitized release, which runs about 3 hours and 5 minutes is currently available on DVD, but it’s worth looking for, or better yet, seeing at a special screening. Now I’m looking forward to the upcoming release of a fully restored version of “Once Upon a Time in America,” Leone’s epic take on Jewish gangsters in New York.
