By Dan Cohen, our Santa Monica Reporter
The movies were so dismal this spring and summer that the outpouring of quality towards years end came as a shock, and that was true of both domestic and foreign releases. But in the thick of it, as the studios accosted us with “Aloha,” “Ted 2,” “The Fantastic 4,” “Pixels,” –just to name a few– it seemed like the standards of mainstream filmmaking had been all but abandoned, to such an extent that when the moderately amusing Marvel entry, “Ant Man,” opened, it seemed like a revival of classicism. To be sure, there was pleasure to be had from the hokey and energetic “Furious 7,” and the stellar “Mad Max, Fury Road,” but they were exceptions that quickly faded in the wake of the so many bloated duds. Sometime in July, after the comic delight “Me, Earle, and the Dying Girl,” came out and flopped, it seemed like there was no reason to go to movies, much less write about them.
There’s no doubt that a proliferation of good TV series has altered the mass audience perception of theatrical films. It’s become a commonplace that while television currently enjoys a level of quality unlike any in its history the movies are stagnating. While that may be shortsighted, it’s probably true that the output of episodic TV on cable, augmented by shows from Netflix and Amazon, has shifted a certain amount of attention from weekends of movie going to weekends of binge-watching at home.
This is not the right moment to engage in a comparison between the two formats, but it suffices to say they’re as different as prose and poetry. Now, in the midst of the most heated month of awards season, I want to talk about a few films that never found audiences in theaters.
Grandma, with Lily Tomlin in the title role, grossed ten times its $ 600,000 (that’s right, under a million) production cost, but still failed to make enough of an impression for the major awards organizations to recognize its creators, other than Tomlin in the title role. That’s not meant to diminish the movie’s appeal; the script is so knowing, and the playing of a seasoned cast that includes Marcia Gay Harden, Sam Elliot, Laverne Cox, (of “Orange is the New Black”) and the late Elizabeth Pena, is so assured, that they more than compensate for writer/director Paul Wietz’ spotty direction.
The premise is simple. A pregnant teenager, played by the relative newcomer Julia Garner, shows up at her grandmothers’ door in need of $600 for an abortion. Tomlin, an aging poet grieving from a breakup with a much younger woman, wants to help but doesn’t have the cash. So, off they go on to see who among her friends and former lovers is willing to front them the money. You have to grant the movie the questionable premise that Tomlin, who lives in a charming bungalow, is virtually broke, but once you get past that, the story precedes with humor and great sympathy for its characters.
Several scenes are crudely edited, and as a result, lack the kind of moment to moment rhythm that would have made them more affecting. This is a problem you never see in big budgeted productions because there’s always enough footage for editors to cut past problems of pacing and momentum.
My guess is that the shooting schedule was too tight, –how could it have been otherwise on 600K to bring out the absolute best in the material. As a result, a few key moments feel either rushed or awkward. But the script is so strong that its rough edges seem much less important at the films’ conclusion, which remains true to the fabric of its characters.
You might remember Paul Wietz as the co-director of the blockbuster teen comedy “American Pie,” back in 1999. He and his brother, Chris, also collaborated on the hit “About a Boy,” and several smaller films with distinctly American settings and themes. “Grandma” is Wietz at the top of his game as a writer and a canny observer of sexual politics.
Pawn Sacrifice
Unless you play chess or follow the game, you might not have noticed this meticulous telling of the championship playoff that set the Russian master, Boris Spassky against the troubled American wunderkind, Bobby Fischer back in 1972. The movie, a lively recreation of their encounter and the cold war tensions that contributed to its gravity, proves that filmmakers do not require genius to credibly portray it. Credit that to director Ed Zwick, who stepped away from his strong suit–action films with important themes—to craft a compelling narrative about the arcane world of chess masters and their attendants. Steven Knight, who worked with other writers, but finally received credit for the script, somehow imagined his way into the guts of both lead characters, the perplexing Fischer and the fabled Russian master with whom he was obsessed.
The movie belongs to Tobey Maguire, whose unvarnished portrait of Bobby Fischer holds the audience at a distance but sets up the tension between he and Spaasky long before the two actually meet. Because Maguire never mediates Fischer’s mercurial nature, the character remains riveting from his very earliest moments. Liev Schrieber, in the subtler role, plays every scene in Russian and is completely believable. In spite of his rough-hewn looks Schrieber seems to float effortlessly from high profile TV, (“Ray Donovan”) to blockbusters (“X-Men”) to Indies, (“Fading Gigolo”) and has proved himself one of the most versatile actors on the planet.
Although “Pawn Sacrifice,” boasts the trappings of studio production, it never attracted mainstream audiences. I’m sure that the title, which refers to the way Fischer opened his game, failed to register with summer crowds cruising for dinosaurs and superheroes. Had it been released later in the fall, it might have been crowded out by flashier dramas, like “Spotlight” or “The Big Short,” but at least Weitz clever and observant drama would have appeared at a time when people were looking for movies with a little more weight.
Mustang
You haven’t seen “Mustang” on a local screen. Its flavor is as foreign to the multiplex as its setting, a small town in the provincial hinterlands of Turkey. But the characters, five orphaned sisters dealing with adolescence in a repressive, traditional society, speak a universal language.
As it begins, “Mustang” recalls the tone of village comedies from fabled directors like Jiri Menzel, Milos Forman, and their cohorts from middle Europe, who used humor to quietly savage their communist overseers in the 60s and 70s. Of course things have changed over the past 40 years, but first time director Denize Gamez Erguven, who also co-wrote the script, seems to have taken their examples to heart. Without ever pointing a finger directly at religion, she takes off on the collision of the traditional and the secular that brings her protagonists to consciousness.
“Mustang” begins when five orphans become the wards of their provincial aunt and uncle as their spring school term concludes. The moment the two guardians hear that the girls, fully clothed, took a dip on the beach with their male classmates, they confiscate any possessions that seem an affront to traditional values, from cell phones to blue jeans. When the girls slip out of the house at night they construct an iron gate to keep them chaste. The aunt, who has never known anything beyond the small town, is generous in temperament but adamant about the rituals of womanhood, as she knows it. The uncle, mean spirited and darker, is more interested in their young bodies. Soon the girls’ trials move from humorous to harrowing, and coming of age becomes a matter of survival.
The movie is so fluid that the shifts in tone are almost imperceptible. As tension increases we’re never sure if an episode will end in a laugh, outright disaster, or something in between. Each sister, resourceful in her own manner, does her best to keep her spirit strong, but in the end they’re beholden to more than the secular world.
About halfway through “Mustang” I felt the movie become more than the sum of its parts. A few days afterwards, the faces of these young women were still in my conscious. Their story casts a spell not easily broken.
Tangerine
I thought about John Waters as I walked out of this gleeful, micro-budgeted outlier, which follows two transgender hookers as they squabble, hustle, and chatter non-stop through 12 hours on the mean streets of East Hollywood. In particular I thought about what Waters’ films would have looked and sounded like had there been I-phones equipped with wide angle lenses and high fidelity recorders back in the late 60s, when he made his early movies, like “Mondo Trasho,” “Pink Flamingoes” and later, “Female Trouble.” I wondered about that because as I understand it, director Sean Baker, who also directed the interesting indie, “Starlet,” shot “Tangerine” entirely on an I-phone.
Waters, who graced his fringe characters with the same humor and candor, and who attended them relentlessly as they either skirted disaster or wallowed in it, is certainly the reference point for “Tangerine.” It’s interesting to ponder what Waters would have done with todays’ software– that even elementary school kids can master—or how his style would have been impacted by the ability to shoot more digital footage then the vastly more expensive 16-millimeter film that was his only option way back when. But he couldn’t have gotten more animated performances from his cast or written smarter banter than Sean Baker.
The story takes place on Christmas Eve day, when Sin Dee Rella, a transgender street hustler, returns from a short stay in prison only to discover that the man in her life, who also happens to be her pimp, has cheated on her with a real woman. It isn’t long before she and her best friend, Alexandra, set out to find the offenders and exact revenge. Everyone Sin Dee encounters, mainly street people, warns her to steer clear of the kind of drama that just landed her in jail, but that doesn’t keep her from wreaking havoc on everyone from cops to cab drivers to her competition. The result is painfully hilarious.
There was always an element of Schadenfruede, (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others,) in Waters’ early, mad romps through the dilapidated trailer parks and gone-to-seed suburbs of Baltimore. And there’s a little more than a touch of that in the way Baker has captured the crises that break out like acne in every locale, from greasy donut shops to flop-house motels. But the lightning fast story telling, enhanced by the grimy mixture of golden light and air pollution that shrouds east Hollywood, fascinates on several levels.
I’ve never seen Kitana Kiki Rodriquez, (Sin Dee,) or Mya Taylor, (Alexandra) but both bring ferocious energy to their parts. Would it be too much to say that their performances feel lived in? The mix of professionals, like character actor James Ransome, and actual street people range in their ability to deliver their lines. But somehow they all mesh. One unanticipated surprise: the 88-year-old Clu Gulager, a fixture on TV since the 50s, turns up as an old guy named Cherokee. Figure that one out.
“Tangerine” is a truly independent movie, the complete opposite of so much of what passes for indies these days, like the compromised and overly polite transgender weepie, “The Danish Girl.” And though it plays like a series of never ending car crashes, there’s an unalloyed joy if not native to the characters, then to the directors’ enthusiasm for telling their story.
Long gone from theaters, you can catch “Tangerine” on Amazon and soon on DVD. You’ll either turn it off in ten minutes or watch it repeatedly.
