Off Book: Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility

Director: Ang Lee

Starring: Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Hugh Grant, Greg Wise

1995

While I know very well that this film is not in 1001 Movies, I love it so dang much that I'm going to go right ahead and review it anyway.  Because it's awesome and it's one of my go-to comfort films.  I've seen it more times than I can count, and I will continue to watch it over and over and over again in the future.

Throwing fuel on the fire of the Jane Austen craze that overtook Hollywood in the mid-nineties is this truly impeccable adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.  I adore Austen, and I adore Austen movies and miniseries, but after a recent rewatch of nearly every Austen film in my library (an undertaking that took several days), I realized just how far above the rest this particular film was.  It has a beauty, a heart, and a lyricism that others lack.  Nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars in its year, it was beaten by Braveheart, a passable but forgettable epic.  Sense and Sensibility, on the other hand, has only grown more beloved over time, at least in the circles I run in.

The classic story focuses on Elinor (Thompson) and Marianne (Winslet) Dashwood, sisters who must relocate to a simple country cottage after their father’s death.  Elinor is sensible and practical, pragmatic in everything, whereas Marianne is a hopeless romantic, determined to fall dreadfully in love.  For Elinor, the shy and composed Edward Ferrars (Grant) catches her eye, while Marianne falls for the dashing and impetuous Mr. Willoughby (Wise), much to the chagrin of Colonel Brandon (Rickman), who is desperately in love with her.  Money and status and scandal put up roadblocks, but our heroines are pure of heart, and true love triumphs in the end.

  

Ang Lee’s gorgeous camerawork combined with Emma Thompson’s Oscar-winning screenplay adaptation bring this 200-year-old tale to life in a vivid, brilliant manner.  Ang Lee paints the film in lush, supple golds and greens, casting his heroines in wonderfully warm candlelight and golden sunsets.  The countryside looks as if it came out of a painting, with rolling green pastures and hills, blue ponds, and low-hanging willows.  When peril begins to loom for our heroines and tragedy seems apt to take over, the color palette changes to a cold, steely blue, with lots of rain and cloud and fog, signifying the change in overall tone.  But Lee brings us back to the warm tones of the opening of the film for its closure, after danger is averted, ending with such a beautiful shot of a country wedding, so golden in its happiness, that it cannot help but bring a smile to the face.

  

Alan Rickman has made a career of playing bad guys.  His looks, his accent, his basso profundo voice all lend themselves to a villain.  How refreshing that he is not one here.  His Colonel Brandon grows increasingly heartsick, increasingly in love with Marianne, but it is his restraint, his sad acceptance of the fact that she loves another, that makes him the most interesting male character in the story.  Ferrars is cute but a bit boring, more interesting in his reflection through Elinor than in himself (perhaps a comment on how far Hugh Grant is in over his head in this film), and Willoughby is simply a plot device to confuse and mislead our heroines, but Brandon is real, Brandon is substantive.  His opening scene as he first hears Marianne is positively hypnotic, and as he falls in love with her in that moment, every single woman watching this film falls in love with him.  Who on earth wouldn’t want a man to look at her the way Brandon gazes longingly at Marianne?  When Marianne is taken ill, his quiet yet desperate plea with Elinor to “give me an occupation or else I shall run mad,” speaks volumes for his quiet love for her.  Thompson, in her screenplay, presents a truly satisfying relationship between Brandon and Elinor.  Elinor clearly understands that Brandon loves her sister but that her sister loves Willoughby, yet she has a feeling that her sister has chosen wrongly.  Elinor and Brandon have a bond, a friendship, that lends a depth to both characters.  Colonel Brandon is one of Austen’s purest, truest heroes, and Rickman gives him such heart, such life, such romanticism, that every time I watch this film, I fall more and more in love with him.

  

Kate Winslet roared onto the Hollywood scene with this role, which she filmed when she was only nineteen years old.  She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role, the first of her six (thus far) Oscar nominations (finally winning in 2009).  She is truly a whirlwind in the role; impetuous, carefree, strong-willed, and impulsive, heedless of society’s strictures on a lady’s behavior.  She is the highest high and the lowest low, flying back and forth between the two as only a teenager could.  Marianne’s ultimate growth is that she learns from her heartbreak, learns to temper her behavior.  She is not domesticated, per se, but after flying too close to the sun, she learns to balance herself, to learn more from her sister.  Winslet pulls off this transformation with utmost believability, and in the years following this film, she has proved, again and again, that she in undoubtedly one of our finest leading ladies of the time.

In contrast to headstrong Marianne, there MUST be a level-headed, careful Elinor, and Emma Thompson is the cautious heart of the film.  Personally, I am much more apt to sympathize with Elinor and her careful repression than Marianne’s recklessness.  I adore Thompson’s portrayal of Elinor, mostly because Thompson is very mindful to show us the cracks in Elinor’s well-studied façade of calm and tranquility at all the right moments.  They are subtle; a sharp intake of breath here, an uncertain word there, but they all combine to convince us that this is a woman very much in love, but disappointed in her love.  One of the most stunning scenes in the entire film, a scene which wrenches my heart every single time, is where Elinor reveals to Marianne that she has known she cannot be with Edward for months, keeping it a secret.  Thompson explodes in her heartbreak at her sister’s shallow condemnation of her lack of emotion.  To me, this scene personifies Elinor, and almost defines the film.

  

The plotline becomes very serious in the second half, as life looks increasingly bleak and sad for our heroines.  The intense drama is satisfactorily eased by light moments of humor, deftly placed to alleviate the encroaching darkness.  Hugh Laurie, a college chum of Emma Thompson’s, is positively scene-stealing as the bored and annoyed Mr. Palmer, a role that only has about a half-dozen lines, yet he makes the most of it.  His silly wife, played by Imelda Staunton, is a fool but lightens the mood as well, and her mother, the loud and unstoppable Mrs. Jennings, is worth a laugh every time she opens her mouth.  

  

At its heart, the relationship of the two sisters is paramount in this story and this film.  Elinor and Marianne may be opposites in terms of their personalities, but they love each other very much and would do anything for each other.  This is a romance, to be sure, but the romances of the film are nothing without the devoted sisters going through life at each other’s sides.  Having a sister myself (Meaghan, this one’s for you), I simply adore the sisters and how much they love each other.  This is an achingly beautiful film that plumbs the emotional depths of Austen.  Without sounding too saccharine, it makes my heart soar to watch this movie, and I find myself alternately moved to tears and smiles.  Because really, who isn’t smiling when Elinor bursts into tears of happiness when she realizes that Edward, feared lost to her forever, loves her after all?

Arbitrary Rating: 10/10.

The Usual Suspects

The Usual Suspects

1995

Director: Bryan Singer

Starring: Gabriel Byrne, Chazz Palminteri, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak

Right around the fifteen year mark is when a film’s worth is most tested.  Has it been remembered?  Do people still watch it?  Do people still talk about it?  No matter how much money it made, no matter how many awards it won, if, fifteen years later, it has been forgotten, the worth of the film is made clear. 

The fact that we’re still watching The Usual Suspects, more so than when it first came out, goes to show that it is just a crazy awesome film.

Customs Agent Kujan (Palminteri) is investigating an explosion at a Los Angeles dock, and there is only one witness, the crippled con man Verbal Kint (Spacey).  Kint’s testimony to Kujan has him telling the agent about the criminal gang run by Dean Keaton (Byrne) getting mixed up with the mysterious and deadly evil criminal mastermind Keyser Soze.  Soze ordered the gang to take over a boat at the dock, but soon, Kint and Kujan start to realize that things aren’t adding up.  Just who is Keyser Soze, and why did he bring these men together?

  

This is quite possibly the ultimate neo-noir.  It has so many thick, rich elements of classic film noir, just updated to appeal to the modern film viewer.  The plot, for one, has all the great elements of the best noirs of the 1940s.  The story is convoluted, with twists and turns and more characters than you can shake a stick at.  Hello!  Have you ever tried to make sense of a plot from a Raymond Chandler film?  Same thing!  Additional criminals are introduced who enter then exit, random cops show up but you don’t really know who they are… it’s all one big thick soup of a story.  Sure makes for one satisfying meal, especially when, after what has to be about my eighth time of really paying attention to the film when watching, the story suddenly made sense.

Apart from the plot, which is beyond gripping (I caught myself holding my breath at least five times when I rewatched it, and believe me, I know what happens by now!), the film borrows additional elements of film noir, making it an automatic love for Siobhan, because Siobhan really can’t get enough of film noir.  The use of the flashback is such a standard in noir: the flawed hero relating his tale of crime is classic.  In The Usual Suspects, not only are there flashbacks, but there are flashbacks within flashbacks, always relating back to the present.  Moreover, The Usual Suspects uses voiceover with the flashback.  By making the voiceover Kint’s conversation with Kujan, Singer manages to slip the voiceover past modern filmgoers who may consider the technique too dated.  Yet it is there nonetheless.  It absolutely reeks of Walter Neff’s confession in Double Indemnity, or Philip Marlowe’s story to the cops in Murder, My Sweet.  

  

This is such a macho film.  There’s only one female character and she is incredibly minor.  Edie Fineran is Dean Keaton’s girlfriend, and supposedly the reason that he’s trying to go straight.  While The Usual Suspects is unlike a noir in that there is no femme fatale to speak of, I will say that it is similar to a noir in that characters speak of love without really feeling it.  Often the femme fatale and the hero have a few conversations about loving each other, but you know that they don’t really mean it.  The hero is attracted to the femme fatale, but he doesn’t love her.  He might be obsessed or fascinated, but it is not love.  While Keaton keeps on protesting that he loves Edie, no one around him really believes him, and given how easily he seems to desert her, even after she tells him that she loves him, you doubt that this relationship is as meaningful as he claims it to be.  When Edie’s life is threatened in order to coerce Keaton into working for Soze, Keaton is coerced, but I doubt it was because of Edie.  Keaton would have been more frightened of a criminal capable of demonstrating such power than he would be of his random lawyer girlfriend getting taken out.

Because the film was made prior to the huge computer explosion of the late nineties, the sets maintain a timeless quality to them due to the lack of dated technology.  There is one instance of a comically large cell phone, but other than that, the police offices seem not so much accurate as ripped straight from the page of a hard-boiled crime drama.  Smoking fills the movie; I can’t count the number of times characters light up.  You don’t see that in modern movies, but it fills the classic film noirs.  

Singer’s direction is, quite frankly, staggering.  It took a director of uncommon confidence to take on this picture as his first major studio-produced film.  Singer had one full-length credit to his name, but it was a small film from a no name studio on a small budget.  I’m impressed that producers would agree to back the film; it goes to show that when Hollywood takes risks, it can still produce phenomenal films.  Singer delights in framing his criminal gang in interesting settings, often showing them standing all in the same frame, more often than not using deep focus to put them all into stark clarity.  

The names in the film are fantastic.  Names in film noir often hold substantial meaning; this film is no exception.  Take Verbal Kint.  The nickname ‘Verbal’ is rather brazenly significant, he being the one who is telling the story and narrating the film; his nickname hints at his personality.  He is a talker, a yarn-spinner, a storyteller.  Additionally, consider the last name ‘Kint.’  It’s related to the German word “kinder,” meaning “child.”  Verbal Kint is often treated as a child, told to stay behind, told he is not ready to deal with the real dangers of the rest of the gang.  He is small and capable of being manipulated.  Keyser Soze, the terrifying unknown criminal gangster, has a first name that sounds just like “Kaiser” or emperor.  He is a man who is in control, who is calling the shots, who is pulling the strings.  Apart from the meaning of the names, listen to them: Verbal Kint, Keyser Soze, Dean Keaton, Kobayashi, Fenster, McManus, Hockney, Agent Kujan.  These are highly unusual names, and they all have a hard edge to them.  Listen to the numerous “K” sounds and “T” sounds.  Hard, flinty, steel-edged names these are.  They paint the characters as beyond reality somehow.  There are no Jones’ or Richardsons’ or Smiths’.  They are most certainly characters, larger than life.

The Usual Suspects floored me when I first watched it as a high school student in the spring of 1996, and it continues to impress me today.  It’s so gratifying to have a film that I loved when I was young continue to enthrall me as a much more experienced film-going adult.  I really don’t think that thrillers get any better than this.  It’s so flinty, so gritty, so perfectly orchestrated, so beautifully executed.  I flat out love this movie.  Love love love.  It’s interesting, it’s thought-provoking, it tells a gripping story, performances are all in tune – it’s a big, big wow.  And it doesn’t get old.  It doesn’t lose its potency with repeated viewings; if anything, it gets better as it ages.  I love this film.  Easily in my top ten favorite films of all time.

Arbitrary rating: A perfect 10/10.

Safe

Safe

1995

Director: Todd Haynes

Starring: Julianne Moore

First things first: massive thanks to Chip of Tips From Chip for supplying me the opportunity to actually watch this film.  Talk about fortuitous timing: the day this was announced as an upcoming Movie of the Week at Squish’s 1001 Movies Blog Club was the same day that I got my flashdrive in the mail from Chip with, amongst other things, this film on it.  So a big yay for that, because otherwise, it would have been much more difficult trying to track this one down.

Second things second: I have a fairly massive girl crush on Julianne Moore.  The woman can do no wrong for me.  I am not one to try to see an entire actor’s filmography, mostly because I know that there tends to be a ton of junk in any actor’s filmography, but Julianne Moore is one for whom I would make an exception.   Even if her movie is crap, her presence alone is enough to make me enjoy it.  Laws of Attraction is proof positive of that.  How on earth she has not yet won an Oscar is completely beyond me.  The fact that she’s “only” been nominated four times is also completely crazy.  At least to me.

Safe, then, is all about Julianne Moore (which is a-okay with me).  Moore plays Carol, a diminutive, sheepish, and insipid affluent suburban housewife in 1987 California.  Carol has unfulfilling sex with her husband (Xander Berkeley), shallow conversations with her friends, and redecorates her house with full-on eighties décor.  Slowly, very slowly, Carol starts to get sick.  It starts with just a general fatigue, but it escalates to respiratory problems and even collapse.  Indignant doctors tell her nothing is actually wrong with her and refer her to a psychiatrist, who is equally unhelpful.  Frustrated, Carol hears of “environmental illness,” where a person becomes allergic to the chemicals associated with modern society, and concludes this is her malady.  When she sees an advertisement for a New Age-esque retreat for people suffering from environmental illness, she decides to join.

Clueless

Clueless
Director: Amy Heckerling
Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Dan Hedaya
1995

Reposting here from my previous site.

Amy Heckerling, the director that brought you the iconic 80s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, turns her ability to examine pop culture on the 1990s. What started as an idea to write a movie about a popular but kinda dumb girl turned into a shockingly well-crafted adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma.

Cher (Silverstone) is the rich popular girl at her posh Beverly Hills high school. She and her friend Dionne (Dash) think they wield more power than they actually do and set about trying to match-make and makeover everyone around them. Of course, though, things get beyond her control and she ultimately realizes she’s, well, clueless.

When Clueless debuted in 1995, it was not advertised as an adaptation of Emma. It was simply another teen movie, and when I saw it in theaters, I only read it as another teen movie. A month or two after it came out, Heckerling was asked in an interview about some distinct similarities between her movie and Austen’s novel, to which she more or less replied, “FINALLY! Someone figured it out!” This film isn’t just loosely based on Emma, however; it IS Emma, just with updated wardrobes. Entire scenes are ripped directly from the text; consider the scene where Tai (Murphy) is alone by herself at the frat party, while Cher is dancing. Josh (Rudd) asks Tai to dance, thus “saving” her. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a loose adaptation – this IS the village dance scene from Emma. Heckerling didn’t even bother to change Mr. Elton’s name; here, his name is just “Elton,” but he’s every bit the pretty boy who considers himself far superior to everyone around him.

I love that this is an obvious adaptation. It somehow lends the film a touch of gravitas, but not too much to bring it down off its cotton candy cloud. Furthermore, the fact that the adaptation is not loose but shockingly spot on is a testament both to Austen’s original story, proving that Emma is timelessm and to Heckerling’s ability to adapt a story to fit a novel time and culture.

Well, Emma may be timeless, but Clueless is very pointedly and deliberately dated. Part of what I enjoy about this movie is its obvious sense of time and place. The film does not attempt to be timeless – it is shamelessly linked to the mid-nineties in Southern California. Right around this time, I was in high school, and to be honest, this is probably a large part of why I like the film as much as I do. It is as if Heckerling took all the most blatant trends from when I was in high school and preserved them on film for me. Of course I remember wearing thigh-highs with skirts! That was, for some bizarre reason, the trend! And the grunge look? Of course! The film is a time capsule of teenaged life in the 1990s. Granted, it was a highly privileged life, but a part of me can relate to these girls.

Alicia Silverstone is so very winning as Cher. Her daft-yet-desperately-wanting-approval popular girl manages to make you grudgingly like her in spite of her wealth and good looks. You know – that girl in high school that you WANTED to hate because she was so perfect, but she was just so damn nice, you couldn’t. I had one of those when I was in school, and I see Silverstone channeling that same character here. Cher’s voiceover is a large part of the reason why the character comes across so appealingly. The narration is highly biased and completely in character; if anything, all of Cher’s mannerisms are amplified inside her head. She is funny and more than a little silly, but what is so important to me, she isn’t mean. Cher doesn’t seek out drama with her friends. She reaches out to the new girl in school, shunned by everyone else, and takes her in. She keeps her father healthy by encouraging him to drink his juice. She sees her single friends and wants to make them happy by setting them up. She makes an effort to see the good in everyone. Frankly, with the overgrowth of bitch-laden reality TV shows (any of the Real Housewives of I-couldn’t-care-less comes immediately to mind), it’s nice to see a movie about a rich girl who is also kind. There is a refreshing lack of cattiness in the character; I respond very well to that.



Paul Rudd as Josh, the Mr. Knightley stand-in, appears here in his first big screen break, looking all young and fresh-faced. Heckerling mentioned that Rudd’s ability to improvise lines in character was much stronger than the other cast members’, and it’s easy to see how he transitioned from a film like this to his work with Judd Apatow. Personally, he plays such a pseudo-prententious yet ultimately appealing character, I remember my fifteen-year-old self had a bit of a crush on Mr. Rudd.

Clueless certainly isn’t Citizen Kane, but it is a very good romantic comedy. The genre of romantic comedy has been systematically run into the ground by Hollywood in the last decade or so, as it has churned out subpar stories with weak females and stereotypical males. Clueless, even for all its silly trends and cotton candy fluff, has a much stronger story than these other Hollywood attempts because it has much stronger source material. I love that it is so heavily taken from Emma; that fact is what elevates Clueless above its counterparts.

Arbitrary Rating: 8.5/10

Zero Kelvin

Zero Kelvin
1995
Director: Hans Petter Moland
Starring: Stellan Skarsgård, Gard B. Eidsvold, Bjørn Sundquist

The Scandinavian countries are lands that teeter on the edge of the world. I shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that the dramas I have seen from these countries are typically powerful psychological battles brought on through isolation and the intensities of nature. Zero Kelvin is a fantastic recent example of this.

Henrik Larsen (Eidsvold) is an aspiring poet slash pornography distributer living comfortably in Oslo in the 1920s. He loves his girlfriend, Gertrude, but she doesn’t want to get married. To get some life experience, he takes a job as a fur trapper in Greenland. There he works in close quarters with scientist Holm (Sundquist) and the main fur trapper Randbæk (Skarsgård). In the remote and vicious country, it’s imperative the men get along in order to ensure their survival, but when cabin fever starts to set in, the mind games really begin.

This is a brutal, brutal film. It’s like a Jack London novel without all the laughs. The setup for the film is minimal at best; Moland wastes little time getting us to Greenland and getting all three of the men together in a small cabin in the middle of nowhere. The environment is bleak and harsh and completely unforgiving. This is the edge of the world, where any dictates of civilized society quickly fall by the wayside, and the brutality of the landscape is mirrored in the brutality with which the men treat one another.