Just to Note...

Most bloggers and critics have already done their Best-of-the-Year lists and awards, but there are still far too many acclaimed films I haven't seen for me to make a list now.  I plan to publish my list the week of the Academy Awards, when I will hopefully be more on top of things.

I am also back at school now, so my postings may be more limited than they were over the past couple weeks.  I do have a couple other things half-written that I would like to get out soon, but that will just depend on classes and events.

Review: Melancholia

I suppose I should preface this review by saying I was set up to dislike this movie.  I have never seen another Lars von Trier film, though I think Europa, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Dogville all look interesting and hope to see them at some point.  Pretty much all of my experience with von Trier up to now has been reading about various controversies he’s caused.  Since I enjoy reading things like that and I had little chance of seeing the movie any time soon, I went ahead and read a whole bunch of reviews of Melancholia right off the bat as it premiered at Cannes.  As a result, I mostly knew what was coming and not much in the movie surprised me, and this is certainly a negative factor in my assessment.  So anyone reading this who has yet to see the film, be aware that the rest of this review has SPOILERS, though only a little more than most other reviews have had.

Melancholia opens with a series of dreamlike tableaux, images in super-slow motion of birds falling from the sky, women running in desperation, and finally the Earth crashing into another planet and exploding.  Right there the film lost me.  I had been told that these images were astonishingly beautiful, that they were the best part of the film, that I would be in awe.  Instead, I found that nearly all the images had already been shown in the trailer or had been pictured in the dozens of publicity stills strewn across the internet.  There was nothing new, and in practice the images looked kind of funny--they were so digitally spruced up that they looked completely unreal, almost like a video game.  The whole sequence was scored to Wagner, which just seemed to make it more fake, like a video game trailer striving to be “epic.”  I wanted to like it, I did, but it was all just too grandiose and overblown.  It tried to bludgeon me into submission but I didn’t let it.  (I suppose this resistance may seem weird and idiotic to others who immediately fell under its spell--sort of how I see those critics who laughed at The Tree of Life--so let me say I don’t mean to be insulting to those who found it great.  I just completely disagree with you.)

Incidentally, I have to say that the decision of all the reviewers to say that the movie depicts the end of the world is definitely a spoiler.  The opening and ending sequences of the film are in fact very different from each other, and the beginning, while it is leveling with the audience in a sense (Don’t expect a happy ending here), does not dictate or promise what will happen in the end.  Much of the beginning is in fact a dream sequence--every shot of Kirsten Dunst in a wedding dress certainly is--and some of the other images are slowed down shots from near the end but are not part of the real final sequence.  Even while watching it, actually, I was wondering how Dunst kept switching outfits between shots.  Anyway, the point is: That all could have been a premonition or a vision which was miraculously avoided at the end, but instead all the reviewers assured us the world really did end, thus taking away half the suspense.

Despite all this about having the opening of the movie ruined for me at the beginning, the movie got me back when the real plot kicked in.  I was occasionally alienated and skeptical during the rest of the film, but never so much as at the beginning, and the diametrically opposite reactions of many other viewers I’ve heard from suggests that my reaction should not be taken as common or definitive.  Up to now, I’ve only been giving my subjective reaction to the experience, but I’d like to leave that mostly behind now to focus on the actual film, which I think is, objectively speaking (or as objectively speaking as it’s possible to be with film), severely lacking in many respects.  

After the intro, the first part of the film is labeled "Justine", and concerns the expensive and disastrous wedding reception of Dunst's character at her sister Claire's (Gainsbourg) country club home. This section is by far the most entertaining of the movie, as the reception falls apart from the selfish and ridiculous exploits of the many guests, including and especially the bride.  The whole thing is very much played for comedy, with a core of pain and harsh criticism underneath, and to a significant extent it works.  The guests are all self-centered jerks engaging in outrageous behavior and generally making fools of themselves, and the proceedings move at a fairly quick pace.  It's hard not to enjoy the dozen excellent character actors who embody the various grotesques, but it's also hard to ignore that they all seem to be doing their own shticks in their own separate movies, completely divorced from the other characters around them.  This may be most clearly pointed out by the fact that Justine, Claire, and their estranged father and mother all have different accents.  As such, the proceedings take on a rather strange, dissonant air that keeps things from ever really gelling together as a compelling piece of cinema, but is wacky enough to keep watching without much effort.  If it is intended to be some sort of class criticism though (unclear), it doesn’t succeed.  Some have criticized this half for its pacing and packing far too many breakdowns into one night, but I didn't mind--radically compressing time is a dramatic tradition with far too much history for me to start criticizing movies for it now.  The first section takes place over the course of one night because it makes good dramatic and thematic sense to do so, and realism be darned.

Throughout all this, Justine is gradually revealing how deeply depressed and genuinely screwed up she is, as she sets about passive-aggressively destroying almost every relationship she has, especially her brand new marriage.  While she initially seems a beaming bride, it quickly becomes apparent that this is merely a facade which she can no longer maintain and her desperate lashings out are both cries for help and savage criticisms of the hypocrisy and lies she sees all around her.  Dunst's performance is without doubt the best thing she's ever done, and von Trier clearly knows the feelings and symptoms of depression inside and out, as he has repeatedly spoken out about his own depression.  The helpless rage, the wildly shifting moods, the crumbling facades and desperate search for something to grab hold of and stop the slide all feel pitch-perfect.  Dunst and Gainsbourg are the only performers who seem to be in the same movie together, and the only characters who feel genuine and grounded at all (except for possibly Kiefer Sutherland as Claire's wife, who isn't entirely believable but lots of fun to watch nonetheless). Justine's pain, her heart-wrenching desire for meaning and stability but complete inability to stop herself from ruining it every chance she gets got to me, and there were moments when I really thought the movie was going to go somewhere good.  But von Trier is not content to merely map the contours and crevasses of depression--he wants to externalize it, project it metaphorically onto the entire universe, and then attempt to justify it by portraying it as ultimately the correct, proper, and better-adjusted response to the end of the world.  This results in a strange situation where the film seems both a metaphor for depression and an assertion of the depressive worldview, an uneasy and highly problematic combination.

The second half is entitled "Claire" and focuses on Gainsbourg's character as she takes Justine in to care for her through her debilitating breakdown after the collapse of the marriage.  It is in this half that the strange new planet called “Melancholia” (symbolism alert), only glimpsed ominously during the reception  as an especially bright star, becomes central to the plot as it gets closer and closer on an apparent collision course with Earth.  It is here that Gainsbourg shines.  I think her performance is significantly better than Dunst's, and it is only one in a distinguished career fast becoming legendary. The two play off each other powerfully, the only actors in the film who seem to occupy the same space.  Initially, justine is so incapacitated by depression that she cannot leave her bed without help, but as Melancholia approaches, that changes.  In fact, Justine and Claire begin to subtly shift places--justine becoming more in control, even serene, while claire becomes increasingly frazzled, fearful, and desperate.  At one point, Claire spies Justine lying in the light of the planet at midnight, as if sunning herself, taking in unearthly nutrients.  This half of the film is not funny but slow, drawn-out and ominous.  The only characters are the two sisters, Claire's husband and son, and the butler.  The outside world is blocked out, referenced only by a couple shots of Claire searching the internet for information on Melancholia, unable to believe her husband's overconfident assurances that the planet will pass them by.

Von Trier's aesthetic is a fascinating one here, apparently quite unlike anything he's done before except possibly 2009's Antichrist. He turns the country club and its grounds, which the film never leaves, into an impossibly gorgeous garden of dark greens, murky blues, and sickly shadows, obviously touched up digitally in many shots, but then shoots it with a shaky handheld camera that in the first half threatens to induce nausea at a couple points.  There is a tension here, between the European modernist geometrical precision and references to Last Year at Marienbad on the one hand, and the woozy, you-are-there faux-naturalism of Amerindie mumblecore films and (I'm told) Dogme 95 on the other.  I'm not entirely sure what this tension is supposed to accomplish, but I suppose it induces a greater sense of dread, and it is not uninteresting on its own.  The constant overuse of Wagner becomes tiresome, however--I think it's the only piece played in the whole thing, and the attempts to borrow significance and weight from it grow ponderously obvious.

Von Trier dots the whole thing with references and allusions--for instance, the poster shot of Justine in wedding dress floating on a river recalls both Ophelia and the Lady of Shalott, and the aforementioned Last Year at Marienbad-styled garden.  By far the biggest influence, though, is Andrei Tarkovsky.  In the opening sequence there is a shot of Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow burning, echoed later when Justine opens a book of paintings to leave that one displayed on a shelf, that seems a clear reference to Tarkovsky's Solaris, where the painting is displayed on a space station lit by candlelight.  Bruegel (along with Leonardo) was a major influence on Tarkovsky, and he also re-staged the painting in a real-life tableau in his Mirror, plus making other references elsewhere.  Displaying great works of art in the pages of a book was also a favorite device of his.  Another shot in Melancholia's prologue shows a horse collapsing in slow motion, probably a reference to Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, where a horse rolls in the dirt in slow motion following the opening sequence.  Horses in general were very important to Tarkovsky, as they are here, with Justine's horse Abraham used to communicate the sense of something wrong with creation.  The whole apocalyptic scenario itself, in fact, resembles Tarkovsky's final film, The Sacrifice, where a bourgeois group of people gathered at a country mansion for a birthday party are suddenly confronted by news of the outbreak of nuclear war and the coming destruction of all civilization.  Tarkovsky, however, puts Von Trier to shame in almost every way, the poetry of his images and depth of his thought making him one of the acknowledged geniuses of the cinema.  Of course, the visuals of Melancholia are plenty gorgeous themselves, and the failure to live up to such a master is no shame on its own.  But the fact that von Trier's philosophy and theme is so obviously inferior when he is clearly mounting an homage/response merely highlights the weaknesses.  Where Tarkovsky presented the apocalypse as the challenge of modern man, and offered his protagonist a chance of saving the world by recovering his spirituality and making a sacrificial bargain with God to give up his family, possessions, and even speech, von Trier mocks modern hypocrisies (unconvincingly) and then destroys everything and suggests we ought to be happy about it.  Where Tarkovsky expressed a constant sense of the mystical power of creation and a sense of the Creator which modernity has lost sight of, von Trier's mystical images are reserved for the coming doom: How beautiful death and destruction will be!

This is an adolescent sense of nihilism, one that glories in destruction, despite being glacially paced and couched in the highbrow aesthetic of European arthouse cinema.  While watching I was reminded of The Sunset Limited which I had viewed mere days before.  Cormac McCarthy is often (rather falsely, in my view) labeled a nihilist. Whether he is or not, the character of White in his play clearly expresses the most extreme position of nihilism, one with which very few outside of the suicidally depressed would agree.  Yet he expresses it with great eloquence, in a manner very difficult to dispute.  He speaks of the horrific violence of the world, man's inhumanity to man, the pain invading every aspect of existence, the crushing finitude of man's creations, the inability of man's accomplishments to stave off death.  Von Trier does none of these things.  He does not grapple with the problem of pain but wallows in depression and lazily mocks all attempts at dignity and celebration as hypocritical and meaningless.  He capitulates not to true evils like war and poverty,  but to the most common form of postmodern alienation.  As evidence that the world should be destroyed ("The Earth is evil,” says Justine at one point. "We don’t need to grieve for it.") he offers the pomposity of rich jerks and the mental illness of one girl--not very convincing.

The ultimate problem of the film is its strange solipsism.  It is a grandiose vision of an insular worldview.  It is a film about depression that attempts to map the actual feelings and sensations of being depressed, but in the process it attempts to justify the depressive worldview in a way that is both irresponsible and intellectually vapid.  Justine is depicted as ultimately the correct one, the one who understands what's really going on.  Indeed, she claims to be clairvoyant and the film suggests she is.  When she explains to Claire that the world is evil and ought to be destroyed, she also claims humanity is completely alone in the universe and no one--neither god nor alien--will ever miss them or remember when we're gone.  "I don't think you know that at all," says Claire.  "I know things,” replies Justine.  “678.  The bean lottery [from the reception].  Nobody guessed the amount of beans.  But I know.” She's right.  (Wait a minute--the movie actually wants us to accept this as proof that she's psychic or something?  Not only that she knows the actual number of beans but that Claire remembers what the number was from weeks/months before?  What a ridiculous plot development.  This must be some kind of joke right?). Nevertheless, Justine is clearly depicted as special, unique, mystical, in a way that "normal" Claire never is.  This is problematic because clinical depression is a genuine mental disorder characterized by a disabling low self-esteem and loss of interest in nearly all the elements of life.  It requires therapy, treatment, and even medication because it is not a correct or productive view, but a narrow, destructive, self-centered condition that is incapable of experiencing pleasure or beauty or even genuine empathy.  One might argue that the whole film is happening inside Claire's head, that we are meant to be merely witnessing the worldview of a depressive.  That might distance us from the toxicity of the worldview.  But if this is true, why show a whole half of the film from Claire's point of view? To differentiate between the two responses, it seems clear.  And when the world is ending, it is clear which response comes out on top.  Justine cuts down Claire's suggestion of a dignified glass of wine before the end cruelly and profanely, declaring it “shit.”  It appears the director agrees.  True, Justine does eventually take pity on Claire and her son and help them build a makeshift lean-to, and it is probable that von Trier has more sympathy for Claire than Justine does, but it is still the pity for the ignorant and the weak from those strong and in-the-know.  It is a clinical observation from above on the desperate attempts of ants to escape the burning of a magnifying glass--a magnifying glass wielded by the so-called clinical observer.  For even here it is self-centered:  “I feel everything is worthless, and my misery deserves company.  Anyone who disagrees is a fool.”

Many have compared the film to The Tree of Life.  I  think it’s pretty clear where my sympathies lie.  It does seem almost a response to the hope and faith expressed in Malick’s opus, and the films’ closely following premieres at Cannes last spring.  Where The Tree of Life attempted to situate one man’s life in the midst of all creation and all history and invited its audience to do the same with their own lives, Melancholia tells its audience their hope is in vain and no one in the universe cares.  Malick manages the difficult trick of extreme humility in the face of eternity paired with a powerful faith in the worth of an individual life, while von Trier mocks professions of faith in anything.  Ironically, Malick strikes me as the true realist here, while von Trier projects private feelings onto the universe and calls it clear-eyed fact.

Ultimately, I do not feel the film is insincere, except perhaps in small bits.  That von Trier has actually felt this way and is trying to represent it accurately I have no doubt.  But there is a reason depression is considered a mental illness: it's understanding of the world is false and debilitating.  It does not give one a mystique nor afford one special abilities, and it should not be dignified as a viable viewpoint (much less the correct one).  The film is flawed as drama but it is absolutely wretched as philosophy, lacking anything like a defensible position.  It is not that it purveys nihilism, but that it is such a low-minded nihilism as this.  Some reviewers have written they left the theater feeling strangely uplifted.  I left feeling initially stunned by the final images, but gradually becoming more and more disgusted, and that disgust has not left me since.

Two Recent Movies: Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol

Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol

The plot is ridiculously impossible, the character development is nonexistent, the attempts at emotional connection are so clunky you can hear the impact, and the way everything is related back to the third film is annoyingly convoluted (if ultimately rather clever and satisfying), and yet, for all that, it’s one of the most purely enjoyable popcorn flicks of the year.  Even a nonentity villain and a weaker third-act can’t derail the whole thing. (As for the cast: Renner and Pegg are good, Cruise is Cruise, Paula Patton was lousy, Josh Holloway should have been given a real part.)  The biggest reason for this success is the excellently staged action setpieces, which exhibit the gratifying, all-too rare quality of actual bodies being flung about in actual space, meaning that despite their lunacy the sequences retain a remarkable visceral impact, especially (1)Cruise’s leap from the hospital, (2) his scrabbling up the side of the Burj Khalifa, and (3) his Pixar-esque pinballing fight with the villain in a giant  mechanical carpark.  And of course it’s filled with ridiculously awesome gadgets and that staple of modern action movies, men running/falling/fighting in really, really nice suits.  It reminded me of what Bond movies used to be in the ‘60s.  Count me in for whatever Brad Bird wants to do next.

Rating: 7/10 stars.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Despite the general awfulness of the trailers and posters, this sequel to 2009’s steampunk-actioner Sherlock Holmes is remarkably entertaining and generally improves on the original in almost every way.  It benefits enormously from the addition of Jared Harris as Holmes’ archenemy Professor James Moriarty, a criminal mastermind who probably stands as the first super-villain in fiction, and if I say that the climax of the film takes place at Reichenbach next to a waterfall, then the various Holmes fans out there should be able to figure out where this story is going pretty easily.  In other words, despite the fact that the film is filled with massive explosions every two minutes and moves at an absolutely frenetic pace uncharacteristic of the literary Holmes’ careful deductive skills, this film is far more dependent on Doyle’s original stories than the previous one (including allusions to several other stories and a very brief cameo by the Baker Street Irregulars), and all the better for it.  

Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law again play Holmes and Watson as the original bromance couple, this time upping the ante with several innuendos that include rolling around in sexual positions on the floor of a train and even waltzing together at a diplomatic ball.  Director Guy Ritchie certainly over-does things at times, tossing in random scenes (like a bonfire dance in a gypsy camp) that are completely extraneous to the rest of the plot, and including a couple of overlong action pieces (especially a horrible chase through a snowy forrest peppered by artillery shells) that rely to an ungodly degree on speed-ramping slow-motion as if that would automatically make the sequences cool and exciting.  Nevertheless, I was impressed by how much the movie actually trusts the audience to piece clues together, cycling through montages of items that added up into solutions for Holmes’ brilliant mind with little to no voiceover to explain how they all fit together.  It’s a surprisingly intelligent device for a movie that seems so in love with spectacle, and this willingness to be smarter than it needs to be extends to Holmes’ scenes with Moriarty, where the conversations are laced with subtle jabs, brilliant insights, and cunning stratagems.  The  climax, notably, leaves explosions behind and focuses instead on the two geniuses literally playing chess with each other, a life-and-death game that concludes the only way it ever could.  I’d say this is a worthy addition to the Sherlock-ian film canon.

Rating: 7/10 stars.

Review: The Sunset Limited

The setting: A dingy apartment in a not-particularly nice neighborhood in New York City.  The characters: Two men--one black, one white--with diametrically opposed views on life, sitting at a dinner table.  The plot:  They have an argument.

The Sunset Limited is a film made for HBO, directed by Tommy Lee Jones, and starring Jones and Samuel L. Jackson.  They are the only two people we ever see.  The script is written by Cormac McCarthy, arguably our greatest living writer, adapting his own play.  It is about the fundamental questions of life, of religion, of purpose, and despite never leaving the one-room apartment, it is one of the most thrilling films of the year.

Jones plays a professor (referred to in the credits simply as White) who is suicidally depressed, and indeed has just come from attempting to throw himself in front of a train.  Jackson plays the Bible-thumping ex-con (called Black) who prevented Jones from jumping and has brought him back to his apartment in an attempt to convince him not to do it again.  The two men are as opposite as they can possibly be: pessimist and optimist, atheist and born-again Christian.  One wants to die, the other to live.  Jones is not only an atheist, but a man who sees the entire world as evil worthless, perceiving no meaning or hope anywhere, and wallowing in his despair.  Jackson is not only a believer, but a strongly evangelical one who apparently preaches to just about anyone he meets.  Even the small heresies he admits to--a general disbelief in original sin, and a suggestion of the perfectability of man--emphasize his positive philosophy, differentiating him from fundamentalism or dogmatic Calvinism.  Jackson aims to prove to Jones that life is worth living, that he is loved by God, that the world is a place of beauty that ought to be valued.  You may think the deck is stacked pretty steep in his favor, but in truth the outcome is very much in doubt.  This is the battle for two men’s souls, and there’s no telling who will win.

Some argue that a one-location film like this can never be truly cinematic.  If by “cinematic” you mean wide vistas and lots of movement, that’s true.  But if what you mean is an absorbing film shot with intelligent, elegant use of the camera that  maintains interest and avoids visual fatigue, then this film is most certainly cinematic in the best sense.  It is certainly more cinematic than the similar (and also brilliant) My Dinner With Andre, where things are most chopped up into shot-reverse shots between two men talking at a restaurant.  Here there is more space around the two men, allowing both the camera and the characters more room to move.  The shots can shift from intimate back-and-forths to swooping, spinning movements that heighten the drama and excite the eyes.  (If I’m being perfectly honest, I’ll admit there were one or two shots which seemed awkwardly/distractingly pointed and noticeable, but that’s probably just me because I think about these things.)  The use of color and light is also highly creative, using oranges and shadowed greens to suggest a trashy ghetto but still evoke some beauty and vibrancy.  The soundtrack is filled with offscreen voices and sound effects, constantly emphasizing the world outside and serving to both isolate the characters and situate them in an identifiable location from which they will leave at the end of the night.  This is not Jones’ first time around the block directing, and he demonstrates ample skill in the staging of the whole production.

Nevertheless, this is still a film of a stage play, and the ultimate author has to be Cormac McCarthy.  I have read McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men, and about two thirds of Cites of the Plain.  I plan to have all of the latter, Outer Dark, The Road, and Blood Meridian read by the end of next year.  The Sunset Limited seems to me to be concerned with the ultimate theme of all his work: the problem of evil.  How do we deal with a world so irreparably violent and corrupt?  Each of his characters attempts to deal with this fact in their own way, crafting their own codes and beliefs to protect themselves, but it’s a dangerous world and their codes might not be enough.  I do not know his personal beliefs (he gives few interviews), but it seems like it would be hard to write Sunset Limited if he were not a Christian at some point in his life.  Based on his other writings, I would be very surprised if he still was.

The film is thrilling because it does two things movies rarely do: It tells without showing, forcing us to imagine instead of receiving pictures straight through our eyes, and it features a sustained argument about actual issues, allowing us to evaluate each character’s position on its own merits.  In most films the rule is show, don’t tell, and that is generally a good idea for movies with plot--but a movie featuring only people talking has its own kind of openness, a scope not limited by a budget but as boundless as thought and conversation can be.  Also in most films, arguments are predetermined and short, featuring one character who is absolutely right and another who is stupid for not listening to him.  Or else, the characters argue only about themselves, and what they say reveals psychology and motivation, serving the story but offering allowing the actual substance of the argument to dissipate in favor of character beats.  Even in something like 12 Angry Men the debate is really all about revealing the various hang-ups of the jury members.  Here, the characters’ personalities and back stories are certainly important, but their positions on the issues are even more so, and it’s intellectually stimulating to watch and listen in a way we almost never see.

Jones and Jackson are both among our finest actors, and here they give two of their very best performances, Jackson especially acting with more soul than he has in years.  These characters might have seemed overly schematic on the page, the stereotypes of “Black” being an ex-con who speaks in strong Afro-American dialect and is the more talkative, funny, and spiritual of the two, crushing down the debate and preventing the reader from relating.  On film, though, the two actors bring their characters to life, and the words pour out of their mouths with an enthusiasm and power not often matched.  While they debate, this little room is the center of the world, the only order amidst the chaos.  An epic battle is playing out, and it will determine whether or not the chaos is kept at bay for another hour.


Rating: 9/10 stars.

Review: The Mill and the Cross

Then began I to dream a marvellous dream,
That I was in a wilderness wist I not where.
As I looked to the east right into the sun,
I saw a tower on a toft worthily built;
A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein,
With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight
A fair field full of folk found I in between,
Of all manner of men the rich and the poor,
Working and wandering as the world asketh.

--Piers Plowman by William Langland

This is a difficult film to review.  It is strange and beautiful and unique, but also a little remote and perhaps too subtle for its own good.  It felt, to me, like it could have been a masterpiece and wasn't, but I am not sure that I wouldn't feel different after a second viewing.  I have often found second viewings of films that I find challenging but remote to be far more emotionally involving and satisfying than the first viewing. 


Written by Michael Francis Gibson and co-written and directed by Lech Majewski, The Mill and the Cross is the story of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and his masterpiece, The Way to Calvary.  It is important to get a couple facts straight about this going in, or you will find yourself completely lost.  Bruegel painted in what is now the Netherlands (and was then Flanders) in the 16th century.  At the time of this painting, the Protestant Reformation was still in full swing, and the Low Countries had a reputation for being open. But Philip II, ruler of Spain, the Netherlands, and much more, came to power, and, as defender of the Catholic Church, began harshly cracking down on any reformist preachers and sympathizers.  This inquisition is what the painting is really about, placing the Crucifixion amidst the people and politics of the times, and depicting the soldiers dragging Christ to be crucified as Spanish.  It is unclear whether Bruegel himself was Protestant or Catholic, but he certainly seems to have opposed the Spanish police measures.

The film is not, however, about the making of the painting.  It shows Bruegel (Rutger Hauer) sketching scenes, but it never shows him actually painting.  The process is not what interests the film.  Nor is it a detailed historical portrait of the times and issues involved.  Instead, the film seems to take place inside the painting, telling the stories of ever person pictured over the course of the day the painting depicts.  There are only three speaking parts:  Bruegel, his patron Nicolaes Jonghelnik (Michael York), and Mary the Mother of Christ (Charlotte Rampling).  They first two periodically give speeches about the painting and the political context, while Mary contemplates the approaching death of her son.  While Hauer endows his lines with a certain gravity and wisdom, the other lines mostly come off as stilted and awkward, interesting in the abstract but not dramatically compelling.  Fortunately, the dialogue is very limited.  Outside of the few speaking interludes, it’s practically a silent film.

The film has been rendered in a complex process of live action, green-screening, and CGI backgrounds layered over each other dozens of times to create the texture of the original painting.  Colors pop off the screen, and foreground and background   shift in strange, surreal ways.  It is often astonishingly beautiful, and it looks like no other movie I’ve ever seen.  However, one gets used to the look of thing fairly quickly, and if it had nothing else worth recommending it would be little more than a curiosity.  What matters is how the film juxtaposes art and life, and what this juxtaposition ultimately reveals.  To borrow a term from another internet commenter, there is a diegetic blurriness to the film, meaning it shows both the creation of the painting and the what the canvas depicts at the same time, mirroring and reproducing the way the painting imagines both the death of Christ and the Counter-Reformation crackdown intersecting in the same artistic space.

Over the course of a single day, we see life roll by, as various people arise in the morning, take their wares to market, interact with each other, watch the executions,  and eventually go home.  At the end they join hands in a dance of death that recalls Bergman’s Seventh Seal, though the image is taken from the upper right corner of the painting.  The vertiginous foreshortening of the frame, with an infinite background suddenly made as close as any of the characters, mirrors the radical perspective shifts as the viewer sees first the painting’s creator and then his smallest creations, a shift that also suggests the religious juxtaposition of the mundane and the divine, mortal and immortal.  The wandering lives of the dozens of characters can feel shapeless and test the viewer’s patience, but the philosophical ideas behind it all are highly provocative and affirming.  At one point, Bruegel says that his painting “must be large enough to hold everything,” and that ability to include both the high and the low in his art is dramatized and analyzed here especially.  This quality is a peculiarly medieval trait, despite the fact that Bruegel was a man of the Renaissance/Reformation era.  One can see it in medieval literature like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the mingling of the sacred and profane, or in Piers Plowman, where the narrator can telescope from a view of a tower or a single man, zooming into that object with a word and discovering whole valleys, multitudes, and worlds within.  The film achieves a similar feat by juxtaposing a young peasant couple making love or a peddler dancing and drunkenly leering with a view from above on a mountain that suggests the perspective of God, “the great miller of heaven, grinding out the bread of life.”  This is a rare quality, almost unheard of in today’s art and literature, both hugely ambitious and warmly compassionate to the smallest person and thing.  The only recent film I can think of that attempts something similar is The Tree of Life, but that of course has none of the medieval flavor.

However, as I mentioned the film often feels shapeless and meandering.  It does not demand your emotional involvement, it observes and offers commentary, inviting analysis only if one is willing to put in the effort.  There is complex symbolism bound up in Bruegel’s painting, and if nothing else the film ought to make you appreciate the genius of the artist and his work.  The Way to Calvary encompasses a whole world, suggesting all of life and the Biblical drama of salvation inside its 4 foot by 5 foot frame.  There is the Tree of Life on the left and the Tree of Death on the right, and in between are the humble multitudes going about their business, living and dying in ignorance of the great drama playing out among them.  For in the center of the frame is Christ, one Man among many, but upon whom all else rests.  It is the achievement of the painting--and of all the greatest art, the film suggests--to capture the ultimate truths of life in a single image of such surpassing beauty that the audience is transfixed, made to know something which had heretofore been obscured.  

In the end, perhaps the film can be taken as an illustration W.H. Auden’s famous poem, “Musee des Beaux Arts,” itself concerned with another Bruegel painting:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Merry Christmas!!

Yeah, it hasn't been very exciting around here, and I'm not actually even posting this on Christmas, but here's wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday season!