November Criminals: Lost in Translation from Page to Screen

When a film is produced based a novel, but instead of official key art, there’s just a forlorn looking “soon to be a major motion picture” burst on the cover, you know the poor marketing department had some awkward meetings with sales. That’s the case with Sam Munson’s teen novel, but his publisher probably isn’t missing out on much. Fans of the book are likely to be vocally disappointed in Sacha Gervasi’s adaptation of November Criminals (trailer here), which opens today in New York.

In the book, Addison Schacht is a small-time pot dealer, who enjoys collecting Holocaust jokes, even though he is Jewish. In the film, he is a mopey sad sack, who is still grieving the sudden death of his mother. For kids who hadn’t read Catcher in the Rye, Schacht’s snarky, drug-addled voice really resonated, but it is entirely lost here. At least he still proceeds to investigate the murder of Kevin Broadus, a straight-laced African American classmate, whose death the lazy DC cops just write-off as a gang-related incident. However, as Schacht starts to snoop around, he realizes he maybe didn’t know Broadus as well as he thought he did. Of course, in the book, he would be the first to admit he hardly knew Broadus at all.

If you are going to remove everything edgy and distinctive about a book than why bother? You’re just setting everyone up for fan blowback. Instead, why not write a completely original, bland-as-cardboard screenplay about as shaggy dog high school student solving a friend’s murder? It is particularly disappointing that such an unremarkable time-waster was co-written by Steven Knight, the screenwriter of Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, as well as Locke and Redemption, which he also helmed. Surely, there must be a much more interesting draft sitting neglected on his hard-drive.

Ansel Elgort has been cast in some high-profile YA properties, so the media acts like he is a star, but he can’t prove it in November. Frankly, he seems to have the antidote for charisma. Spending extended time with whiny, grandstanding Schacht just becomes excruciatingly painful. Chloë Grace Moretz shows more signs of life as Phoebe, the platonic pal turned potential romantic interest, but there is not much she can do with the thinly sketched character. She too has been watered down from the source novel, in which she appears as “Digger,” Schacht’s friend-with-benefits. Ironically, the most fully developed performances come from David Strathairn as Schacht’s widowed father and Catherine Keener as Phoebe’s single mom Fiona.

The book uses Schacht’s college admittance essay as the narrative device framing the story, but in the film, he mails off his application in the first scene. Instead, the movie Schacht uses a video diary to express his feelings and establish the exposition, which is a nauseatingly tired cliché, post-Sex, Lies and Videotape. Still, you could argue it perfectly suits such a dull work of mediocrity. Not recommended, November Criminals opens today (12/8) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Louder than Bombs: Trier Directs Huppert, in English

Just like T.E. Lawrence and Buford Pusser before her, it seems cosmically wrong that celebrated war photographer Isabelle Reed died in a motor accident. However, the awkward circumstances surrounding her death are more likely closer to that of Ernest Hemingway. Her widower Gene Reed has tried to shield their youngest, moodiest son from the truth, but an upcoming press tribute is almost certain to broach the inconvenient subject. The father and his two sons will struggle to finally come to terms with her death in Joachim Trier’s first English language feature, Louder than Bombs (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

To mark a round number anniversary of Reed’s passing, her friends and admirers have organized a career retrospective exhibition. To tie-in, her wordsmith partner will write a personal appreciation of her life and work for the Times magazine or something very much like it. He duly warns Gene Reed that he will not duck the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That only gives the long-suffering father a few days to level with the increasingly surly and anti-social Conrad. His grown brother Jonah seems to have dealt with her loss, but that is only a superficial impression. Deep down, the new father is probably the most dysfunctional member of the family.

For an angst-fueled domestic tragedy, a considerable amount of stuff happens in Bombs. Inevitably, it all boils down to life is not fair. As one might expect of the busy narrative, some of it works and some of it does not. Poor Gene Reed serves as the glue holding it all together, constantly sacrificing his subplots for the sake of others. However, Gabriel Byrne plays him with such profound sorrow, he gives the film a deeply humane core.

Of course, Isabelle Huppert outshines everyone as her namesake. She effectively haunts the film, dominating the ensemble despite her limited flashback screen-time. As the not so mature Jonah, Jesse Eisenberg also surprises with the quality of his work and the character flaws he reveals along the way. However, as the Number Two Son, Devin Druid feels like he is doing a third rate riff on Wes Bentley’s brooding teen in American Beauty. Conversely, David Strathairn dramatically elevates the film during his pivotal confrontation with Byrne as his wife’s suspiciously close colleague.

Indeed, the are moments in Bombs that rings with brutal honesty and forgiving compassion, but there is also a good deal of uncomfortable filler. Those messy interludes are rather surprising given the uniformly Spartan elegance of co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt’s directorial debut Blindness, which is sure to appreciate critically even further as time passes. Still, when Bombs connects, it leaves you smarting.

It might be inconsistent and even derivative with respects to Conrad’s resentments and fixations, but when it finishes, you know you have seen a film. Recommended with all its warts and ragged edges for patrons of mature chamber-dramas, Louder than Bombs opens this Friday (4/8) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza.

Hemingway & Gellhorn: Papa Met His Match

Ernest Hemingway deliberately cultivated his notoriously macho image.  Yet, he somehow he found four women willing to marry him at various points of his life.  That was a lot of optimism, on everyone’s part.  Though she had the shortest tenure as a “Mrs. Hemingway,” war correspondent Martha Gellhorn was the most notable.  Matching and at times surpassing his feats of war zone journalistic daring, Gellhorn fired his passion and inspired his professional respect and jealousy.  Their tempestuous relationship is dramatized in Philip Kaufman’s HBO Film Hemingway & Gellhorn (trailer here) now currently airing on the network.

When ambitious young magazine writer Martha Gellhorn first meets the funky, grungy Hemingway in a Key West bar, they can barely resist tearing the clothes off each other.  The fact that he is married hardly matters to either of them.  However, their animal attraction will have to briefly wait until they reunite covering the Spanish Civil War, at the behest of ardent Spanish Republican supporter John Dos Passos.

Working with Dutch Communist documentarian-propagandist Joris Ivens, Hemingway and Dos Passos film The Spanish Earth (with Gellhorn tagging along), for the purpose of rallying American audiences to the Republican cause.  Frankly, it is considerable more compelling to watch their run-and-gun shooting process in H&G than the historical documentary itself.  That adrenaline also fuels the war reporters’ torrid affair.

Just like Hemingway and Gellhorn’s relationship, the film really clicks during their time together in Spain.  Viewers are served a liberal helping of Nationalist atrocities, but the portrayal of the Soviet forces is also refreshingly unvarnished, particularly with respects to fatal purging of heroic Loyalist soldier Paco Zarra, a stand-in for Dos Passos’ doomed friend José Robles.  While the literary power couple is shown fawning over Chou En-lai and sneering at the gauche Chiangs in China, Gellhorn also reports from Finland, unequivocally siding with the Finns against the Soviet invaders.

Unfortunately, the film loses vitality with the aging Hemingway, sliding into the long denouement of his dubious u-boat chasing Cuban years and sad final days in Idaho.  By the time America enters WWII, screenwriters Jerry Stahl and Barbara Turner clearly suggest Gellhorn was more of a man than Hemingway.  Of course, this is a common problem with bio-pics.  To be accurate, they can almost never end with the good stuff.

Regardless of his character arc, Clive Owen totally goes for broke as Hemingway.  One of the few actors working today who can come across as both manly and literate, he bellows and carouses with relish.  It is a larger than life performance, bordering on camp, yet he is still able to convey Hemingway’s inner demons and nagging self-doubts.  He also manages to dial it down periodically for some saucy Tracy-and-Hepburn bantering with Nicole Kidman’s Gellhorn.  Likewise, Kidman is on a very short list of actresses who can play smart, sophisticated, and alluring, simultaneously.  In fact, she could be channeling Hepburn and the Rosalind Russell of His Girl Friday as the fast-talking, khaki-wearing journalist crusading against injustice, which is frankly pretty cool.

In addition to the strong chemistry between the leads, H&G boasts a strong supporting ensemble.  David Strathairn is particularly engaging as the disillusioned idealist, Dos Passos, serving as a subtle corrective to Hemingway’s ethical malleability.  Metallica’s Lars Ulrich adds notable color as Ivens, while Tony Shaloub conveys a sense of both the menace and tragedy of the Stalinist true believer Mikhal Koltsov, who is considered to be the source for the Karkov character in For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Again, the most inspired work comes during or prior to the Spanish Civil War sequences.

Frequently approximating the look of black-and-white news reels and Ivens’ documentary footage, H&G is highly cinematic (getting a vital assist from cinematographer Rogier Stoffers).  Kaufman is a big canvas filmmaker, with sufficient artistic stature to merit a recent MoMA film retrospective—a high honor indeed.  While steamier and gossipier than The Right Stuff, it is downright staid compared to his Henry & June and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 

An appropriately messy film sprawling all over the place, H&G is rather rowdily entertaining, capturing good deal more historical insight than one would expect.  Definitely recommended for those who appreciate the Hemingway oeuvre and persona (as well admirers of Gellhorn or Dos Passos), Hemingway & Gellhorn airs again on HBO June 2^nd, 7^th, 10^th, 11^th, 15^th, and 19^th and on HBO2 on June 4^th, 6^th, 12^th, 17^th, 21^st, 25^th, and 30^th.

Racing Daylight

Racing Daylight
Written and directed by Nicole Quinn
Vanguard Cinema

Sometimes weirdness is hereditary. “There have always been Stokes in Cedarsville,” says Sadie Stokes, but they tended to be crazy, haunted, or both. The Stokes’ dark family history truly haunts the present generation, resulting in a willing journey into madness in Nicole Quinn’s Racing Daylight (trailer here), which releases on DVD this week

The first of Racing’s triptych of stories is that of Sadie’s descent into madness. The end of the Stokes line, Sadie has no identity of her own in Cedarsville. She is either her mother’s daughter or her grandmother’s granddaughter, depending on the generation of the townsperson. She is desperately infatuated with Henry, the handyman and avid reader of Civil War history, but he seems to interpret her extreme shyness as either disinterest or mental derangement. In fact, she is going mad, as she says so herself in her voiceover narration.

Sadie is apparently a dead-ringer for her ancestor Anna, whose spirit is slowly taking possession of her. As small town luck would have it, Henry is also the spitting image of Anna’s true love Harry. As Anna was much bolder in affairs of the heart, Sadie eventually decides to go along for the ride, embracing Anna’s dominant persona.

In the second part of Racing we meet Edmund, Anna’s husband and father to the son she conceived with Harry. Like Sadie, he is also haunted by spirits, including that of a runaway slave he accidentally killed as a teenager, who happens to look exactly like one of Sadie’s few friends in modern day Cedarsville. Since Edmund has long grown accustomed to the silent company of his ghost, it is a sad, pointless haunting. However, when Anna dies and also returns as a spirit, her presence makes it nearly impossible for him to carry on with his life.

The third part is “Henry’s Story,” as he tries to make sense of it all, both past and present. Here, Racing abruptly departs from the serious tone of the first two parts. While apparently addressing the audience directly, Henry makes some shrewd observations as he puts his amateur historian’s instincts to good use. In some cleverly cut sequences, we view scenes from Sadie’s story from his ironic perspective. We also get a wild “punchline” that seems completely out of place with the rest of what preceded it. However, “Henry’s Story” has a go-for-broke spirit that you have to admire.

Racing boasts an interesting cast, including Melissa Leo, recognizable from the show Homicide as Sadie and Anna, as well as the perfectly cast David Strathairn, seen in nearly every John Sayles film in recent years, as Henry and Harry. Unfortunately, the film’s other name actor, the cool Giancarlo Esposito (also of Homicide and films like The Usual Suspects) does not get much to do here beyond looking sad as Edmund’s ghost.

Though entirely written and directed Nicole Quinn, one would think Henry’s installment was produced by an entirely different creative team than first two stories. Even if it is somewhat overwritten and highly uneven, the result is at least memorable. Ultimately, Racing is worth checking out on DVD for a fine performance by Strathairn and a few odd scenes of “well-how-do-you-like-that” bemusement.