Love Lies Bleeding, Co-Starring Ed Harris

1989 was a great year for most Americans. The Berlin Wall came down, we had a president we could respect, and the movies were consistently entertaining. However, Lou is going through some tough times, largely because of her beyond dysfunctional family and its criminal activities. She finally meets someone she really likes, but the stranger has plenty of her own baggage in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

In 1989, the steroid scandals had yet to rock cycling and MLB. Yet, juicing was already a fairly open (if dirty) secret in the bodybuilding world, even in the grubby desert-town gym Lou manages. One day she notices Jackie, a drifter with ambitions of competing in an upcoming women’s contest in Vegas. The attraction is indeed mutual. Unfortunately, Lou introduces Jackie to steroids during their early courtship, which will have dangerous implications when their relationship comes under stress.

Much of that stress will come from Lou’s family, particularly her brother-in-law J.J., who physically and emotionally abuses her sister Beth, and her slimy kingpin father Lou Sr. The old man runs a lot of highly illegal business out of his gun range. Jackie happens to work there as a waitress in the canteen. All that pre-existing family tension will soon boil over, leading to one-darned-thing-after-another, including murder.

There is some deep grunge in Love Lies Bleeding—like Grand Canyon deep. This is sleazy, lurid stuff, just as Glass intended it. However, she takes viewers on a wild third-act flight of fancy that is a bridge too-far-out there. She should have stuck with what was working, because all the needles and grime are massively provocative.

Of course, the great Ed Harris makes a terrific villain, strutting through the picture as Lou Sr. Glass gives him a lot of color, like his massive hair extensions and a weird love of bug-collecting, but Harris plays him with shrewd understatement. As a result, his quiet hardnosed-ness is absolutely magnetic on-screen. Likewise, Dave Franco is exceptionally slimy as the irredeemable, mullet-sporting J.J.

Resistance: Marcel Marceau Defies the German Occupation

During WWII, underground partisans had to keep their mouths shut to be effective, so yes Marcel Marceau was good at it. He already had ambitions to perform on stage, but his underdog humanist empathy compelled him to help guide refugee children to neutral Switzerland. The real-life Marceau’s filmography is a bit spotty (a small part in Barbarella, the only speaking role in Mel Brooks’ Silent Movie), but Jesse Eisenberg does a nice job portraying him in Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Resistance, which releases today on VOD (it would have opened in theaters too, but you know.)

Clearly, Marceau must be talented, because Gen. George S. Patton serves as his opening act in the flashforward prologue. When the proper narrative starts, Marcel Magnel is still working in his observant Jewish father’s Strasbourg butcher shop, but by night he performs Chaplinesque routines for unappreciative night club audiences. His father does not think very much of his performance art either. However, when Magnel agrees to help welcome a busload of newly arrived Jewish orphans to their new chateau sanctuary, he suddenly finds an appreciative audience for is gentle pantomime.

A bond quickly forms between Magnel/Marceau and the kids, which finally impresses his longtime crush, Emma. The local relief organization also starts noticing the supposedly irresponsible Marcel is around much more often than his self-proclaimed activist brother Sigmund. However, as the war starts to turn against free France, all three take leading roles teaching the children survival skills and then join the Resistance together—at the worst possible time. Yet, instead of seeking vengeance, Marceau (the name on his forged papers) prefers to embrace life, by saving as many of the refugee children as he can.

Although Eisenberg performs plenty of bits associated with Marceau and Chaplin, the film never wallows in the sad clown schmaltz of Life is Beautiful or the twee preciousness of Jojo Rabbit. Nobody needs to tell these kids about war or death. They understand just as well as the adults. It also helps that Eisenberg achieves a nice balance for Magnel/Marceau, depicting his artistic sensitivity just as well as his gutsy resolve.

A Crooked Somebody: Maybe it is Better to be an Honest Nobody

Michael Vaughn is a professional psychic. He is also a conman—obviously. The one clearly implies the other. He has been scuffling through crummy commuter hotel gigs. However, he will try to convert a crisis into a blockbuster career break in Trevor White’s A Crooked Somebody (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Vaughn is tired of life on the road with Chelsea, his business partner and shill-of-last-resort. Nevertheless, his act is still good enough to impress Nathan, a violent drifter who still carries the remorse of a decades-old murder. Convinced Vaughn made a connection with his victim, Nathan kidnaps the phony medium with the intent to kill. Instead, Vaughn exploits his guilt, promising he can help bring comfort to his victim’s restless spirit and his now grown daughter, Stacey (who was a major sob-story, back in the day).

Shrewdly, he convinces Nathan to lead him to where the body is buried, so he could “discover” it as part of a media event. He does indeed become a trending topic, but he also attracts the suspicious attention of the local cops. Nathan also starts to doubt his sincerity, while Stacey refuses to participate in the media circus.

Crooked Somebody shares a kinship with Irvin Kershner’s The Flim-Flam Man, because both films explore the ways in which bunco artists often get help from their pigeons to con themselves. They also share small-town-off-the-interstate settings, which are convenient if you might have to leave town in a hurry.

As Vaughn, Rich Sommer is impressively committed, portraying him in just about every way a man can be unpalatable, from smug smarminess to whiny desperation. He certainly makes him quite a piece of work. Joanne Froggatt’s Chelsea is subtly reminiscent of Lizabeth Scott in her hardened noir prime, but without any hanky-panky going on. Yet, the best work comes from Ed Harris and Amy Madigan as Vaughn’s devout parents. Thanks to them and screenwriter Andrew Zilch, the Vaughns are not moralizing caricatures. In fact, their faith and earnestness are ultimately quite beautiful and touching.

Frankly, Crooked Somebody works better as a grifter character study than a caper-con. Zilch’s narrative has a few reversals and betrayals, but it would need more to hang with the Ocean franchise and Mamet’s big con films. However, the characters are consistently intriguing and increasingly compelling as the stakes rise. Mercifully, it also avoids the “hey, maybe he’s suddenly psychic, after all” subplot, like it is the doomsday plague. Recommended as a modern, media-savvy Flim-Flam descendant, A Crooked Somebody opens this Friday (10/5) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Cymbeline: The Bard of Anarchy

Not exactly comedy or tragedy, Cymbeline is considered by many critics Shakespeare’s sly attempt at self-parody. Its only highly quotable line is: “the game is up,” so it is no surprising it is one of the Bard’s least performed plays. Yet, that makes it considerably easier for Michael Almereyda to stage a liberty-taking modernized production. The battle fought by the Celtic British and the forces of Rome becomes a conflict between the British biker gang and the Rome Police Department in Almereyda’s Cymbeline (trailer here), which opens tomorrow in New York.

In many ways, Cymbeline really is a mash-up of Shakespeare’s greatest hits, starting with the star-crossed romance of Imogen and Posthumus Leonatus. Having secretly married, they have already gotten further than most Shakespearean lovers. However, Imogen’s father, Cymbeline the biker king, is less than thrilled when their union is revealed. Since he essentially promised Imogen to step-son Cloten, the loutish offspring of his Lady Macbethish second wife, it is a rather awkward turn of events for him. Fleeing Cymbeline’s wrath, Leonatus takes refuge in Italy (or somewhere more prosaic), where he encounters the Iago-like Iachimo. After listening to Leonatus boast of his wife’s fidelity, Iachimo wagers he can seduce the woman. It is a bet Iachimo will collect through deceit and subterfuge.

There is no avoiding the antiquated vibe of the Iachimo storyline, but Almereyda plays it up big anyway, because the old scoundrel is portrayed by Ethan Hawke. Much more successful is the geopolitical intrigue reconceived as the biker gang’s fraught dealings with the corrupt civic constabulary. Some things are timeless, whereas as other are very much a product of their time and place.

Of course, Ed Harris as a leather jacket wearing biker monarch blasting away with an assault rifle gives Almereyda a solid base to work from. He has the stately presence of a Shakespearean king, while calling back to his early roots in George Romero’s Knightriders. Believe it or not, Milla Jovovich pulls off the Queen’s Machiavellian iciness quite well. Bill Pullman has limited screen time, but he makes a great entrance as the ghost of Leonatus’s father, while John Leguizamo is well cast as Pisanio, the wily servant. Nevertheless, it is Delroy Lindo who steals scene after scene as Cymbeline’s banished former ally.

On the other hand, the younger romantic leads and rivals largely underwhelm. Dakota Johnson is just sort of eh as Imogen. Penn Bagley is a double-eh as Leonatus and Anton Yelchin is a triple-eh as Cloten. Generally speaking, the older and more seasoned the cast member, the better they come across in Almereyda’s Cymbeline.

Once known as Anarchy, the updated Cymbeline openly invites comparison to Sons of Anarchy. It is a strange choice for such a treatment (perhaps Julius Caesar, the grandpappy of all power struggles would have made a better fit), but the greasy roadside settings are considerably more effective than one might expect, giving it a distinctly austere but slightly unreal aesthetic. It is clear why Cymbeline is considered a minor work in the Shakespearean canon, but perhaps the best way to handle it is by thoroughly recontextualizing as Almereyda does. It is an odd little film with a big cast that is rather entertaining, in an idiosyncratic way, despite its ragged edges. Recommended for fans of non-traditional Shakespeare, Cymbeline opens tomorrow in New York at the Quad Cinema.

Weir’s The Way Back

They endured harrowing extremes, including Siberian winters, blistering deserts, and utopian ideologies. In 1940, a Polish POW and six assorted political prisoners walked away from their gulag. Their ultimate destination was India. A harrowing tale of physical and spiritual survival adapted from Slavomir Rawicz’s novelistic memoir, Peter Weir’s The Way Back (trailer here) briefly opens an award qualifying engagement this Wednesday in Los Angeles, in advance of its regular January theatrical run.

1940 was a bad year to be a Pole in Russia. It was also pretty miserable being a Russian in Russia, unless your name was Stalin. Janusz, a Polish Cavalry officer, was fighting the invading Nazis from the West. The Russians invading from the East branded him a spy (using his “contact” with the Germans as a staggeringly hypocritical pretense) and imprisoned him in a Siberian work camp. Here he meets a broad cross-section of Soviet society swept up in Stalin’s purges.

Janusz quickly befriends Khabarov, a Russian actor sentenced for his overly sympathetic portrayal of an aristocrat. He also comes to respect Mr. Smith, an American engineer lured to Russia during the Great Depression with promises of work, but he is instinctively distrustful of Valka, one of the “Urki” (a.k.a. “Thieves By Law”), the career criminals who run the camps at the barracks level. However, they let the thug to join their escape attempt because of the knife he brings to the party. Along the way, they also reluctantly allow a girl to join their ranks: Irena, an orphan of the purges. Though Smith fears she will slow them down, she seems to be the only one able to draw the men out of their prison-hardened shells.

The plan was simple—head towards Lake Baikal with the only rags they had on their backs and then improvise from there. Of course, there were plenty of complications, like food and shelter. It is hard to imagine a more daunting landscape than the one they faced, including the Ghobi desert and the Himalayans. This long trek was not the original idea. Yet, when they realized Mongolia had also succumbed to the ideology of Communism, they had no choice but to press on.

While Way works very well as a man against nature film, it also captures the realities of the Stalinist era quite forthrightly. For instance, we see the abandoned remnants of Buddhist monasteries razed by the Communists, which echoes the experiences of Voss, a Latvian Orthodox priest, whose soul was essentially destroyed along with his church.

With its forbidding vistas and scorching sunlight, Way is a perfect vehicle for director Weir’s visual sensibilities. The audience really does feel like it is seeing remote corners of the globe never previously trodden by human feet. Yet, the film also features some considerable performances. Although Jim Sturgess has appeared in some high profile screen projects in the past, none of his previous work has been of this caliber. It is hard to be the “good guy” among an ensemble cast, but he actually makes Janusz the most memorable of the escapees, effectively establishing the deeper motivations fueling his superhuman drive. Ed Harris is also well cast as Smith, nicely expressing his guilt, resentment, and fundamental decency. Really, nearly the entire cast becomes one with their characters, blending seamlessly into this epic story of average people, except for Colin Farrell, who stands out a bit awkwardly as Valka.

Way might be a story of rugged survival among the elements, but it is really part of a larger man-made tragedy. Weir nicely drives that point home with his evocative final payoff. A finely executed, emotionally engaging human drama absolutely worthy of award consideration, Way begins a highly limited LA run this Wednesday (12/29) at the AMC Covina.

Holland at MoMA: To Kill a Priest

The face of evil is usually all too prosaic. Such is the case in To Kill a Priest, the first of three fruitful collaborations (so far) between the Polish-born director Agnieszka Holland and American actor Ed Harris. Released in 1989, To Kill a Priest (trailer here) is also her most misunderstood film. It is indeed inspired by the assassination of the pro-Solidarity priest Jerzy Popieluszko, who really was kidnapped and murdered by members of the Polish Security Police with the winking approval of their superiors. However, the nature of Holland’s assassin, played by Harris, is often misinterpreted. Screening tomorrow as part of the MoMA’s Holland retrospective, it might be the film in her oeuvre most overdue for a critical re-examination.

Harris’s true-believing Captain Stefan leads the Fourth Division of the secret police charged with monitoring religious activity. His number one target is Father Alek, an earnest young Roman Catholic priest modeled on Popieluszko (and played by a stiffly miscast Christopher Lambert), who openly criticizes Communist oppression from the pulpit. Not taking kindly to such counter-revolutionary sedition, the Captain tries to trump up a criminal case against the Father. Failing that, he obtains tacit permission from his section Colonel to run a black bag operation to solve their problem once and for all.

Much is made of the secret policeman’s love for his family and heartfelt defense of socialist values, as if this ameliorates his guilt for killing Father Alek in cold blood. Yet, such thinking is deeply flawed. Theologically, evil is not considered the opposite of good, but rather its perversion. Harris’s character is evil for choosing ideology over humanity. It is an ideology that compels him to terrorize his own family, painting gallows and nooses on the door of his flat, while blaming neighbors sympathetic to Solidarity. He has deliberately poisoned his family with fear and paranoia, and murdered the innocent, rationalizing his crime as a means to insure: “that my son can grow up to be a good Communist.”

This might be Ed Harris’s best on-screen performance, capturing the nervous energy of a tightly wound, but all too ordinary monster. He is joined by a very talented cast, including Joss Ackland, Tim Roth, Joanne Whalley, Pete Postlethwaite, and David Suchet, many of whom were cast by Holland before there became well-known actors, proving her eye for prospective talent.

Priest is more deliberate than most political thrillers, but more action driven than typical arthouse fare. While the drab look of the film might have been true to the Communist reality, it gets to be a chore on the eyes. Still, Holland infuses many scenes with tremendous power, as when the confirmed atheist Captain teaches his Colonel how to cross himself. Arguably, the sum of Priest’s parts is greater than its whole, but that still offers much for viewers to chew on.

Like her mentor Andrzej Wajda, Holland was forced into a life of exile in the 1980’s. However, in recent years she has remained a world citizen of a filmmaker, directing American, French, and German productions. According to her Q&A with Harris on Wednesday night, her next project will be an HBO pilot about New Orleans musicians returning to the city. As for Harris, his next project will be a Peter Weir adaptation of The Long Walk, Polish Cavalry Officer Slavomir Rawicz’s memoir of his grueling escape from a Soviet Gulag, which would eventually make quite an interesting double feature with Priest. Holland’s first collaboration with the actor screens again this afternoon as her retrospective series continues at MoMA.