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.

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.

The Double: One Jesse Eisenberg Too Many

It was Nabokov’s favorite Dostoevsky work, but he might not have recognized this vaguely British, boldly dystopian adaptation. Simon James is about to meet a new co-worker with a familiar face, who will turn his drab little life upside down in Richard Ayoade’s The Double (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

James is a mousy Winston Smith toiling away in a soul-deadeningly bureaucratic data processing firm. He works like a mule producing mountains of reports, but the boss, Mr. Papadopoulos constantly belittles him, never even properly remembering his name. Simon James initially befriends James Simon, his relentlessly confident doppelganger, even completing his paper-pushing assignments in exchange for advice on wooing Hannah, a pale young woman in the copy department. Even though she lives across the courtyard from his Soviet-style apartment building, she has only the barest awareness of James’ existence.

Naturally, Simon soon starts pursuing him for his own satisfaction, while insidiously undermining James’ already tenuous position with the company. As the put upon James’ Orwellian world becomes increasingly Kafkaesque, he starts to act out of desperation.

For those who were less than charmed by Submarine, Ayoade’s sad-eyed moppet coming-of-age tale, The Double will come as a pleasant shock. Even though it often feels like the unauthorized sequel to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, there is a real vision thing going on here. Specifically, the strategy of recasting Dostoevsky in a dystopian setting is a brilliant way to still connect to the original story’s Russian-ness, while striving for universality. After all, novels like 1984 and We were conceived as Stalinist critiques, which suddenly seems highly relevant again given Putin’s re-commencement of Russian May Day parades.

Similarly, it is nice to see Jesse Eisenberg step outside his sheepish hipster comfort zone to create two very distinctively pathological personas as Simon and James (or vice versa). His two-handed scenes played single-handedly crackle with tension and bite. Mia Wasikowska’s Hannah is rather drearily demure, but at least she is a convincing blank slate for James to project his yearnings upon. In contrast, Wallace Shawn and Kobna Holdbrook-Smith ham it up something fierce as the company president and security guard, but the effect is much more unsettling than funny-ha-ha.

Ayoade and co-adapter Avi Korine have created a rigorously consistent, dark, and dank vision of an analog future that almost was and maybe will be again. Production designer David Crank and his team did incredible work making it all feel (uncomfortably) lived in. It is an admirably disciplined film that never trafficks in empty surrealism merely to score points with cult movie fanatics. Recommended for devotees of literate urban fantasy, The Double opens this Friday (5/9) in New York at the Landmark Sunshine.