|
Review:
This film was interesting to me in the technical
way it handles telling three interconnected stories in parallel,
separated in time by decades. Rather than bargain on a conventional
rooting interest in one character, the movie takes the form of a kind of
rondo with variations.
The anchor (and most convincing) third of this
Cantor set is the original story in 1921 (Britain) of Virginia Woolf
(Nicole Kidman), writing her novel Mrs. Dalloway about a woman
giving a party. Her family tells her, “You have two lives, the life you
live and the life you write.” She has hired a typesetter for publishing,
and the typesetter threatens to quit over her typos. The scenes of the
old-fashioned typesetting equipment are quite striking for modern
connoisseurs of desktop and on-demand publishing.
The second story concerns a 50s southern California
housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) who will use the novel to deal
with her own medical and suicidal issues, but live through them. The
third story concerns her little boy who grows up to be a gay man (played
by Ed Harris) and writer who will die in 2001 of AIDS. The depiction of
him as a Person with AIDS is quite graphic: emaciated, mangy chest hair
turned gray, face and body covered with apthous sores and balding legs
invaded by Kaposi’s Sarcoma. Book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl
Streep) wants to give him a party, but the suicide issue will come
first. The scene takes place in the East Village the winter before
9-11.
The screenplay technical transitions and dissolves
from one time period to another are rather simple and direct, without
any need to funnel everything through some kind of omniscient observer.
Another, smaller, trifurcated film with feminist
viewpoint is Personal Velocity,
from United Artists and written and directed by Rebecca Miller. The film
appeared to be shot on DV. Here there is a narrator (John Ventimiglia)
who tells the connected stories of three women sequentially. There is
Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) who has left her husband for a shelter and then
working-class life as a single parent. Then Greta (Parker Posey) is a
New York publishing house editor who deals with issues of fidelity and
sexual attraction. Finally Paula (Fairuza Balk) goes on a journey in the
Catskills with a young hitchhiker. The short stories are miniatures and
episodes that do not come close to answering the questions that they
pose. Remember how we studied short stories in high school English
class? We had to know them in detail for tests. It’s grammar and
literature.
Evening (2007, Focus
/ Hart-Sharp / Bavaria, dir. Lajos Koltai, novel by Susan Minot, 110
min, PG-13, USA/Germany). In Newport, RI, Ann Grant Lord is dying, with
the aid of an evening nurse (Eileen Atkins) and daughters. She recalls a
complicated love affair a half-century before, when she was maid of
honor to a wedding of Lila (now Meryl Streep, who also comes to the
house), and had to deal with the wild likeable but alchohol-prone
brother (Hugh Dancy) who pulls a stunt (jumping off a cliff) only to be
struck by a car. During the incident Ann fell in love with a young
doctor (Patrick Wilson). The complexities of the story get chopped up in
the flashbacks, and the flow is not as clear as in other movies of this
type. At one point, The Great Gatsby is mentioned, but this
retrospective film seems less effective than the more straightforward
classic.
|