zwirnm Reviews

Children of Men (2006)

High expectations dwindle over the course of the film

[6/10 · 14 July 2007]

Children of Men got a great deal of attention last year for its bleak portrait of a future Britain after a catastrophic epidemic has caused the sterility of every woman on the planet — but the attention was mostly for the political allegories embodied in the plot: roundups of illegal immigrants, refugee camps, a country ruled by the national security state, looming ecological crisis. The fact that the director was Alfonso Cuarón (Y Tu Mamá Tambien, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) brought the film even more attention. But seeing the film left me ultimately frustrated; my expectations were high at the beginning but dwindled over the course of the playing time.

The opening is positively enthralling — horrific, but enthralling. Simply becoming immersed in a society contemplating the future extinction of its species, and the political response to increasing hysteria, pretty much guarantees that you'll be compelled to watch. The story itself fades in comparison, despite strong roles by Clive Owen and Michael Caine. Julianne Moore has a surprising role as a leader in an underground organization that may be a terror group, but may also represent humanity's best hope for survival. The political allegory turns into a run-and-chase film, and then a bloody massacre in a squalid apartment block that looks like a cross between Gaza City and the Brixton of the 1970s. The ultimate scene takes the film in a mystical direction that I found unpersuasive.

Without giving away the plot points, I'll just say that I found the set design, cinematography, and sound direction enthralling (check out the Spanish-language version of "Ruby Tuesday"), but the story left me wanting more.

Art School Confidential (2006)

Zwigoff, Clowes, and great acting - less than the sum of its parts

[4/10 · 14 May 2006]

Considering the sheer firepower involved, it's shocking that Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes' Art School Confidential is so dreadful. The two did stupendous things together on Ghost World, adapted from Clowes' graphic novel, but the same combination somehow just doesn't congeal in Art School.

Max Minghella stars as Jerome, a lonely and sensitive art school student at an urban New York art college. He's got a buddy (Joel Moore) who revels in pointing out the art school stereotyped characters surrounding them, but it's just a copout to point out stereotypes, and then structure the film around the selfsame characters. The film has some great actors -- John Malkovich, Anjelica Huston, Jim Broadbent -- and Sophia Myles is touching as Jerome's love interest, but the whole thing is lost in a dire plot line. Acting is fine, diolog writing is good ... but gah, the plot turns could be forecast fifteen minutes ahead of time, and watching good actors enact those routines just got painful after awhile.

The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam (2005)

Well-meaning and handsome, but too stolid

[6/10 · 2 January 2006]

Omar Khayyam was a Persian astronomer, mathematician, and poet in the 11th Century, famous today for Edward Fitzgerald's 1859 translations of his works into English. The Keeper is a well-meaning and handsome (if a bit stolid, and poorly edited at times) attempt to render his life meaningful today, written by Iranian-American lawyer/filmmaker Kayvan Mashayekh.

To keep things relevant, Mashayekh presents through the eyes of a young Iranian-American boy in Houston (Adam Echahly) who is a descendant of the family who takes it upon himself to "keep" and transmit the story. The title character (Bruno Lastra) is presented in an admirable if a bit sycophantic light, as is his love story with Darya (Marie Espinosa), to whom he composed most of his most famous love poems. The scenes (set in Uzbekistan, with period jaunts elsewhere) are ably filmed and mostly elegant, although the level of the actors' engagement doesn't rise above a slow simmer most of the times. The principal conflict is between Khayyam and lifelong friend Hassan (Christopher Simpson), which Mashayekh hopes to make emblematic of a host of larger conflicts - between science and religion, between universalism and sectarianism, between worldliness and Islamic separatism. It succeeds only in pieces. The editing is also a bit spotty, and at certain points I felt that too much of the story had been cut.

The film is one of those that serves a valuable public function; informing the movie-going world about Khayyam's legacy and the larger history of Islamic science and mathematics is a meaningful one, and I saw a host of Iranian-American families at the screening taking part in their cultural heritage. It doesn't win on purely cinematic terms, but it's an engaging and wholly good-hearted exercise regardless.

Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity (2002)

Sweet, but slight

[5/10 · 28 April 2005]

A sweet but slight portrait of Chinese-Canadian community outside Vancouver, Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity benefits from two wonderful leads — Sandra Oh and Valerie Tian – but comes out a bit short everywhere else. Oh (who is really Korean-Canadian, but who's counting) plays the harried single mother of Mindy (Tian), an adorably geeky twelve year-old. Mindy is desperate to fix her mom up with an eligible bachelor (Russell Yuen) who works with her at a Chinese restaurant, and turns to Chinese traditional medicine and Taoist magic. In the meantime, other members of the community struggle with family strife, economic hardship, and conflicting values. Only the romantic mother-daughter story, and a story about a son who turns to religion rather than working in the family butcher shop, are really interesting. The rest is kind of a muddle — interesting in its way, but failing to contribute to the plot.

Because of Sandra Oh's recent high-profile appearances in Sideways and Grey's Anatomy this might get improved distribution on DVD. I got it through the filmmovement.com series.

OT: Our Town (2002)

Fascinating characters and story, although generic film-making

[7/10 · 28 April 2005]

An interesting documentary that looks at two teachers' attempts to put on a theatrical drama in the context of some of America's most notorious urban poverty, OT: Our Town has a lot of fascinating characters and story, although pretty generic film-making. It's a documentary so it's hard to complain, but in terms of setting up character development, other films (Spellbound, for example) have done better. Director Scott Hamilton Kennedy apparently met Catherine Borok, an English teacher at Compton's Dominguez High School, and fell for her — she's both sexy and smart and committed — and only then decided to make a film about her efforts to direct Thornton Wilder's Our Town as the school's first dramatic presentation in twenty years. As a result, he missed a lot of back story and tries to catch up. The actors in the drama are fascinating - many of them are the school's most dynamic and motivated students, but even they have suffered tremendously from urban poverty, violence, and broken families. Ebony Starr Norwood-Brown, the stage manager in the play, is tremendously charismatic; Archie Posada is a natural comedian. Borok struggles to motivate and direct them all, and by the end of the documentary has successfully held the first dramatic presentation in two decades. In the meantime the director gets in a lot of digs at high school sports, and some funny/sad Waiting for Guffman-like amateur theatre bits.

The DVD adds a lot of value with followup interviews of the students, teachers, etc. The high school has now held sold-out annual plays for the past three years, and many of the actors in the production of Our Town have become highly successful in college or elsewhere. The success of the OT documentary brought Hal Holbrook — the Stage Manager of a 1960-era TV production of Our Town — to meet with many of the students, which is a nice scene in the bonus footage.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Interesting Without Ever Actually Being Good

[3/10 · 16 March 2005]

A tremendous disappointment, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou the most recent Wes Anderson film, falls apart on a host of levels, remaining interesting at times without ever actually being good. You've seen the trailers, so I won't go into the plot, except to wonder why exactly Anderson thought the life of a Cousteau-inspired underwater explorer and filmmaker would make a good backdrop for a musing on fatherhood and mortality. (On the other hand, I couldn't figure out Tannenbaums either, although I loved Rushmore and thought Bottle Rocket was impressive for a first movie.)

I'm increasingly convinced that Anderson wants to tell Important Stories With Morals about families, responsibility, etc. but that the only tools he's ever been able to use are zany characters with idiosyncratic behaviors in peculiar settings. So he has started to misapply the techniques that worked so brilliantly in Rushmore, continually upping the weirdness quotient: first a lonely, manic and desperately romantic kid in a WASPy prep school, then a family of genius misfits, and now a madcap oceanographer and his band of explorers. Unfortunately, he's not figured out where to play up the zaniness, and where to focus on the stories. As a result, Bill Murray - whose work has been simply astonishing in a lot of films - is now getting reduced to a stock character, a washed-up legend who is bitter over the poor decisions made in his life while pining for the glories of his prime. He's good in Life Aquatic but he has too little to work with. Of the Team Zissou squad, Anjelica Houston is touching at times, as is Cate Blanchett as a quietly miserable English journalist. Owen Wilson is -- well, what the hell is he? The issue of his purported parentage is never resolved, although it's strongly implied that he's not Zissou's child after all, but is meant to represent Zissou's urge to serve as a father figure. The hick Air Kentucky get-up and accent are pointless, and go along with the weird CGI fish as Andersonian self-indulgence. And if we don't care about the characters and their relationships with one another, what's the point of all the family moralizing? The rest of the actors in the film - a long list including names like Willem Dafoe, Jeff Goldblum, and Michael Gambon - might just be slumming.

Things that deserve merit in the film, however, are the brilliant set-design to show the interior of the ship, the lovely tropicalía renditions of David Bowie material by actor/singer Seu Jorge, and the clever name of the ship, which is a great pun.

Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel (2004)

Beautiful story, heartbreakingly told, with a few technical weaknesses

[12 January 2005]

Among the most fascinating and ultimately saddest stories in American popular music is the brief life and odd afterlife of Gram Parsons, one-time Byrd, Burrito Brother, quasi-Rolling Stone and inventor of the "cosmic American music" that became alt-country or Americana after his death. Fallen Angel: Gram Parsons, a UK-Germany television production that screened as part of the Portland Reel Music festival, is a feature-length documentary that explores Parsons' life and musical legacy with a host of the musicians and family members who knew him best. Director Gandulf Hennig — a small and hyperactive German — hosted the screening in Portland, and was clearly blown away by an audience queue that extended around the block, forcing a sold-out showing and emergency late-night screening for the remaining audience.

What is clearest about the Parsons documentary is that everyone who knew him realized they were in the presence of genius - a completely self-destructive and obnoxious genius, but genius nonetheless. His most prominent musical partners, including Chris Hillman of the Byrds, Keith Richards of the Stones, and Emmylou Harris, testify so eloquently. But the same self-assured genius made Parsons almost completely unbearable as a musical, romantic, or family partner, and he tore down relationships that could have saved him and enriched music immeasurably, alienating himself from his most dedicated allies. It's also clear that in his abbreviated life, Parsons was able to play key roles in some of the most significant musical transformations of his era - taking the Byrds into proto-country, performing on the bill with the Stones at the disastrous concert at Altamont, bringing Emmylou Harris to national attention, and playing an active role in the rediscovery of American roots and country by the rock audiences of the time. Keef in particular expresses his remorse at playing with Parsons, recognizing his gifts and his talent, and not recognizing how Parsons' own habits and weaknesses were threatening his prospects to continue his musical growth (Mick Jagger, not interviewed here, is depicted as a far more competent professional who tried to encourage Parsons to take his career, health, and family life more seriously).

I was never a huge Parsons fan; my knowledge of his musical legacy comes from the performances by other musicians of his songs. But seeing the old concert footage - from sophisticated live sets to ramshackle house jams - makes it clear that he was a true one-of-a-kind, with a gorgeous voice and spectacular physical beauty, coupled with songwriterly gifts that were just beginning to grow - before alcohol and drugs caused caused his eventual decline and death at the age of only 26.

I'm much less interested in the morbid tale of Parson's afterlife - the theft of his corpse and his partial-cremation in the desert by a road manager. But as Peter Buck of R.E.M. says in the film, that sort of mystery explains a large part of his mystique.

My only complaint about the documentary, which is incredibly detailed, loving, and sympathetic to both Parsons' survivors and his musical colleagues, is that the director puts too much emphasis into talking-head commentary and fails to show any complete performances, or any live footage longer than a minute or so long. Additionally, there were either very few interviews ever recorded with Parsons or Hennig chose not to include them. As a result it's harder to get a sense of how Parsons himself spoke or expressed himself.

Anonymously Yours (2002)

Ambitious, courageous, but not a great film

[7/10 · 15 December 2003]

As a humanitarian exercise, it's hard to imagine a more ambitious and courageous venture than a behind-the-scenes documentary on the women victimized in the Southeast Asian sex trade. It's impossible not to be impressed director's courage in filming women in the repressive state of Burma, and smuggling the film out to be edited and shown to Western audiences. She depicts four young women in detail, allowing them to tell their stories - including rape, violence, abortion and abduction - in their own words, with minimal interruption. The women are in turn calm, animated, spirited, and heartbreakingly, visibly wounded by the abuses they've experienced. One, nicknamed ZuZu, appeared scarcely a teenager but recounter a lifetime of despair, confusion and pain with the mien of an old woman.

The film is an important and impressive one, but had some serious flaws. It's too long for a talking-heads format, and the digital footage - shot surreptitiously under many circumstances - is variable in quality. Because the film jumps back and forth between woman to woman, it's hard to keep the individual stories straight, and a bit more context (on the government, economy, etc.) would have been appreciated.

Still, this is a worthy contribution to the generally woeful state of Western knowledge on the abuses present in the international trade in women.

Bread and Salt (1992)

Klutzily earnest

[6/10 · 13 February 2003]

A klutzily earnest early-1990s documentary on the changes in Russian society around the time of perestroika, Bread and Salt is hosted and narrated by Irina Muravyova, who emigrated to Boston in the middle-1980s and returned in 1991 with scholar Richard Lourie. She marvels at the changes in the society, visits her mother's grave and meets her friends, sees a faith healer outside Moscow and generally just observes. She's a fairly melodramatic host. Lourie is more fun, but we see less of him. The documentary is educational but scarcely riveting.

L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin (2002)

Interesting story, presented somewhat blandly

[6/10 · 19 January 2003]

The unlikely story of a Soviet attempt to create a Jewish homeland in the hinterlands of Asian Russian, near the Chinese border. Interviews (in Russian, Yiddish, and English) with some of the would-be colonists round out a rather bland voiceover by Ron Perlman. Unfortunately, while the stories are individually very interesting, the film lacks resonance and coherence and is somewhat unprofessionally presented. There are about ten things I could suggest to improve the overall quality of the documentary, but a few in short: Tell us the names of people! Let a story emerge, rather than jumping back and forth! Give us more hard facts on current life in the Jewish Autonomous Okrug! Tone down the Soviet era propaganda film/music excerpts!

Anyway, the story of the Jewish Autonomous Okrug is a fascinating one, but the film could have been greatly improved.

Mostly Martha (2001)

Thoughtful, moving, rewarding

[8/10 · 9 November 2002]

A few rhetorical questions:

a. Why are there no great English-language food/romance movies? Whenever you see a movie that truly ravishes you with food preparation and recipes as part of the atmosphere of the movie, it comes from France or Mexico or Hong Kong - or, if it is in English, it's borrowed culturally from another country (e.g. Chocolat, or the Mexican-American adaptation of Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman). I think it's because the English speaking societies of the world have a relatively unsophisticated approach to food preparation and dining, manifest in our great contributions to world culinary arts - fast food and industrial agriculture, plus cooking technologies that take art out of the equation. You can't have a sexy drama set amidst a world of force-fed veal or microwave dinners.

b. Why do we never talk about German comedy? The Germans do have a comedic tradition, but the movies that are released in the US tend to be solemn dramas, violent or shocking action pieces or grim experimental works. On the rare instances that I see a German comedy, I'm always pleasantly surprised, and I have the feeling I'm missing out.

c. Why are European movies so much better than American films at showing sexiness and desirability in 30- or 40-something year-old women? I have a pet theory, that European sensibilities about marriage and commitment are sufficiently different from American norms that there is the expectation that a 35-year old woman may yet be actively and happily single, or perhaps a single mom who isn't stigmatized to feel that she had best find some sucker to marry her and get out of the dating pool.

d. Why isn't jazz used in American soundtracks anymore? In this film set in Germany, the score is assembled by Manfred Eicher (founder of ECM, the acclaimed modern-jazz label), and it's all good. Some nice German lieder, classic vocal jazz, and instrumental pieces by Keith Jarrett and others. We Americans appear to have forgotten jazz as soundtrack music.

In any case, Mostly Martha is a fine little movie set in contemporary Köln, starring Martina Gedeck as the title character. Martha is a neurotic, workaholic chef at a high-end restaurant, whose control freak tendencies keep her at a distance from everyone. When her boss insists that she go to therapy, she replies by preparing recipes for the hapless shrink. Both lonely and a loner (a tricky combination), she throws herself into her work to the point of exhaustion.

Martha's single-minded life is thrown upside down when she suddenly becomes the guardian to her niece Lina (Maxime Foerste). As she struggles to take on this new role, the arrival of a competitor in the form of a brash Italian chef (Sergio Castellitto) threatens her supremacy in the kitchen.

Any viewer of romantic comedies knows where this is going, but I have no complaints about the plot line. The performances were all good; the dialogue is thoughtful; the food looks delicious. It's not a great movie, but it's a good one and would be an admirable effort by any studio.

Paris, Texas (1984)

Individual elements of brilliance, but at the expense of audience engagement

[16 July 2002]

I'm a huge Wim Wenders fan, but for one reason or another I never saw what's

often considered one of his masterpieces (alongside Wings of Desire), Paris,

Texas. On its release this film won a host of awards at Cannes and elsewhere, but I'm not sure that it holds up well. Individual elements are superb: the

cinematography by Robby Müller, the Ry Cooder soundtrack, and the acting of

Harry Dean Stanton and Dean Stockwell, in particular. But the film seems to

overstress its theme of alienation and emotional distance between people, at

the expense of audience engagement in the characters and plot.

The film begins with one of the archetypes of Western themes: A man with no

past, no voice and no obvious explanation stumbles into an isolated hamlet in rural Texas. This turns out to be Travis (Stanton), whose sole possession is a piece of paper with the phone number of his younger brother Walt (Stockwell,

looking quite different than Sam in Quantum Leap) in Los Angeles. As Walt flies out to get him, the mystery of his brother's disappearance and reappearance

becomes the focal point of the movie. The inability of the brothers to

communicate (at first, Travis doesn't speak at all) foreshadows the film's

recurring theme of alienation. During one of a number of long highway sequences (Wender's company is Road Movie Filmproduktions), we get a sense of Walt's

frustration and confusion, which is elaborated upon when we reach LA and meet Hunter, Travis's son.

The time spent on unearthing the dissolution of Travis's early life, including what happened to his wife and son, is painstaking but not intensely engaging on an emotional level. As Travis and Hunter renew their relationship, in search of Travis's long-estranged wife (Nastassja Kinski), the film becomes more

engrossing, culminating in a fascinating and unnervingly filmed sequence in a sleazy sex club that epitomizes Travis's inability to hold a meaningful face to face conversation.

Kissing Jessica Stein (2001)

Charming, crowd-pleasing

[28 June 2002]

Cute with a capital Q, Kissing Jessica Stein tells the tale of lovelorn, neurotic Jewish New Yorker (stop me if you've heard this one before -) Jessica (Jennifer Westfeldt), who is fed up with one awful would-be boyfriend after another. With her desperate-for-grandchildren Jewish mother (Tovah Feldshuh) breathing down her neck at Yom Kippur services (stop me if you've heard this one before -), she is about to give up on dating when a co-worker reads a moving Rainer Maria Rilke quote from the personals ads.

Pity that the ad appears in the "women seeking women" section, and is posted by artsy, promiscuous but mostly heterosexual Helen (Heather Juergen), seeking out some hot girl-on-girl action for herself on a whim.

With this plotline, and the Friends-goes-R-rated comedic approach, this movie could have been a disaster, but all in all it's very entertaining and even

charming. There are stereotypes everywhere you turn (fey, advice-giving gay

male friends; mousey but avidly sexual coworker; slutty and gossippy art

crowd), but it's handled lightly and mostly thoughtfully. Westfeldt and Juergen wrote the script, which was originally an off-Broadway play, and the two have a delightful rapport on screen. Scott Cohen co-stars as Jessica's former boyfriend, and current editor, Josh. He does a fine job. The music, cinematography and

overall tone of the film is lighthearted and crowd-pleasing.

Divided We Fall (2000)

An inquiry into loyalties - personal, familial, and national - during Nazi occupation

[7/10 · 23 April 2002]

A nuanced character drama set during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia,

Divided We Fall is mis-advertised as a Holocaust drama, when in fact it's an

inquiry into loyalties - personal, familial, and national.

Written and directed by Jan Hrebejk, the film explores the relationship between genial, unassuming Jozef (Bolek Polívka), his lovely wife Marie (Anna Sisková), and former colleague turned enthusiastic Nazi collaborator Horst (Jaroslav

Dusek), a German-speaking Sudetenlander. The three live in comfortable

middle-class surroundings, and in a series of perhaps overly confusing quick

cuts from 1937 to '39 to '41 to '43, we see how Jozef and Horst work together for a prosperous Jewish family, the Wieners. These scenes fly by so quickly that it's hard to make sense of their significance, and my girlfriend had to point out one crucial relationship afterward. By the time we reach 1943, the Nazis are in full control of Prague, and Jozef and Marie chafe silently under German rule, while forcing themselves to host Horst during his frequent unannounced visits. This tableau is overturned when the solitary survivor of the Wieners'

deportation sneaks back to his hometown, threatening Jozef and Marie's safety and imperiling them with reprisals for harboring a fugitive Jew.

While the film starts slowly, and perhaps too muddled in the first crucial

scenes, the dramatic intensity picks up during the second hour, with the struggle of Jozef and Marie to protect themselves while behaving decently, with

sometimes horrible personal choices to make. The most fascinating character is Horst, who has suffered his entire life being ridiculed as a German-speaker in Czechoslovakia, and revels in Nazi superiority at last while still proclaiming himself a loyal Czech citizen acting with his country's interests at heart. I found the ending overly sweet, under the circumstances, but it does wrap up all the endings and demonstrates how a simple division of good and evil-doers in a complicated war may not be possible.

Bread and Tulips (2000)

frothy but entertaining (spoilers)

[6/10 · 19 April 2002]

A frothy and unrepentently unrealistic romantic reverie, Pane e Tulipani attempts to take us into the mind of Rosalba (Licia Maglietta), an unsatisfied Roman housewife, harried by her careerist husband and her teenage children. When the package tour that they're taking stops at a bus stop, she drops her wedding ring in the toilet (foreshadowing!) and misses the bus home. Impetuously, she jaunts off to Venice, a city she's never seen, and establishes an identity for herself working at a flower shop, with a new circle of friends including the ancient shopkeeper/political philosopher, an Icelandic restauranteur, and a New Age masseuse. While eking out a hesitant living and prevaricating about returning to her family, she realizes the extent of her yearning for an independent existence. In the meantime, the world's least competent plumber-wanna-be-detective seeks her out on the streets and canals of Venice, on orders of her outraged husband. While the conclusion is naïve and the real-life repercussions would be unsavory, the light-as-air plot and surroundings are continually entertaining, especially the periodic dream sequences that illuminate Rosalba's confused yearnings.

Café au lait (1993)

Enjoyable depiction of multicultural French life

[28 June 1999]

I wanted to make an enthusiastic recommendation for Café Au Lait, otherwise known as Métisse, a 1993 Franco-Belgian production written and directed by Mathieu Kassovitz (who did La Haine (Hate)). Kassovitz mostly explores overlapping ethnic and religious communities in modern France, and in Café Au Lait he throws them all into a very amusing and occasionally serious conflict: Muslim, Jew, Christian, black, white, native-born and immigrant. Lola (played by the adorable Julie Mauduech) is a biracial Christian with two boyfriends, one a slightly thuggish ne'er-do-well hip-hop aficionado from a poor neighborhood (Kassovitz himself, playing the Jew, Félix) and the other a refined, educated diplomat (Hubert Koundé, playing the nominally Muslim Jamal). When Lola is pregnant, she refuses to disclose which one the father is, and it becomes a slightly predictable but very nicely executed relationship comedy. Particularly good are the illustrations of contemporary French life that don't usually appear on screen.

Pretty in Pink (1986)

Not as good as you remember it being

[1 June 1999]

Pretty in Pink (1986), starring Molly Ringwald, Jon Cryer, James Spader, Harry Dean Stanton, and Andrew Dice Clay (well, not really, but he does have a small role). This is 1980s teen movie heaven, with Molly Ringwald and John Hughes. I'm still mystified by the appeal of John Hughes movies - having never seen them when they were released, they all seem so bad now. It's a mediocre plot with cookie-cutout characters, and the high school setting seems to have been created by someone oblivious to how high school students actually look, act, or talk. I was in junior high when this thing came out, and to the best of my knowledge no one ever dressed like the supposed kids (all of whom look around 24 or older) in this school. There are some nice bits - I like Annie Potts as Ringwald's boss/older friend, Molly Ringwald is as adorable as ever, Jon Cryer is alright, and Gina Gershon (recently in the very cool lesbian gangster film Bound) has a small part - but I still don't understand the supposed long-term appeal of this film. "Cult favorite"? Seems just like a forgettable, mildly diverting bit of fluff.

The Name of the Rose (1986)

Well executed adaptation of the Eco novel

[1 June 1999]

The Name of the Rose (1988), starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater (IMDB reference) - Umberto Eco is probably my favorite living novelist, and this is probably my favorite of his novels, so it's a bit strange that I'd never seen the filmed adaptation. Filming an Eco novel can't be easy, because so much of his writing wanders off into theoretical and historical digressions, but the director (Jean Jacques Annaud) has done a pretty good job with this one, emphasising the core of the plot - a murder mystery in a medieval Catholic monastery, circa 1300 - but also bringing in some of the context of a longstanding theological argument between religious orders. Connery plays Father William of Baskerville, a Franciscan from the remote backwater of England, whose very name illustrates Eco's fond Sherlock Holmes references. Slater is William's young novice, an earnest and well-meaning sort who is a bit overwhelmed by the brutality of the killings and the circuitous theological arguments that come to the fore. Arnaud can't really film much of the book's subtleties, revolving around William's adoration of wisdom and the allure of an endless library, but he does touch on it nicely without bogging the film down. The cinematography and setting unblinkingly illustrate the morose and impoverished circumstances of the Dark Ages, when wisdom was hidden away and the poor were kept in ignorance and suffering.