Home Cinema
by Leonard Heldreth

Devil in high school; art and bricks rolled into one
This month we look at a film about high fashion, one about dealing with personal problems and two very different films about high school.

The Devil Wears Prada
David Frankel has directed several episodes of “Sex and the City,” and his first feature film displays the competence of a good television production.
Based on the best-selling novel by Lauren Weisberger, apparently about her experiences as an assistant to Vogue editor Anna Wintour, the screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna fortunately improved on the original by changing Wintour from a completely predictable monster into a well-rounded villain. Then Meryl Streep was cast as the lead.
In the film, Northwestern journalism graduate Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) is hired by Miranda Priestly (Streep) to assist her assistant Emily (Emily Blunt). Priestly is the high priestess of fashion whose facial twitch or nod can make or break major fashion collections. She terrifies the entire staff of Runway, the magazine she edits, and concerns herself only with its success.
Priestly ridicules Sachs, referring to her as the “smart, fat girl,” and sending her on impossible errands. In the meantime, Emily ridicules those aspects of Sachs that Priestly doesn’t have time for. Sachs, fighting back with the help of Nigel (Stanley Tucci), improves her manner of dress, carries out the imperial commands of Priestly, and vows to last a year in order to use the position as a launching pad into a serious journalism career.
Unfortunately, as Sachs succeeds on the job, her relationship with her aspiring chef boyfriend, Nate (Adrian Grenier), deteriorates, and while her friends accept the expensive fashions she brings home as gifts, they think she is turning into a snob.
Thus, the plot develops and leads to that terrible (and unfortunately common–at least in the movies) question, will she choose high fashion career success over living with her slightly scuzzy boyfriend, who has just been accepted to be an apprentice chef in another city?
While clunky and predictable, this plot arc has carried any number of films in the past and will likely do so in the future, but here it’s weighed down by a number of problems. Hathaway simply doesn’t change into the aspiring bitch that her friends tell her she’s turning into. She feels sorry for Emily when she loses a chance to go to Paris, she makes an attempt to be home on her boyfriend’s birthday, and she even keeps smiling through most of it, despite putting in grueling days that stretch well into the night. What’s wrong with her friends—can’t they give her a little support for a year? If the boyfriend thinks he’s going to have regular hours and leisure time as a chef, he doesn’t know the worlds of haute cuisine and Gourmet.
Further, at least one of Sachs’ tasks—getting copies of the manuscript of the next Harry Potter novel by evening–is so ridiculous that even her success is unbelievable. And, finally, we aren’t privy to how she learns to turn from dressing like something the dog dragged in after chewing on it for a while to dressing like a fashion model. Yes, she has help from Nigel and the overstuffed closets of designer clothes stored at the magazine, but she still would have to learn how to put it all together each day.
Granted, when she did show up in designer clothes, this reviewer often was unable to tell the times she was dressed outrageously well from those in which she was just dressed outrageously, but I tried to keep neutral on the subject of high fashion. Priestly offers an explanation of the need for fashion during one of her criticisms of Sachs, but it wasn’t convincing.
While I see the economic value to the clothing industry of people buying lots of clothes they wear only a few times, the argument finally isn’t any more convincing than the old theory of buying a new car every three years to help the auto industry.
Given all of these problems, then why am I discussing this film when I usually just don’t talk about films that I don’t like? First, there are the performances of Blunt and Tucci. Both are quite funny; their characters sometimes are outrageous, but they make them believable.
Then, overshadowing everything and, by itself, making this necessary viewing, is the performance of Streep. She turns Priestly into a believable character with whose motivations we may not agree, but whose driving force, mannerisms, and even scorn we can accept as necessary. From her imperious entrance, tossing her coat and bag onto the desk of the nearest assistant, Streep knows how to convey Priestly’s character.
She never raises her voice, she never scowls, she never rushes—she is just polished steel. Her political instincts carry her through the machinations around her, and, at the end as she sits in the back of her car, she permits herself a smile of satisfaction. Then she calls to her driver, “What are you waiting for? Go!” Streep is simply phenomenal because in this film, although she has little to work with, she creates a memorable and almost sympathetic monster. Top

Art School Confidential
Director Terry Zwigoff and screenwriter Daniel Clowes collaborated on Ghost World, a well-done film about the alienation experienced by two high school girls and the friendship of one with a collection of old records. The film appeared on a lot of top-ten lists for 2001.
Like the previous film, Art School Confidential is based on a comic book, and its title reference to the notorious High School Confidential (1958) announces its pulpy and overdone tone with possible plot digressions as ridiculous as Mamie Van Doren playing Russ Tamblyn’s sexy aunt. Satire that can last for the length of a feature film, however, needs a plot, and the plot here is a patched together affair that does indeed echo its namesake.
Jerome Platz (Max Minghella) is a freshman at Strathmore Academy, a private art school in one of the more disreputable parts of New York City. Naive, Jerome believes he will be the next Picasso, the greatest artist of the twenty-first century, and he shares this conceit with anyone who will listen, including his roommates, a fashion designer and a filmmaker. Jerome attends drawing classes to Professor Sandiford (John Malkovich), who works on his own languishing career while giving As to all of his students. In these classes Jerome sketches (and lusts for) nude model Audrey (Sophia Myles), while his fellow students ridicule his technical facility and spout jargon about what makes effective art.
In the meantime a strangler is stalking the campus, and it doesn’t take long for the audience to make a connection between theses murders and the pictures and other clues that Jerome finds when he goes to visit Jimmy (Jim Broadbent), a Strathmore graduate. Jimmy’s rants at the human race sometimes echo those of Jonathan Swift or Mark Twain in a foul mood. Vince, Jerome’s roommate, is making a movie about the murders, funded by his grandfather. Then, there’s Jonah (Matt Keeslar) whose drawings look as if he “has unlearned everything he was ever taught.” These pieces all come together in the rest of the film, and the ending manages to both wrap up the plot and give the satire one huge push forward.
Minghella (son of Anthony Minghella, director of The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain) visually fits the part—he’s cute with big brown eyes (as a co-ed tells him), a mop of curly hair and an insufferable innocence. Myles is equally good as the female lead, but the supporting cast—Malkovich, Broadbent, Anjelica Huston—make the young players look like amateurs any time they are onscreen with them. The film is often quite funny as it lampoons artistic pretensions and jargon, and the strangler scenes will amuse any fan of Hitchcock (the “Blue Danube” soars on the soundtrack as the cord tightens around a neck).
The biggest problem is the difficulty in satirizing anything already as loopy as artistic jargon–or literary or philosophical or any other jargon that depends ultimately on subjective evaluations. What the film accomplishes is to generate some sympathy for talented people like Jerome who are caught up in a system that fosters such chimeric values. On the other hand, these people chose to be there.
A story used to circulate about a famous writer—Dylan Thomas or Tennessee Williams or someone who did the circuit and sometimes calmed his nerves with a few too many drinks before his talk. As the story goes, he would stumble out on stage, accept the applause from an awed audience, and say, “How many of you want to be writers?” Most of the hands in the audience would go up. “Then,” he would ask, “what are you doing here? Why aren’t you home writing?” Perhaps if Jerome had seen the movie first, he would have stayed home and continued drawing. On the other hand, he’s doing pretty well at the end of the film, whether you like the value system he’s exploiting or not. Top

Brick
Rian Johnson directs his first film with Brick, an homage to film noir and the detective novels of the ’30s and ’40s, especially those of Dashiell Hammett. The amazing thing is that Johnson has set his dark film in sunny San Clemente, made almost all of his characters high school students, kept the wise-cracking jargon, and made it all work beautifully. It doesn’t become camp or cute or derivative.
The plot is drawn from Hammett’s Red Harvest and other novels about his private eye, the Continental Op (short for an operator working for the Continental Detective Agency) with some references to The Maltese Falcon, especially near the end. The plot is convoluted, as all such plots are, and even Raymond Chandler admitted to William Faulkner that he wasn’t sure who the killer was in The Big Sleep.
All of the loose ends may not be tied up in Brick either, but that’s not the point; the plot moves so quickly that the audience is always running to keep up with it. The movie is an exercise in style and dialogue, and on those terms it succeeds admirably.
Brenden Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) gets a call from a former girlfriend, Emily (Emilie de Ravin), asking for his help, but he doesn’t know where she is. Searching her locker, he finds a clue that eventually leads him to a drug drop-off site where he finds her body.
Wanting not just to identify her killer, but to punish those who put her in harm’s way, Brenden decides to shake things up a little and starts some fights that bring him to the attention of Tugger (Noah Fleiss) and, through him, to the Pin (short for King Pin), the local teen in charge of drug distribution (Lukas Haas). Figuring out the situation, Brenden plays both sides against the middle (as the heroes did in the source material and as Akira Kurosawa did in his adaptation, Yojimbo). After both sides have squared off and settled accounts, Brenden confronts Laura Dannon (Nora Zehetner), the femme fatale, in a scene that echoes Sam Spade’s confrontation with Brigid O’Shaughnessy. This is, however, a movie about teens, and Laura twists the knife with one last revelation from that angle.
The acting is all fine. Haas (the little boy in Witness) is as skinny and wispy as Sidney Greenstreet was corpulent, his literary references are to Tolkein and the cane he carries has a bird at its top, probably a falcon. Dode (Noah Segan) gets slapped around like Peter Lorre’s character, the high school vice principal (Richard Roundtree) stands in for the intruding police, and there are other parallels between these characters and those in the source films and novels.
The dialogue, an artificial mixture of high school slang and film noir jargon, is sometimes difficult to understand (I turned on the English subtitles a couple of times). High school drug words are mixed with phrases about “taking the fall” and a student known as “The Brain” (Matt O’Leary) is designated the “Op.”
In almost every case, the sharp dialogue works, as when a character says, “Act smarter than you look, and drop it.” Only when Brenden calls Laura “angel” does the voice of Bogart intrude too much for me and break the illusion, but it may not do so for everyone—I probably have seen The Maltese Falcon too many times.
Brick, like the best film noir, grabs you and doesn’t let go until the last scene is over. It’s exhilarating, fun and enjoyable in its own right, but it’s a must-see for anyone who values the earlier films that it honors. Top

Clean
For a film written by an accomplished French director, Olivier Assayas, and starring one of the world’s most beautiful women, Maggie Cheung, in a prize-winning performance, Clean received very mixed reviews. Critics seemed to want it to be something that it wasn’t.
It doesn’t focus on the trials and tribulations of getting off of drugs, although the heroine does move from being a user to being clean during the course of the film. It is not a slice-of-life French film—in fact, it’s in English except for some subtitled sequences in France and French Canada. Clean is an account of what happens to a woman, Emily Wang (Cheung), who has hung onto a second- or third-tier position in the rock music world for many years, losing herself in the self-importance of rock/drug fantasies until the overdose death of her partner Lee (James Johnston), the father of her son, forces a new reality upon her.
Jailed for six months for possession, she emerges taking only methadone for her habit and desperately needing help. She meets with her dead partner’s Canadian father, Albrecht Hauser (Nick Nolte), who has custody of her son, Jay (James Dennis), and agrees to try not to visit the son for a while.
Then she sets out for Paris to ask former friends and even enemies for favors—including food and shelter. The rest of the film traces how she slowly learns to live in the real world, how she cuts through the smoke and drug euphoria and subsequent depression to determine what she really wants and what she is willing to do to achieve that.
Born in China, Cheung grew up in England, speaks several languages fluently, and has lived all over the world. At the time she made Clean, she and director Assayas were in the process of divorcing, although he wrote the script for her. Cheung is a huge international star, having made more than eighty films, but American audiences may know her only from some Hong Kong action films or from her starring role in Wong Kar-Wai’s beautiful In the Mood for Love. In Clean her regal beauty is reduced to a gamin, waif-like quality, and her acting, strong without ever being over the top, won her the prize for best actress at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
Emily is not a pleasant person. She is conceited, selfish, impractical and a liar. Yet Cheung slowly lets us see that beneath these qualities are a sensitivity, toughness and persistence that we can admire and that may see her through her trials. It is a remarkable performance, and the upbeat ending, although she’s not out of the woods yet, is more inspiring than most “winning season” films or Rocky on the steps of the Philadelphia museum.
Equally good is Nolte as the builder of wooden ships, who is not yet ready to let his grandson go but who knows that he can not care for him indefinitely because his wife Rosemary (beautifully played by Martha Henry) is ill and may not recover. He must groom the boy’s mother to take on that responsibility, and he assures Emily, “I believe in forgiveness. People change. If they need to, they change.” It’s an extraordinary moment in a fine film about learning how to face reality and earn the price of what you value.
At the end, it’s not clear whether she will be successful as a singer or, if she is, whether she will be able to resist the temptations that success will bring. But this is a film about getting through one day, solving one problem, winning back one person’s love or respect, and hanging on until she can get the next solid grip on daily life.
As it was for that famous Southern belle of over a century ago, tomorrow will be another day for Emily, one that she hopes she can deal with. Top
—Leonard G. Heldreth

Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores.

 

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