By John Thomason
Everyone Else (Cinema Guild)
Release date: Oct. 26
SLP: $20.49
If “mainstream cinema” is shorthand for grounded, explicable, coherent story arcs told with logic and closure, then art cinema – the yin to Hollywood’s yang – is the terrain of the unknown, the inexplicable, the frustratingly open-ended. Its filmmakers are fully aware that, as in life, they don’t have all the answers, and their stories do not conclude in tidy, message-filled packages. More likely, the package has been destroyed, the wrapping paper strewn about the floor, the message missing.
Most movies canonized as classics – most of the films that wind up on critics’ top 10 lists each year – fall squarely in the middle of these polarizing modi operandi. But I usually have the most respect for movies that compromise nothing to mainstream conventions, that question rather than explain, that observe rather than preach. Everyone Else, the second feature from German director Maren Ade, is one such film.
Movies about relationships have rarely contained this much raw intimacy and uncomfortable insight into human conditions, because most of them seek to manipulate us one way or the other, fitting their characters into prescribed roles: We sympathize with the battered wife or the henpecked husband, and morality usually wins out in the end. Everyone Else, which has its roots in both the authentic, ragged psychodramas of Cassavetes and Bergman, and the lost-in-a-strange-land meanderings of Antonioni, is far more complex in its evocation of a seemingly blissful coupling that may or may not dissipate over a vacation in the Mediterranean.
The central players are Chris (Lars Eidinger), a struggling architect, and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a music publicist. For Chris, the couple’s vacation in Sardinia serves a dual purpose, one that involves the potential reconstruction of a villa. Small battle lines are drawn early in the film: Gitti resents that Chris won’t compromise any of his architectural ideals even if it means never bringing any of his projects to fruition, while it’s quite obvious that Chris sometimes finds Gitti’s behavior offensive and embarrassing. When he and Gitti meet one of Chris’ colleagues, Hans, and his pregnant wife Sana, for dinner, their relationship begins to fully unravel, one painful tether at a time. A directionless mountain climbing adventure at the film’s midpoint only serves to reinforce the idea that Chris and Gitti are strangers in a foreign land, stranded in physical and emotional oblivion.
But the more you stick with this patient, perceptive movie, the more Chris’s casual coldness and hurtful solo excursions begin to look like justifiably erected walls against Gitti’s increasingly fractious, mentally unstable behavior. It’s a subtle transformation that happens almost without the viewer realizing it. We don’t know what to make of an ambiguous scene early on the film, when Gitti teaches hateful admonitions to Chris’s niece before pantomiming her demise in a pool. By the end, this behavior looks like a warning sign shot from the bow of a disturbed mind.
It’s important to understand that Ade’s film is, by its uncertain end, a potent dissection of mental illness – not, per se, a fundamental depiction of male-female gender roles in contemporary courtship. First of all, gender roles are an antiquated notion to Ade, who confuses them early on by having Chris agree to be made up like a woman. Which is why it’s an offensive notion to read one particular web critic’s diagnosis of the film as a Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus study in gender differentiation.
If that were true, Ade would be saying that all women are irrational, combustible nutcases and that all men are mean, calculating jerks. Gitti and Chris are neither of these; in fact, they’re both so relatable in their peculiarities that you’ll hope for their happiness as you would a friend in a similar situation – even if said happiness can only be achieved by splitting up.
The Elia Kazan Collection (20th Century Fox)
Release date: Nov. 9
SLP: $137.99
The holiday gift set to end them all, The Elia Kazan Collection compiles 18 movies from the classic Hollywood mainstay, many of which make their American DVD debuts. These include 1953’s Man on a Tightrope, with Frederic March as a member of a Czech circus troupe; 1960’s Wild River, a Jim Crow racial potboiler with Montgomery Clift; and 1963’s Academy Award-nominated America, America, a drama about a persecuted man in Constantinople that was inspired by the story of Kazan’s uncle.
Some other long out-of-print titles, such as the 1945 melodrama A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and 1952’s Viva Zapata, with Marlon Brando as a Mexican revolutionary, are included here as well, along with a couple of punchy noirs (Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets) as well as the director’s most prestigious titles (East of Eden, On the Waterfront, Splendor in the Grass). My favorite Kazan title, the Glenn Beck-anticipating media satire Face in the Crowd, is here too. Martin Scorsese’s name is almost as big as Kazan’s on the packaging; Marty selected the films and produced the first disc in this collection, the new documentary A Letter to Elia. This is mouth-wateringly good.
The Hungry Ghosts (Virgil Films)
Release date: Nov. 2
SLP: $20.49
The idea of lost, troubled souls converging amid the bustle of urban America is to independent film what ostentatious explosions and buff men walking in slow motion are to Jerry Bruckheimer productions. We need more of both like we need more cancer, laugh-tracked sitcoms and vampire novels. The Hungry Ghosts, the writing and directing debut of actor Michael Imperioli, falls wholeheartedly and unceremoniously in the former genre, an inexplicable favorite of film festivals if nowhere else. The specific characters may be different – a hard-living late-night talk show host (Steve Schirripa) and an alcoholic charmer (Nick Sandow) attempting to rekindle a relationship with a pretty but aggressive and newly homeless meditation companion (Aujanue Ellis) – but their loneliness, connected through vice, pain and Eastern religion, is all too familiar. This pointless pity parade collects perverts, drunks, drug addicts, degenerates, deadbeats and other timeless miscreants of the big, nasty city, while claiming on its official box-art description to channel “the zeitgeist of our times.” Hardly. The film’s summation, as voiced by Schirripa’s blowhard, is that “the world is a cesspool.” A perennial diagnosis, perhaps, but by no means original or zeitgeisty.
Tropic of Cancer (Olive Films)
Release date: Oct. 26
SLP: $18.99
Joseph Strick’s adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is another reminder that, as with Ulysses and The Bell Jar, great literature does not always make great cinema. Rip Torn plays Miller in a story that transplants the drifting writer/horndog from the book’s ‘30s milieu to modern-day Paris, hoodwinking everyone he meets to satisfy his desires for food, sex and lodging. Technically faithful to the book, the barely coherent nonstory shambles along, jump cut by jump cut, audiovisual mismatch by audiovisual mismatch, until it settles into a languorous groove anchored by frank discussions of sexual organs that earned this once-shocking art-house drivel an NC-17. It’s boring both despite and because of its artsy quirks, and the acting is wooden and at times laughable. Curious Miller aficionados will likely encompass the movie’s microscopic demographic, and it’s no surprise that the most engaging part of Betty Botley’s screenplay are the passages lifted directly from the source material.