Spank's LFF Diary, Thursday 18/11/1999
1.15pm: Brokedown Palace
A women's prison movie starring Kate Beckinsale and Claire Danes? Of course Jon and I are going to be there.
Alice Marano (Danes) and Darlene Davis (Beckinsale) have been friends ever since childhood. With college coming up, they decide to go to Thailand for one final fling. During a bout of small-scale lawbreaking by Alice, they're rescued from trouble by Australian Nick Parks (Daniel Lapaine). Charmed by his exotic accent and his work on the Wallace and Gromit films, they become friends with him and agree to follow him to Hong Kong. Unfortunately, at some point between their meeting and their arrival at Bangkok airport, several kilos of smack has made its way into their luggage. Their only hope is sleazy lawyer Hank Greene (Bill Pullman), who knows enough about the Thai justice system to realise what danger they're in.
Well, this year we've had a teenage Dangerous Liaisons (Cruel Intentions) and a teenage Taming Of The Shrew (Ten Things I Hate About You), so why not have a teenage Midnight Express as well? For all its liberal pretensions, Brokedown Palace still pushes the same buttons as Alan Parker's movie: there's no reason to identify with the main characters, other than because they're pure unsullied Americans being defiled by the evil alien Thais. If there is a saving grace to this approach, it's that as the story progresses, some doubt is cast on the total innocence of the two girls, and towards the end there is some sort of recognition of their responsibility. But on the whole, Jonathan Kaplan has made a women's prison movie just like his old boss Roger Corman used to churn out, except it doesn't even have the decency to throw in any lesbian sex or catfights. Frankly, I feel cheated.
4.00pm: Wind With The Gone
It's usually at this point at the Festival that, with nothing to lose, you start taking more risks. You start going for films purely to fill a timeslot: films so inadequately promoted that this pixillated smudge to the right is the only still from the movie I could find anywhere... and then you come across a little surprise like this.
Alejandro Agresti's film announces its presence with the warning "this is not a comedy". The danger is that the first half has so many hilarious ideas crammed into it, you'll have forgotten that when the second, more elegaic half comes around. Buenos Aires taxi driver Soledad (Vera Fogwill) throws in the towel one day and drives south until she (literally) hits Patagonia. She encounters a small town called Rio Pico: totally cut off from the rest of the world, with no television or radio, their only contact with civilisation is via the movies that play in their town cinema.
Unfortunately, as the prints have made their way all around Argentina before arriving here, they're all full of jump cuts, elisions and unnecessary scenes. As this is the only outside influence the children know, the town's collective verbal and cognitive skills have been totally destroyed, as everyone talks as if their dialogue was written by William Burroughs. The town elders decide to make their own newsreels, and recruit Soledad as anchorperson.
The first half concentrates on Soledad's new career, and her hilarious attempts to strike up a relationship with the town's film buff Pedro (Fabia Vena), who's seen more movies than anyone else and therefore makes no sense at all.But there's also a parallel subplot involving the town inventor, who discovers most of the major philosophical advances of this century several decades after the rest of the world. When he heads into Buenos Aires to announce his discovery of Communism, four days before the military coup of 1976, things take a darker turn.
Just when you think you've got this film sussed, it throws one more element into the mix, as French film star Edgar Wexley (Jean Rochefort), a popular actor with the townsfolk, pulls into Rio Pico himself to see where all his Latin American fan mail comes from. As the film meanders towards a downbeat conclusion, we start to remember that "this is not a comedy". It is bizarrely enjoyable, though, with a great script by Agresti and a nice cameo by Rochefort (from The Hairdresser's Husband) as the faded idol. A film festival film if ever there was one.
7.30pm: Closing Gala: American Beauty
Two weeks and a day after Ride With The Devil, the crowd control barriers are back up outside the Odeon Leicester Square. This time, the police are a lot happier: when bystanders ask if anyone famous is expected to turn up, they can say "Yes, Kevin Spacey." Terrifyingly, a couple of the bystanders follow this up by asking who Kevin Spacey is. For those of us who permanently reside on Planet Earth, however, American Beauty is one of the most eagerly awaited films of 1999. Garlanded with critical and popular acclaim on its US release, it's being tipped for Oscars and every other award going. In the Internet Movie Database user rankings, it's currently the number one film of all time. Can any movie possibly live up to these levels of expectation?
Hell, yeah.
Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) is a walking male midlife crisis. His wife Carolyn (Annette Bening) hasn't had sex with him for years, his teenage daughter Jane (Thora Birch) despises him, and his job in telesales is currently on the line. Three separate events - Lester's falling for Jane's friend Angela (Mena Suvari), Carolyn's developing relationship with her rival in property sales, and the arrival of the Fitts family in the house next door - will combine to push Lester to the point where he doesn't care any more: a state that's easily mistaken for freedom.
The main reason why American Beauty has struck such a chord with audiences has to be, first and foremost, Alan Ball's script. Chock full of non-stereotypical characters and amazingly quotable lines (look them up yourself on the IMDB, it's too late for me to do it now), it traces Lester's downfall with exquisite precision, without relegating the other characters to filling in narrative gaps: everyone has their part to play in what happens to him.
Sam Mendes, former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse theatre, shows an amazingly steady hand in his first film as director, getting top-notch performances from everyone concerned. Kevin Spacey's performance is a career best, but you kind of expect that from him: the real revelation is Annette Bening, who takes Carolyn through a thoroughly believable emotional journey. Mendes also pulls off some beautiful visuals: there's terrific use of framing to frequently make Lester look lost inside the wide expanses of the Panavision screen, while his fantasies about Angela (linked with an effective rose petal motif) are brilliantly realised. Funny, tragic, flawlessly acted... remember all that stuff I said a few days ago about The Insider sweeping the Oscars? As of now, you can forget it.
One final note about the screening itself. Kevin Spacey came on stage at the start, and was incredibly nice about how his time on the London stage in The Iceman Cometh prepared him for this role. Annette Bening couldn't attend, however, as she's currently laid up expecting her fourth child. Must Warren Beatty always screw up my Closing Galas?
Notes From Spank's Pals
American Beauty
Ken - Last year's closing gala at the LFF was the simply dreadful Bulworth. This year however they redeemed themselves with a splendid closing gala - American Beauty. Kevin Spacey plays the typical suburban man whose wife despises him and daughter hates him. Then he completely changes his life around. He falls in love with his daughter's best friend, buys drugs from his daughter's boyfriend, loses his job and takes a job in a fast food joint. But that's only the start. The ending has already been given away, as it is revealed right at the beginning of the film that this man is going to die. It seemed a mistake to reveal that right at the beginning, but the audience is left to wonder how it is going to happen, and is led off on many false trails during the film - which of course wouldn't work if you didn't know he was going to die. I am reminded of one of last year's LFF films The Opposite of Sex, because that has a scene in which it looks as if Christina Ricci has been killed, but then she says "of course I wasn't killed, I'm the narrator, get with the plot". Kevin Spacey's character has obviously not heard of that rule of film making, since he manages to continue his narration after he's been killed. Definitely a go see movie.
Nick - A first feature by Sam Mendes and a huge critical success in America, probably on the back of his theatrical success with The Blue Room which transferred from London to America, and the film is very theatrical in style. So much so that we have a notable coup de theatre that appeared in a recent West End play by Terry Johnson, and here finishes the film in dramatic style. At the gala screening, Sam Mendes thanked his enormously experienced cinematographer and, one suspects, it was a necessary hand holding exercise for the novice film director. The big pluses of the film are a superb performance by Kevin Spacey, an actor who is adding more subtlety to his performances with every film and must be near to graduating from his succession of impressive supporting roles, to becoming one of the central characters, as we see him in this film. Annette Bening gives an impressive performance as his materially obsessed wife, who only gets excited when she is being screwed by a successful competitor and never with her own husband, who has to take solace wanking in the shower or lusting after the leader of his daughter's majorettes. The script reworks some elements of Hitchcock's Rear Window with Soderbergh's sex lies and videotape, and spins in a wacko Vietnam veteran from countless films and a nod to the current obsession with teen movies. The pacing and observational nature of the film is very similar to Ang Lee's The Ice Storm, so if you liked that, you will like this.
November 19th 1999
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