Chicago International Film Festival Wrap Up:  The Fountain, Wristcutters, Waiter, Severance, Taxider

THE FOUNTAIN

An exception to what seemed like the above rule was by far my favorite film of the festival: Darren Aranofsky’s The Fountain. I’ll limit my observations in lieu of Todd’s great review of the film and instead be running an interview in the next couple of days with Aranofsky. But to say that I liked this film doesn’t begin to do it justice. The Fountain is the kind of film that I would never see coming from a major studio. Bursting with ideas, boasting extraordinary faith laden, imagery and offering a compelling complex rumination on death and dying this is a movie bound to bleed money at the box office but for all the wrong reasons..

Hugh Jackman is a research scientist fighting to save his wife with his research. Jackman also plays a conquistador searching for the fountain of youth and a futuristic star traveler in dialogue with a higher power residing in an ancient tree. And the way Aranofsky intermingles these stories, weaves their emotional cores back and forth to the films conclusion is breathtaking. The symbols here are just huge and they leap of the screen with an astonishing savvy reminiscent of all the great art that I remember gracing covers of paperback novels back in the seventies. Aranofsky asserts there is a coherent narrative line throughout the film and I think he’s right but you will have to keep your eyes wide open to follow it. Your reward is being able to walk away asking questions about the importance of looking beyond the things of this world to find true meaning and peace

TIME

Kim Ki-duk made one of my all time favorite films- 3 Iron. It changes every time I see it and I change with it because so much of what it says is so true. I also like Spring , Summer, Winter Spring and Fall an awful lot. But this film, though it contains some truly compelling imagery and more than a handful of thought provoking moments never seems to coalesce into anything. We aren’t sure where we’re supposed to go and we aren’t sure that was the director’s intention. And that’s the main problem with Time - we want it to lead us somewhere, to teach us something but all it does is put the ugliness of it’s characters on display.

A young woman becomes obsessed with the idea that her boyfriend is growing bored with her appearance. She disappears undergoes cosmetic surgery and then pursues him as a new woman. Does he love her, the new woman she has become or does he suspect the switch making her the object of his manipulations?

Great movies about paranoia like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Frankenheimer’s Seconds offer characters we can care about knowing that film has great power to create empathy. But this is stretched to the breaking point here as none of these characters seem to think before they act. Jerry Springer should have such guests. Kim does reach for some nice visual poetry via the films repeated visits to an oceanfront sculpture park where his characters can interact with abstract representations of themselves but in the end it’s difficult to tell which is which.

Empathy aside there is an undeniable cautionary tale here but it gets lost in the overwrought, reactionary choices of characters who seem as lost in their landscape as I felt in the theater.

TAXIDERMIA

A man pleasures himself with a burning candle at the beginning of Taxidermia and it almost seemed to me as if director Gyorgy Palfi is inviting viewers to do the same. Pain is, after all, the only lasting pleasure in Palfi’s controversial universe where characters are obsessed with how far they can push the limits of biology and never mind good taste.

The film traces the stories of a man and his ancestors who all are linked by their obsession with things that prove their undoing. One is a sexually obsessed soldier in a bleak terrain who tortures himself to find satisfaction, another is a champion eater and lastly one is a man who must care for his former cripplingly obese former competitive eater father and his impossibly large house cats while running his own taxidermy business.

The lead image of someone taxiderming themselves is a great one. It speaks to all of Palfi’s concerns about the mysterious relationship between biology and personhood and the difficulty of transcending physicality but it’s also less provocative than say, the vomiting competitive eaters or some of the film’s sexual imagery. And so I think I might criticize Palfi for being overly concerned with his images- a provocateur as it were but even if this is the case it seems more by default than design. Palfi is trying to lead us through not strand us in his universe, or at least not to make us feel anymore stranded than anyone else.

Viewers unprepared to grapple with graphic and often disgusting imagery are well advised to steer clear of Palfi’s latest and try Hukkle instead. I have an unopened copy of Hukkle and am at last persuaded to break the seal. I do not have a copy of Taxidermia and, though it has inspired some interesting thought, I will not be purchasing one, or watching the film again. I rest easy in this decision believing however tenuously that some things, perhaps the most important things, cannot be eaten, physically expelled, or most important mounted (taxidermically or sexually). Those things, like Taxidermia, invite us to consider our limitations even as we reach out.

WRISTCUTTERS: A LOVE STORY

The last great comedy involving suicide I saw was Beetlejuice where we get to meet all the government workers trapped in dead end jobs for eternity because they offed themselves. There is a similar premise here but it’s put to use that’s less zany and more brainy. What if, after killing yourself, you woke up somewhere just a little bit more awful than where you were before? Patrick Fugit discovers that not only is the grass not greener on the other side but heaven may be what you make of it. Amidst a white trash, desert ridden strip mall afterlife Fugit and his new found Russian friend have nothing to do except eat bad food, drive junky cars, in low paying futureless jobs while reminiscing about the “good old days.” When Fugit finds out the girl he offed himself over is “alive” on his side of the fence he persuades his friend to provide wheels and company and help him search only to end up picking up a hitchhiker who just needs to see the people in charge so that she can show them a horrible mistake has been made. Together the three form a bond that can only be had while driving a station wagon through the desert.

Wristcutters does a good job of intimating the possibility of magic in the everyday hum-drum dumbed-down existence that makes us worry that this is all there is. Tom Waits has rarely been put to as good a use as he has been here as the head of a small campground where small seemingly pointless miracles dress the mundane post life with whimsy and hope.

First time director Goran Dukic makes great use of everything at his disposal giving the movie an otherworldly sensibility while keeping things character driven. As a viewer I was never less than fascinated with where I was at any one time which also means I was happy with the films slow paced ruminations on the meaning of life. My favorite narrative device in the film was the black hole under the passenger seat. As sunglasses and other things get sucked into it the movie not only treats the events as normal but beside the point. When you’ve lost your fear of falling you might just find a happy little miracle upon landing. The trick is to stop assuming you need to know exactly how you got there.

WAITER

This pleasant surprise is a film from the director of the cult hit Grimm and I’ll be revisiting it with friends and using in discussion groups and pulls offers a premise that merely makes me smile while delivering a series of performances that made me laugh at loud and made me think about the way I connect with characters and story.

Fifty year old Edgar is the Head Waiter at a seemingly trendy but actually seedy restaurant. He struggles to satisfy his wife, mistress and a series of increasingly hostile customers and even has to tolerate the obnoxious potentially fatal presence of gangster neighbors who from time to time demand favors from him. But all those problems pale in comparison to the fact that Edgar is actually a character in a story written by a man who only seems interested in how much suffering he can inflict on Edgar. Visits to the authors apartment only increase the tension between character and creator leading to a conclusion I’m betting you won’t guess and even if you do you’ll be glad for the ride and grateful to Edgar for his willing and unwilling participation. There are of course tons of films that offer fictional characters becoming part of reality. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and the upcoming Stranger Than Fiction demonstrate the universal quality of such a premise. It can be applied to help create all kinds of effects and tell all kinds of stories. But at its heart it’s a premise more disturbing than anything else.

I’ll never forget a movie lecture by noted author Tom Gunning. He was doing a breakdown of the sequence in The Mummy (1932) where an older paleontologist tells a younger man not to touch a forbidden box. Of course the young man does as soon as the old man leaves and this brings up an important point. We the audience, know that something really awful will happen if the young man disobeys the older wiser man. But we want him to don’t we? Why is that? What sort of pleasure is derived from watching this transgressive act? In The Mummy the young man’s actions set in motion a series of hideous murders. Gunning’s point was that such a question is more than worth asking, it’s essential if we are to see film as something more than entertainment.

SEVERANCE

As a big big fan of Christopher Smith’s Creep I was no less than thrilled with a take home return later screener of Severance. Getting together with a big group of like-minded friends (the kind that like to go
“Eeeeeeeeew!”) I staked my rep. that this would be worth a treasured movie night slot. It was a good bet. Severance is by far the best horror comedy I’ve seen in a long while mixing equal parts Friday the 13th, Dr. Strangelove and Office Space even if it does fail to generate the sort of apocalyptic tension that makes the business of weaponry such a good subject for satire. Its main fault is in injecting an unnecessary mystery regarding the killers identity when it could have been revealed earlier and used to strengthen the “conflict” that drives the film. In other words its not a very tight storyline. Without giving too much away I would rather have seen a group of office workers who work for a munitions manufacturer attempting to actually use their products in a frontlines situation than wonder if they are killing each other off for the first half of the film. When the identity of the killer is revealed in this film it comes as no real surprise anyway.

But having said that, I’d still heartily recommend this marvelously inventive, very funny and occasionally suspenseful horror satire. A group of office workers at a munitions factory are forced by their obnoxious boss to attend a weekend team building retreat only to wind up being stalked and killed. Who is killing them and why I won’t reveal but I’m betting you’ll like the film for other reasons.

Severance is at it’s strongest in the way it references the other great films that question our need to blow each other up. Anyone who has ever seen Bowling For Columbine will remember the image of the bikini clad girl firing the AK-47. Such jiggle-vision is actually employed here to help humanize a female character who in almost any other movie would end up spending most of her screen time providing sex comedy relief. Other moments reference Dr. Strangelove.

But Severance also offers some really original takes on horror movie tropes and comic characterization. In one scene we are offered a spider and it is put to exactly the sort of effect spiders are always put to in horror films- until the end of the scene. Another even better executed and much funnier moment involves a swimming pool, a pile of leaves and an idiot but as funny as it is it also involves a surprising amount of suspense for what would have been, in lesser hands, a quick gag.

And maybe not so surprisingly one can’t help but think of The Office while watching Severance. There’s a great bit where the boss inadvertently gives a romantic compliment to a surprised coworker only to dig himself a deep verbal hole trying to back peddle. And that’s another thing to like about this engaging film. Its characters aren’t just there to die. They have small hopes and dreams as well as a complete and utter incompetence about the use of small arms.