Woody Abroad: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

David Begelman

Maybe it’s no accident that Woody Allen films like Match Point and his latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, are such successful ventures, whereas Scoop, a film that came between the two, was more or less a dud. Ironically, the director appeared in a major role in Scoop, but not in the other two films. The quality of Woody’s work nowadays seems immeasurably better when he puts himself behind the camera, rather than in front of it. It’s as though the Annie Hall era has been over for some time. Self-casting in roles with one-liners smacking of stand-up comedy routines may have worn thin as a continuing chapter of modern cinema.

At first blush, Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to be just a comedy about American tourists abroad in Spain. Looks can be deceiving. It is actually a more complicated film than Match Point. The latter is about the sticky predicament of a murderer who evades justice by chance. (One of the graphic images in the film symbolizes the indeterminacy of outcome: a tennis ball teetering on the edge of a net, unsure about which way to fall).

Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a comedy of manners, dwells on the way love is loosened up in exotic circumstances. Yet there is another theme implicit in its narrative. Are novel love entanglements signs of liberation or personal imbalance? Are they manifestations of a new sexual freedom or symptoms of going haywire? And how do we tell these apart?

 In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there was no quandary over dramatic purpose; the unsettling aspects of love gone flukey had to be relieved and equilibrium restored. In Woody Allen’s movie, you’re never sure whether love’s confusions steer its principals in the right or wrong directions. And its characters all ask themselves the same question: “Am I where I should be, or just plain wacky?” Vicky Cristina Barcelona isn’t a comedy of errors; it’s a comedy about whether what happens in love is an error to begin with.

The plot revolves around two friends, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) who, at the invitation of Vicky’s relative Judy Nash (Patricia Clarkson) and her husband, Mark (Kevin Dunn) are on summer vacation in Barcelona, a gorgeous, ochre-hued Spanish city. The film is graced by the lush cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, and there is a voice-over by a narrator (voice of Christopher Evan Welch), who describes the ongoing action throughout the course of the film. Performances of principal actors are beautifully nuanced, and at a high level of achievement—thanks to the director.  

The two women are distinguishable types. Vicky is a staid, somewhat conventional woman with academic interests. (Her attraction to Barcelona is inspired by her fascination with Catalonia, especially the works of the architect Gaudi.) Her commitments are all in place, as well as the one to her fiancé, Doug (Chris Messina). Cristina is quite different. She has just had a disappointing love relationship, is unsure of what she wants in life, and has little sense of achievement, except having recently completed a short film about—wouldn’t you guess?—love.

At a restaurant, the two eyeball an artist, Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem), an attractive man they remember seeing at an art exhibition earlier that day. The three exchange glances, after which Juan Antonio approaches their table. Without the drawn-out preliminaries that would distinguish an American approach to hitting on two women, he summarily invites them to fly with him to Oviedo for a night of fun and love making. Cristina is up for what seems to her to be a novel and enticing adventure, whereas Vicky initially protests the outrageous idea. Yet they both find themselves acceding to the plan, whereupon everyone’s world starts to change, and at breakneck speed.

Vicky’s erstwhile composure is shattered after a night of lovemaking with Juan Antonio (a secret she keeps even from Cristina), while Cristina later moves in with him. Into Cristina’s world of new enthusiasms steps Maria Elena, Juan Antonio’s former wife (Penelope Cruz). Maria Elena has recently attempted suicide, and out of concern for her (or emotional enmeshment, depending on the spin you put on it) Juan Antonio brings her home to a love-nest already in place. Maria Elena’s stability seems to strengthen as she gets to realize that the attraction among the threesome is just what the doctor ordered. They all draw closer together, even sexually, as Christina’s talent as a photographer blossoms. (Woody’s ode to the relationship among love, liberation, and creativity?).

The plot continues to thicken as lovers reprise their trysts and separate again. The soufflé has risen in a stunning moment of culinary delight before flattening down to an ordinary existence.

Woody Allen admitted that Vicky Cristina Barcelona fulfilled his fantasy of becoming a European filmmaker. For some time now, he has enjoyed more popularity in Europe than at home. For one who has already gone through his Godard, Truffaut, Fellini, and Bergman phases—not to mention in this film a hint of Pedro Almodóvar—the home away from home must continue to be appealing. But in a rare moment of soul-searching, Allen also admitted that the only place he ever really wanted to be is in his bed. Considering this filmmaker’s prodigious output, not likely.

   

   

    

       

 

 

Texas Hold ‘Em with the Coen Brothers 

David Begelman

            Critics across the land are going ape over No Country For Old Men, a film adaptation of a novel by Cormac McCarthy. The writer was ushered into popularity in 1962 by his Random House editor, Albert Erskine, his literary guide and mentor for over forty years.

            The popular novelist of western macho sagas has unusual tastes; witness his dismissive attitude toward—of all things—such literary giants as Marcel Proust and Henry James, authors who, according to McCarthy, fall short of dealing with the “important issues of life and death.”

Huh? Is there nothing in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and Portrait of A Lady that for him rivals the importance of the bloodletting that is the thematic backbone of his novels? Alas, so much the worse for geniuses who wouldn’t know a genuine Texan thing if they came face to face with it on some nameless mesa. Not that those writers knew anything about mesas, six-shooters, or the standard paraphernalia of real men, the hunks who hunker down amid the sagebrush and the cactuses.

If Joel and Ethan Coen imagine they have delivered an adaptation of McCarthy’s novel dealing importantly with the metaphysics of masculinity, stalking, or carnage they are—at least to my mind—sadly mistaken. For me, their film is nothing but a trussed up cops and robbers escapade beautified by a pair of fashionable directors who, in collusion with such allies in the media as PBS’s Charlie Rose, have managed to convince a vast audience they have something cinematically important to say.

Charlie hosted the Coen brothers, Josh Brolin (who plays Llewelyn Moss in the film) and Javier Bardem (who plays the relentless contract killer, Anton Chigurh). The two characters are studies in implausibility, whatever the frenetic aspect of their unending cat and mouse caper across the Texan landscape. And caper it is, from desolate desert wastes to creepy accommodations in out of the way motels with vents suitably designed to hide the two million dollar stash Llewelyn discovers among the detritus of a drug deal gone bad. It is a landscape for the morose away from home.   

Mr. Bardem, after deserved accolades in Pedro Almodevar films (and stunning portrayals as the father in The Dancer Upstairs and the bedridden patient in The Sea Inside), plays a serial killer too inattentive to personal grooming and the arsenal of weapons he hauls around to give heed to what would routinely mark anyone as jail bait in the eyes of a vigilant police force. He sports a kooky Prince Valiant haircut, dresses in somber clothes as gothic as any vampire’s, and in plain sight lugs around an arsenal of weapons that puts your average serial killer to shame. (Talk about showing one’s hand: The portfolio includes a rifle with a humongous silencer, and a cow-killing pneumatic device that blows locks off doors, scatters the brains of arbitrarily selected victims, and is backed up by an enormous cylinder of compressed air. The contrivance looks like it should be hooked up to a patient with terminal emphysema, hardly to a killer committed to getting a professional job done with as unobtrusive a technology as possible).

Mr. Bardem’s improbably accoutered loony wends his homicidal way undetected through Texas towns that would ordinarily terminate inconspicuous Darwinians on the spot. So how does Anton Chirgurh get away with it? Mysteriously, we are supposed to believe he is as undetectable as he is deadly. Any redneck, exquisitely attuned as he is to signs of deviation in the neighborhood, knows the assumption is flat wrong. You don’t carry on this way in Texas. Maybe in New Jersey.  But even there, only if you’re lucky.

Llewelyn Moss likewise stretches the imagination (although Josh Brolin as a rising Hollywood star has an eloquent, if somewhat highfalutin conception of his role, as evidenced by his remarks in the Charlie Rose interview). We are to believe that this dustbowl mechanic and occasional deer hunter, in fleeing from Anton, suddenly becomes adept at tactics that would put James Bond to shame were the Brit put to a similar challenge. Llewelyn gets popped indoors by Anton near the end of the film, but not before he shoots the killer in the leg from behind a car Anton has riddled with bullets.

Not to be outdone by minor setbacks like shattered viscera, Anton blows up a car outside a drug store, and while the pharmacists in it rush to the street to eyeball the conflagration, Anton raids their repository of drugs in order to obtain the necessary medicine for reparation. He then undertakes what any stone-faced psychotic would do in a heartbeat: perform surgery on his own wrecked appendage. An occasional dunderhead as a murderer, Anton is beyond reproach as part time physician. He even manages to fashion an arm sling for a compound fracture at the end of the film, after a broadside collision with another car. (The message here is that no one can dispatch the ghoul through calculated strategy; he has to be done in by a happenstance as fortuitous as what can happen to anyone who doesn’t keep his eye on a traffic light.)

However disrepaired, Anton doesn’t get his comeuppance at the end of the film. Far from being a model of invincibility, his escape from justice augurs nothing more serious than a cinematic sequel we can see coming a mile away. Shades of Hannibal Lecter, returned repeatedly to American audiences clamoring for more cannibalism. All of which goes to show you that when the public hankers for extreme sadism in its movie-going diet—while harboring residual guilt about the naughty emotion—confusing the meaner item with high art is the name of the undercover game.

Tommy Lee Jones plays the lugubrious Ed Tom Bell, last of a family of West Texas sheriffs. His contribution to No Country For Old Men is cracker-barrel wistfulness over the fact that the killer is not only always one step ahead of him, but leaves him in  sentimental reverie over the good old days, when life was less complicated. (Meaning that killers in the past weren’t as resourceful as the one that leaves this sheriff feeling continually unemployed.) Scenes with his wife and an old crony stuck in a wheel chair are plainly redundant narrative in the film, although they serve to remind us what a sore loser the sheriff is if he puts his mind to it.

Kelly MacDonald as Llewelyn’s wife, Carla Jean, bides her time patiently while the macho thing explodes all around her. Before Anton does Llewelyn in, he promises the latter he will also snuff out his wife. Whether or not this transpires is not exactly clear, because Anton has a habit of making his victims toss a coin to determine whether they live or die, and he is seen exiting the place in which he cornered Carla Jean before putting the question to her.

Carla Jean, in her encounter with the killer, says the most sensible thing in any of the tedious dialogue of the film: that the coin toss has nothing to do with shaping Anton’s decisions; it’s what’s in his head that counts. For that epiphany alone Carla Jean deserves to live (we doubt she does, since her remark catches Anton off guard for a moment so infinitesimally brief, you’d miss it if you blinked). Should the creep move on to cut himself an equally murderous career in any movie sequel, he will be a bit wiser for the instruction.

By the way, the title of the film and McCarthy’s novel is filched from a William Butler Yeats poem, Sailing to Byzantium. It has nothing to do with murder, drug busts, sheriffs, contract killers, all around mayhem, or intimations of Oscars in equally sordid rituals. And it’s ten to one there are movie enthusiasts out there who assume the greatest of modern English language poets was because of this incompletely educated. Monuments of unageing intellect they’re not.