THE PLEASURE OF WATCHING PAYNE

DIRECTED BY ALEXANDER PAYNE

STARRING: GEORGE CLOONEY, SHAILENE WOODLEY, AMARA MILLER, NICK KRAUSE, JUDY GREER, MATTHEW LILLARD, ROBERT FORSTER, MARY BIRDSONG with ROB HUEBEL and BEAU BRIDGES

I feel dreadful for having delayed writing this review by almost a day and having not written it the moment I got back to my room from watching ‘the Descendants.’ For one, I’ve not reviewed Alexander Payne before – I’ve only liked him. I don’t know if I could do justice to someone as prolific and significant as Mr. Payne is to contemporary World Cinema. I didn’t know if I could do justice to someone I love, whose presence and contribution I cherish beyond mere delight.

There are facets to the man, there are sides that complement each other, sides that are of complete contrast that they constitute parts of one absolute whole. Payne, the humanist. Payne, the humorist. Payne, the upper-middle class storyteller, Payne, the undoubted champion of the ‘neighbourhood’, Payne, who cups his hands on the sacred flame of life and lights one’s mind with the illumination of his own self-conscious, guilt-subduing empathy. It has been seven years – seven very long years since ‘Sideways’, the last acceptance of inevitability, of loss, of suffering; of humour in helplessness. ‘Goodbye Solo’ was replenishment, Ramin Bahrani was/is of rare, definitive promise. Thomas McCarthy, Peter Hedges – they’ve all taken the boat to different banks of the same nourishing river.

But there hasn’t quite been the inimitable pleasure, the self-accepted perversion, the sexism, the misogyny as much as feminism and most importantly, relevance in the constrained, flawed and beaten-down morality of an Alexander Payne film character. Every single venture of his (with the exception of his debut film ‘Citizen Ruth’) has been an adaptation; his own characteristic translation of suburban stories richly detailed, neatly chronicled and striking with their simplicity. There is as much elation as there is heartache in these anecdotes as we find, there is glory in their simple little lives. It isn’t just nostalgia working, there is real pleasure in Payne – that which seems stronger in his return.

There had been a recorded downtrend in the sale of the Merlot as opposed to the Pinot Noir variety of red wine when Payne made ‘Sideways’ in 2004, speaking for writers Rex Pickett (who wrote the novel), Jim Taylor and himself through the staunch, stubborn and deadbeat Miles Raymond. With ‘the Descendants’, he heads off the coast and takes us to Hawaii, the surfboarding capital of America, where the landscape as we see it has immense potential to be monetized. In fact, there are a couple of shots where he dabbles with the scenery with the nosiness of a photographer who cannot resist himself, almost advertising the land alongside the fondness that comes with it.

Still, as exotic as the setting might be, it’s not landscapes that he’s selling. It’s the people, whose hearts are just as warm, whose lives as complicated and whose cancers, just as deadly like he puts it through to us in George Clooney’s fed-up, wise-cracking Tom Waits sort of tone in a voiceover right up front. Much like every other movie of his, Payne cuts a portion off the world and puts it beside you, making for a closer watch. These people might have their accents, they might have their weird wardrobe and footwear and extensive seafood diets. But, for all you know, they might be your neighbours.

Matt King (George Clooney with a performance of unforeseen subtlety) is a lawyer, a descendant of a native Hawaiian princess and hence the sole proprietor of a trust that owns about half the land around the place, whose legitimacy of ownership would die out in about seven years, thanks to the ‘Rule against perpetuities.’ He has two children – seventeen-year-old Alexandra ‘Alex’ King (Shailene Woodley, another to add to the list of assertive young actresses) and ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) with a wife (Patricia Hastie) who’s at the hospital in a coma after a misadventure on her motorboat. With the signing-over (to a certain Don Holitzer) coming in a week with all cousins coming together to celebrate the hundreds of millions that they’d cash in on with the sale, Matt has but one thing on his mind as he anxiously awaits his wife getting better so that he could make up for lost time.

Several things happen in succession. Matt finds that this wish of his to get back to his wife on some lost romance is futile. First of all, there’s no way her condition is going to improve. Second of all, he comes to learn from his very own daughter that his wife had been cheating on him. “What makes all the women in my life want to destroy themselves?” he asks. Elizabeth (his wife) with her speedboats. Alex with her drug-indulgence and alcoholism. Scottie, who’s invariably stuck with him, the ‘back-up parent.’ He’s one of those people who thinks the world is burning and doesn’t see his tail catch fire, where life’s this layer of fireproof clothing that makes it sure you don’t feel anything more than just the heat that gets you sweating and exhausted and down on your knees.

The transaction, the intrigue, the insufferable anger and the helpless reconciliation are all tied up in a simple loop filled with thankless, unforgiving, single-minded characters who seem one-dimensional because that’s as much of their stories that we come to know. The outlook is utilitarian, these people come and go in Matt’s linear course of trying to piece the situation together. The Father-in-law who doesn’t know his own daughter but knows enough to love her blind, the Lover, the substitute that she found for Matt in a possible ‘anyone but him’ kind of situation and his wife, the mother of their children, the proponent and platform of whatever he has for a family. The resilient cousin, to whom the sale jumps off the page on an uneventful life otherwise. The impassive youth to whom Alex clings to beat loss and loneliness with nonsense that can be excused.

It’s amazing how real Payne makes these characters look in spite of the fact that it’s like they’re made of cardboard and stuck on a screen. Also interesting is the bunch of actors that he’s assembled to play these characters. Robert Forster (‘Jackie Brown’, ‘Medium Cool’) plays the gruff, disapproving father-in-law, Judy Greer, who’s been in sleazy comedies one too many, is cast as the wife of the other man and Matthew Lillard (Shaggy Rogers in the ‘Scooby Doo’ franchise) plays the other man. Veteran Beau Bridges plays the only cousin with a voice of his own, that which, again, is almost representative of the entire rest of them as well. The only shortcoming could be how disjointed, disconnected and distant these characters are from each other’s life, which, of course, is also a strength considering the satirical, almost defeatist sense of romance that the story shares with the life of the people in it.

Clooney is beautiful as Matt King. Payne knows that, and we know that he knows from the amount of close-up profiles of Clooney that abound throughout the movie. Paul Giamatti can’t call for such focus. But Clooney with his sculpted, elaborately-lined face where every twitch comes out magnified a hundredfold strikes us down with the shaken superiority that he commands with the stripped-down nakedness of Matt King. Kevin Spacey wouldn’t have made for a better option. He’s like Dan (from ‘Dan in Real Life’) but at the onset of trauma, clueless as to what to do with his kids, the surreal weight of responsibility getting to him that he’s having to resort to asking one of them for help. Shailene Woodley as Alex is Alison Pill in ‘Dan in Real Life’. In her, Clooney and little Ms. Miller (as Scottie), we have three beautiful people that the exterior visualization turns out as strong as the actual impact of character. They’re heroes of this glorious story. They have charisma, in short.

Humour is in the moments, not the movie. There are those that make you laugh. There are those where you’d want to, there are those where you wouldn’t want to. But then, there are those times in life both on and off the screen where you can’t help but laugh, where the instance is so overwhelming, so hard in your gut that laughter is about the only thing you can hit it back with. Your humour is your means to retaliate, you retaliate with acceptance. You wish you could fight your way out of the quicksand, but the only way is down. And you find yourself faced with the helplessness of the situation, the raw irony, the heartlessness and the wholesomeness of heart, all at the same time.

‘the Grandeur of Doom’, as Keats once wrote, is a thing of beauty. Incomparable; indestructible. In your face. That’s ‘the Descendants’, in a nutshell.

'GOOD LUCK', I GUESS

DIRECTED BY SUDHISH KAMATH

STARRING: MANU NARAYAN, SEEMA RAHMANI with VASANTH SANTOSHAM and RAJA SEN

NOTE: This review is what you'd call 'awfully long' and is full of spoilers, which doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. It only means you're not to read it until you've watched the movie as well. If your idea of a review is one that would tell you whether or not to watch a movie, then this isn't one of those. This isn't a reference medium. It's my own opinion, and exactly that. A compilation of what I felt and what I thought I should've felt when watching the movie and after. Cheers.

Sudhish Kamath postulates eight phases of a romantic relationship, chronicling them in the expanse of an all-night telephone conversation in ‘Good Night, Good Morning’, his second directorial venture that he apparently co-wrote with Shilpa Ratnam, a woman much younger than both him and his characters. The film follows a linear narrative from ‘Night Before’ to ‘Morning After’ in a split-screen rendition in B&W intercut by flashbacks and fantasy sequences. ‘Before Sunrise’ is an inspiration and the characters discuss it. There are definitely no Woody Allen references in the movie, which, quite frankly, pretends to harbor neither the wit nor the cynicism of standard Allen caricatures. It’s actually borderline Crowe in Linklater-denial, exactly how Kamath describes it to be.

Turiya Omprakash (Manu Narayan) is a second-generation American part of a foursome headed back to Philadelphia from New York where they were out drinking on New Year’s eve. In the car, he calls a woman (Seema Rahmani) whom the four of them chanced upon a little while back, drinking by herself. She doesn’t respond at first, but calls back.

Her name, as we learn much later into the movie as a carefully-deliberated mystery, is Moira, a Greek Goddess of fate. Turiya himself is fished out of philosophical waters, referring to one of the four states of consciousness as mentioned in the Upanishads. “The other three are in the car with me,” he jokes at a point of time as Moira looks his name up on the internet. That joke, as it turns out, is not a joke. I’m defenceless against this sort of contextual naming. And not to mention, tired. There’s a character called JC (played by Raja Sen), abbreviated like in every Indian circle of friends of names too long and hard to pronounce. JC is along with a Hussain (Vasanth Santosham), again an Indian stereotype. But then JC has purpose. He’s the wizard equivalent, the one that makes things happen; who turns water to wine. JC, Kamath confessed, stands for ‘Jesus Christ.’ Exactly what I said in response.

Moira, when constantly pressured, asks Turiya to assume she’s called ‘Nona’, which is like Latin to an actual Greek. The moment had me miss the ‘Vijay’s and the ‘Priya’s, if not the entirely ambiguous ‘Guy’s and ‘Girl’s (as in ‘Once’). In the end, I had to be thankful such redundancies didn’t waste more than a minute of my time. Although I took the liberty to waste a couple of yours in the process.

Anyway, the two of them start with taking off clothes and discussing breasts in an obvious foreplay. Moira asks Turiya if he’d like a banana. He responds saying he prefers melons, where he gives an 8 on 10 to hers. Such cheek isn’t uncalled for. What is conversation if not a sharing of idiosyncrasies? I once ranked nipples with a girl for two hours, from Charlotte Gainsbourg through Julianne Moore down to Sasha Grey. There wasn’t a consensus, we didn’t turn each other on with the topic and it’s not the best that I remember of her. It still qualified.

But then ‘Good Night, Good Morning’ overstays its sitcom-phase. We’ve a half of the movie spent on gags and nonsensical nothings, with the other half speeding up the sink into deeper waters. It’s not a disconnect that I’m talking about. It’s a stretch. Like a joke on both Michael Jackson as well as Justin Bieber in a sort of diversity move to bridge the 90s with the new century. It doesn’t work.

What lifts the movie is the moment it asks to be taken seriously. The second call-back; the ‘Make-up’ in Kamath’s own words. The time when both Moira and Turiya both drop their armour down; when Moira gets into her bathrobe and feigns nakedness. She’s past an attempt to kill herself, we learn from a standout sequence with ‘Silent Night’ playing in the background. He, on the other hand, still isn’t over the woman who left him three years ago. His suffering isn’t unreasonable, definitely, but hers is more pitiful. He’s the ‘virgin Indian boy’ against her ‘the Girl who’s had enough sex before that it doesn’t matter anymore’ stereotype. He hesitates, she groans. To him, it’s a beginning, with all its doubts. To her, it’s yet another tiresome journey. Through the same thing all over again.

The fact that Moira is even remotely interested in one like Turiya, whose sensibility doesn’t get past ‘the Matrix’ and ‘Mills and Boon’ and other ominous signs of the average Indian male says but two things. One - we’re watching a man’s fantasy. For all you know, there could be an ‘Inception’ moment with Turiya waking up in the end and having to spin a totem to check. She calls back, she calls again, she confesses, she calls the shots as he watches and comments. With her, Kamath says he intended to break convention about the perception of women in India or Indian cinema, at least. This being said about a movie he conveniently sets in New York with people who we relate to because Hollywood exists.

Secondly, Moira and Turiya suffer from the same flaw that they discuss at one stage of the movie. They don’t want the same thing. Not exactly. Moira wants solace, Turiya wants love (or so he thinks). To her, he’s a doormat; the safety-catch. And someone who’d love being so. In ‘Before Sunrise’, we worried about Jesse and Celine losing passion by forcing to stay physically connected. Here, it’s a redundancy – the tip of an iceberg with a promise for more. But the tip is off the parent, broken and floating. Turiya is a limitation that Moira, with her unboundedness, would outlast. It’s a disarming sort of certainty.

Her final decision, to Turiya, is a dream, given that he had already taken his shot at giving her up. For Moira, on the other hand, it’s a ticket to a rehab routine that would have her coming off stronger and cleaner in the end. He would’ve resuscitated her, nursed her back to health. She, on her part, would give him an experience to remember, in bed and out. They’d break as better people.

Of course, I’m extrapolating on the actual script which despairs to end with hope – a reflection of the very same creative liberty that I take to criticize it as well. It is a work of fiction that’s as open to the viewer as it was to the one who came up with it. Kamath has schoolboy aspirations with his concept, where he wants to ‘succeed’ in his romance no matter what. Even if ‘success’ meant taking the first step towards a sure-shot downfall. I’m not referring to the Allen-assertion that all love fades. I’m saying that this one will, one hundred percent. It’s about a woman who decides in the end to go with the flow, and a man who’d always try to wing it to his favour. It makes for a sad story, where the touch of optimism is but actual false hope.

This, ideally, is what one expects a co-writer to rectify, more so because it’s a woman. Or is she? In Turiya and Moira, I see an action-reaction pair, of a person talking to oneself. They’re like alter-egos, like they’re parts of the same schizophrenic whole. Like Eugene and Miriam from Winterbottom’s ‘Butterfly Kiss.’ The parasite and the willing host. It still is ‘love’, I don’t deny it. But between whom? It’s Kamath courting Kamath, as far as I can see, sticking to movie-standards to beat his folly.

A collage of tributes too many, ‘Good Night, Good Morning’ is pretty much the Critic’s movie, even if technically sound and runs like a racehorse. Elegant and carefully put together with a majestic music score, it’s a roller-coaster ride with no time to think twice. But then, it disappoints in that it fails to even make an effort at honesty. It’s an elaborate gimmick and is content to be so, riding on the fact that everyone, at one point or another, would’ve known a girl like Moira – too wise, too damaged, too out-of-reach. The film is beautiful because she is; ugly because it’s too much so. She is lent a hand to get her out of the water, he has volunteered to replace her at the bottom. And Kamath, only too gloriously, cashes in on this misshapen connection.

Linklater wrote ‘Before Sunrise’ with Kim Krizan, with ‘Before Sunset’ getting its lines from its lead pair in Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. I see this co-writing venture between Kamath and Rathnam as a move to touch upon that nostalgia, if not emulate the same. I cannot rationalize Ms. Rathnam’s involvement in any other way. It’s like if Kamath had a wife, she’d have done the music score, playing Nancy Wilson to his Crowe-desperation. At least, he’d have had her credited for it.

But I still do not dismiss this movie. It’s a nice watch, it has its moments. And I, for one, have seen a Moira before. Like I’ve seen a Summer Finn or even an Alyssa Jones. But then this movie is like I dreamt about getting her and then came forward, calling it real because I can recollect it and put it in bullet-points. That’s what Kamath has done. He’s put a fool's dream before a world that won’t disagree. It's silly, it's trivial, it's good to watch. And he likes it, like a writer likes his work. I wish him luck.

A PHOENIX FROM ITS FLAME

DIRECTED BY DRAKE DOREMUS

STARRING: FELICITY JONES, ANTON YELCHIN, JENNIFER LAWRENCE, CHARLIE BEWLEY, ALEX KINGSTON, OLIVER MUIRHEAD, FINOLA HUGHES, BEN YORK JONES and CHRIS MESSINA

You remember the scene in Richard Linklater’s ‘Before Sunrise’ (1995) where the couple-by-chance decide not to exchange contact details in a pessimistic move to at least safeguard their encounter, if not give it a chance to succeed, vowing to meet after 6 months of no physical disturbance instead? Well, ‘Like Crazy’ takes the poison. We watch two really young, tactless, heart-on-sleeve romantics torture themselves with shock therapy sessions of pangs and subsequent resuscitation back into their dream and then shoved back on course towards either impending doom or sure-shot monotony that’s drearier than their flower-patterned notebooks and their heart-shaped beds.

Drake Doremus writes and directs this film like a love letter. It’s his own experience, we hear. Semi-autobiographical. That means the names have been changed. And locations, possibly; the rest of the exterior. Even characters, perhaps. Anna (Felicity Jones, with an incredibly endearing performance) tells her Boss at the magazine that she runs errands for that her writing is about someone who’s inspired her a lot and that writing about him is her way of giving something back. Jacob (Anton Yelchin) can only draw pictures of chairs when he puts pen on paper. This film has materialized. I guess that leaves one with no assumptions on who’s who.

But then that’s irrelevant. True that in a film like this, we (the audience) play the sick-in-the-head sort of postman who opens the letters that pass through his hands. Much like how in ‘Blue Valentine’ we played the guilt-ridden neighbour who listens in on next-door fights. We squirm in course of stories as these, however sumptuous. They’re like cholesterol that’s straight out of the stove and piping hot. But these, we find, are legitimized by cinema, the pervert-art. There shall be no check on pleasure, no holds barred. The correspondence is only as juicy as the words communicated with, the sex-tape only as good as the intimacy that’s visible. Empathy works against the viewer, but without it there isn’t really a point. Success lies in how disarming the experience turns out to be, fighting against one’s self-disenchantment. You believe, you feel. You feel, they win.

Jacob and Anna meet at college, like each other, get cozy and get madly attached, all with complete knowledge that Anna will have to leave the country to go back to England, where she’s from. At one instance, Anna overstays her Visa, reluctant to leave Jacob for the summer, an impulsive, immensely mindless decision without which the film wouldn’t have been around. We’re not to ask if the summer compensated in memories for the disaster that it turned out to be. It doesn’t matter. Not to us, not to Doremus. He jump-cuts to the point where Anna’s told she can be in America no more and is ushered back to England with but just a semblance of contact between them and their odd time-zones. Guess they’d just have to be thankful she’s not further from the East.

Anna’s parents are very much involved, Jacob’s mother is merely mentioned. They talk of marriage when Jacob tours England to visit. There are two things that discomfort him at that point. One is the obvious fact that Anna seems to be looking for alternatives. The other is the fact that he has one of his own. Then again, two things still seem to keep the couple hooked with each other, even if in varying degrees. A chair that has ‘Like Crazy’ engraved on the underside and a bracelet that spells ‘Patience’, both gifted to Anna by her woodman lover. As a counter, she throws loads of love and confusion, which, in course of time, morphs into clearer love. Her indulgence is a full-blown storm while his is but a cloudy mess. And they’re raining in different continents. That, in short, is their problem.

Jennifer Lawrence as Samantha (shortened to a tomboyish ‘Sam’) is Jacob’s alternative, before I forget. Although I doubt if anyone can. Both Yelchin and Jones grow in course of the film, Yelchin distinctively uncomfortable with those parts where he’s had to feign an innocence uncharacteristic of both his physical and emotional self. Jones, on the other hand, undergoes a near-perfect transition. Her performance carries the film and the entire weight of Doremus’ intentions, honest or not. With her, he finds his baby in a safe, immensely likeable pair of hands. Lawrence, on her part, contributes with a maturity beyond the ages of both herself and her character. As Roger Ebert would put it, in her we have a very important actress. Of this generation and the ones to come.

Pain turns pleasurable the second time around. The best way to beat it is to remember it; not forget. Doremus would agree. I remember telling a friend about how death takes people who haven’t even come to think of it yet. ‘Like Crazy’ shows a separation equivalent. It’s humble. It’s helpless. It fights fire just to get burned, and it burns in a flame that’s a glorious orange. The flame flickers, but it’s there. I hope you understand. It’s an honest love story with a likeable lead pair. And Jennifer Lawrence. She spikes it further. It works.