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Archive for the ‘DRUGS’ Category

Absence Of Malice

04 Jan

Absence Of Malice – directed by Sydney Pollack. Newsroom Drama. 116 minutes Color 1981.

★★★★★

The Story: The son of a former gangster is exposed in a Miami newspaper as under criminal investigation and tries to learn the truth from the female reporter who printed it.

~

When Mildred Dunnock came home from working with Paul Newman in Sweet Bird Of Youth, she told me “He’s always acting.” I didn’t ask her what she meant by this, though I knew she liked it, but I am going to report what I assumed she meant.

He is always generating.

What that means is that the character he is playing and the scene he is playing and the words he is saying and the attitudes he assumes all arise from a ground of chosen acting energy that you can’t notice, because if you did it would looked acted.

It certainly is true here. Newman’s task as an actor is to create a character who is competent. To do this he hauls liquor cartons, deals with strike breakers, opens fine wine, takes care of a 1943 yacht, serves a picnic on it, and reserves himself sexually by courting. He is always shown in competence-requiring actions. Ordinary everyday competence is the characteristic he must establish, because the finale of the film depends upon unobtrusive competence. You’re never to notice it; that’s how he gets away with it. It is his main character decision in the part, and he is right. Everything I said he does, he does. And as he does them he does them without effort or fear – slowly, carefully, as though he had done them many times before. He never “acts” them. The part of him that acts is another part entirely, and you can’t see it.

For to create this competence, it must spring from a center second nature to him: the thing he gets around in: the inner limousine of the Actor. Which you never see.

Newman’s habit of generating this conscious and constant energy is that of a race driver holding the car in neutral. The problem for Newman is that this tends to slow down momentum and get dull. You can see him practically fall asleep in Buffalo Bill And The Indians and Quintet. (They were Altman films and everyone smoked dope like mad; perhaps that’s what it was.)

Newman is 54 here admitting to 47, and he looks good. He entered films when he was 30, so he always looked younger, and, of course, to the day he left the screen he kept his figure and looked good. I notice when talking to him over the phone that he had most beautiful speaking voice. People talk about his looks, figure, blue eyes, but an actor’s best tool is his voice, and he had a great one. Check it out.

The ever-fretful Sally Field, a top notch actor, plays the reporter, who takes upon herself to write stories that cause a great deal of harm. To me it seemed the character was not authorized to write any of them, but the story has them meanly instigated by an assistant D.A., beautifully played by Bob Balaban. Wilford Brimley enters in to wrap-up the story and rap knuckles. It’s good to see Luther Adler as a Godfather in his last film role. Melinda Dillon plays the unbalanced friend of Newman so well that you think Dillon herself is unbalanced. But the film is not about acting but about an ethical crime.

I liked the film. I went with its pace, as it took its time to move through the examination of its subject dramatically, carefully, and fairly. Journalism put on the hot seat. Good.

 
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Posted in Bob Balaban, DIRECTED BY: Sydney Pollack, Paul Scofield, PERSONAL DRAMA, Sally Field

 

Gone Dark

24 Mar

Gone Dark (aka The Limit) — directed by Lewin Webb — Crime Drama. An elderly woman is suspected by a drug-addicted policewoman of stashing a fortune in drugs and holds her at bay to find it. 83 minutes Color 2004.

**

Claire Forlani makes a disastrous mis-strategy in playing this part. It is a two-fold error. The first and dominant error is to play her as self-pitying, which means that, since she is always whiningly sorry for herself, one cannot pity her, and so one can never get behind her or exercise any patience on her behalf. Forlani is English, and the second error is to use a Lower East Side Italian accent for her, but never once to get behind the person behind the accent. This reduces her to grimacing and “using” her extraordinarily supple and sensual mouth for effect. Even had this error not been made by the principal actress, the film’s story is improbable in its execution, a fault that might have been remedied by strong narrative editing, but the editing is flaccid. As is the direction by a director who does not seem to know how to rehearse actors at all. We have the great Pete Postlethwaite great in all his scenes, yes, and we have superstar Lauren Bacall, who uses her Virgo cool to play a lady who does not suffer fools gladly, but who does suffer pistols gladly. She chooses to play her character Mae as a lady who sits back and contemplates how things shall unravel, which works, but the director might have given her an alternate or two. The film is entirely lacking in tension and conviction. Forlani describes it as a slice of life, but such a film cannot be that; it can only a highly charged artifact, made entertaining by its suspense, an ingredient the lack of which herein makes the cake fall flat.

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Blow

15 Dec

Blow – directed by Ted Demme – a young man grows into a big time drug dealer, then withers. 2 hours color 2001.

* * * * *

Johnny Depp can carry a film all right all right. The trouble is, as the film goes on, the burden gets lighter and as the burden gets lighter the film is harder for him to carry, because there’s nothing left to carry, until he almost staggers under the exhausting weight of nothing. And this is noticeable here. The material is actually quite thin. Its first thinness is that it is about drugs to begin with, and not really about any conflict or irresolution between the characters or even in the characters. For years Depp has played noble crooks and cranks doomed to betrayal by life and love and oh so many octopi. And he had made other films about drugs, but films about drugs, stories about drugs, always end up collapsed partly because drugs are not human and partly because drugs are a power larger than any human, no matter how successful one might be in doing business with them. So the final thinness is that all films about drugs become enfeebled by the foregone conclusion that they will not end well. Ray Liotto and Rachel Griffiths are especially good as Depp’s parents, and Griffiths, who is younger than Depp and Australian, nails her New England accent and character with one blow. This is a very well made, beautifully shot and written and filmed piece. The wigs are dreadful and in them Depp and Penelope Cruz look like … well, they look like they’re wearing wigs. As Elia Kazan said, “No wigs. Wigs always look like wigs.” And he was right. So there is never a single moment when the wigs here give character registration. All they give is: “Why is Johnny Depp wearing another peculiar wig?” Depp, of course, we root for, not because of his performance, but because it is inherent to his nature that we do so. Will It Work? is our suspense. Will He Get Away With It? How Will it Turn Out? Yes. Yes. And Badly.

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