Photo Courtesy © Twentieth Century Fox

Australia

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann

Written by: Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman

In the tradition of grand old romantic epics like Gone With The Wind or Doctor Zhivago, Australia marks Baz Luhrmann's return after seven years away from the cinema. His previous three films, Strictly Ballroom, Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge were all flashy, colorful, theatrical treats that he came to refer to as his “Red Curtain Trilogy.” Having seen nothing but these flamboyant and audacious productions, it was hard to imagine what Luhrmann would be like without the Red Curtain effect. Turns out that he's not so bad. However, he's also not as exciting as he is when he's working his magic, exploding color and quirkiness on to the screen.

Australia follows Nicole Kidman's Lady Sarah to the dry Northern Territory, where she is determined to sell her cattle ranch. Cowboy Hugh Jackman is there to help herd the cattle and of course, become the object of Sarah's affections—a spot he shares with a young half-breed Aboriginal kid who they must protect from the authorities who would send the "creamy" to a Church-run mission. Oh yeah, and World War II is starting to simmer. It's a big story that's told with style and class—just not the trademark style of Luhrmann. Which for some people is probably preferable, but as much as I enjoyed the story and properly swooned and sighed over its three hour running time, I felt a twinge of disappointment that it wasn't the sort of Baz Luhrmann extravaganza I've grown to know and love.

Rick@picturesandframesmagazine.com

Photos Courtesy © Overture Films, New Line Cinema, IFC Films

The Unlikely Christmas Trilogy: Nothing Like the Holidays, Four Christmases, A Christmas Tale

What would the Christmas season be like without the appropriate holiday-themed family movies? Granted, we have Oscar-contenders to distract us from the lighter-often-crappier-fare, but overall I tend to stay away from the movies selling “Christmas spirit.” And yet, thanks to the irresistible combo of Freddy Rodríguez, Reese Witherspoon and Mathieu Amalric, I found myself watching not one but three holiday movies at the theater this year.

Which is pretty much the way that I feel about Reese Witherspoon. I had my "Witherspoon Renaissance" a couple of years back while watching a TBS marathon of Legally Blonde. 'Genius!' I shouted, and it was feminista love between Witherspoon and I ever since. But even I have to admit that when I first saw the trailers for Four Christmases I shook my head in horror: It didn't really look funny let alone plot-worthy. It was written by four (yikes!) unknown writers, although it was directed by Seth Gordon, who's King of Kong was pretty damn entertaining. Gordon and his writers did something right because the movie is also oddly entertaining. Nothing particularly memorable happens in the film but it was an enjoyable hour and a half spent with Witherspoon, Vaughn, a hilarious Jon Favreau, Sissy Spacek and Kristen Chenoweth (a completely unrecognizable Tim McGraw also co-stars). Not all movies have to be works of art and considering the Christmas-induced coma that I found myself in when I saw this film, no-brainer comedies often fit the bill.

Mathieu Amalric was the main reason that I went to see A Christmas Tale. Sure, Catherine Deneuve, Chiara Mastroianni and the sexy Melvil Poupaud also star in this film about a French family reunited after many years at Christmastime, but ever since I first laid eyes on Amalric in Munich I was hooked. Then came Diving Bell and the Butterfly and he soon became my current reincarnation of Daniel Auteuil. There's something oddly intriguing and sexual about Amalric that I can never quite place and it certainly served him well for his role here as Henri, the black sheep of the family.

The performances in A Christmas Tale are top-notch—especially by Jean-Paul Roussillon as the father—but the direction and story leave something to be desired. This is the first film that I watch from writer-director Arnaud Desplechin and the best that I can say about that is that I find him to be very French. I don’t mean that to come off as harsh or uncultured as it does but really, with incestuous and adulteress pairings, random narratives that go nowhere and diatribes that are clearly meant to be deeper than they actually are, I haven’t seen a more typically French film since I saw Christophe Honoré’s Ma Mere recently. No one does sex and suffering like the French but when there is no substantial story to back either up, emptiness is all that you’re left feeling.

That said, A Christmas Tale was the most un-Christmas-esque film of the bunch, and yet its odd and often idiosyncratic family members are genuine enough onscreen to make it a film worth viewing.

Lily@picturesandframesmagazine.com

Photo Courtesy © Paramount Pictures

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Directed by: David Fincher

Written by: Eric Roth and Robin Swicord

Starring: Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Taraji P. Henson, Julia Ormond, Jason Flemyng and Elias Koteas.

With all of the hype surrounding The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and with the intriguing trailer that surfaced a couple of months back, I definitely had high expectations for David Fincher’s latest film. Fincher’s last film, Zodiac, is remarkable and continues to be one of the best films that I’ve seen in years, and that is something that I often find myself remarking about his work in general: from Se7ven to The Game to Fight Club to Panic Room to the aforementioned Zodiac, David Fincher makes movies that are saturated in the mood of their story, are visually stimulating and often groundbreaking. At the core of all of these films, all of them thrillers, is a central purpose that drives both the story and the audience through the arc of the film. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button took Fincher years to make and develop, but watching his end result makes me wonder exactly what it was that drove him to tell this fairy tale in the first place? His purpose does not translate clearly to the film.

Nor does the story’s. Much has been made about the movie’s 2 hour and 45 minute length, but that didn’t bother me nearly half as much as the film’s plot. There were so many odd elements to the film—from the present-day-Katrina setting juxtaposed with Daisy’s (the luminous Cate Blanchett) flashbacks (a technique that I hated in Titanic and once again fails here) to the completely useless, except as a narrative tool, underused existence of her daughter as played by Julia Ormond (crazy that she was once the love interest of Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall)—but all of these elements could have worked had there been more at play in the film other than a cute and odd fairly tale.

Grasping at a deeper meaning or a commentary on wisdom and age in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is really hard to do. I know that was probably Fincher’s as well as Pitt’s intention but I find it to be reaching. Fincher accomplished a technical feat by casting Pitt in the role of Benjamin, and watching him age and regress to youth again is truly fascinating, but Pitt doesn’t bring a lot of warmth or depth to Benjamin. His performance is oddly reminiscent of his take on death in the awful drama Meet Joe Black, with a little more charm thrown in for fairy tale’s sake. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button shares a lot in common with Tim Burton’s Big Fish, but unlike that film which managed to both develop a story, a moral and a fairy tale all while wowing us with special effects, Benjamin Button is just, well, disappointingly nice. Which is an adjective that I never thought I would use to describe a David Fincher film.

Lily@picturesandframesmagazine.com

DVD'S:

Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

Directed by: Takashi Miike

Written by: Takashi Miike and Masa Nakamura

From the opening scenes of Sukiyaki Western Django, you start getting an uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. You know what I’m talking about—the feeling that this is going to be either really good or extremely bad. The latter seemed to be the case with this one, a painful disappointment from the cult Japanese film director Takashi Miike. Originally, I was expecting this film to be something along the lines of Stephen Chow’s hilarious Kung Fu Hustle (you can thank the preview for that). Instead, I found myself watching a bad spoof of Kung Fu Hustle meets High Plains Drifter.

If you were to mix a cheesy Spaghetti Western, a samurai movie with no samurais, and an Anime feature that’s not really animated, in a bucked filled with unfunny, poorly written, plot-less crap then maybe you would come close to describing the film. (Yes, Quentin Tarantino is in the film and yes, he’s quite funny, but it’s not enough to save the movie.) Sukiyaki Western Django is based on characters created by Sergio Corbucci, a pioneer of the Spaghetti Western. The film’s poor excuse of a plot revolves around a lone gunfighter that comes to a remote western town called Nevada. The town of Nevada is run by two warring clans—the reds and the whites—each looking to strike it rich mining or stealing gold. Initially the lone gunfighter offers himself and his skills as a killer to the clan who will give him the largest share of the gold. Instead the gunfighter decides to help the remaining townspeople get their town back from the clans.

One of the things that really bothered me about the movie was that Japanese actors who clearly have no idea what they are saying speak every line in English. But the thing that actually broke the camel’s back for me was the character of the schizophrenic sheriff; I have never seen anything more annoying. Even though the film is nice to look at, it’s the flaws in the story and the sheer absurdity of the situations that make this movie a must miss.

Juanmarcos@picturesandframesmagazine.com

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening

Stuff Happens!

The title sequence. Clouds and stuff.

Chris: The sky got darker. It happened.

Two blonde chicks on a bench in Central Park. Someone screams. They see people clawing at themselves. A guy starts walking backward while others just stand in place. One of the blonde chicks seems frozen. She snaps out long enough to say, “What page was I on? Page…page…” Then she rams a large hair stick into her throat.

Chris: That reminds me, I have to kill myself…page.

Elsewhere in NYC. A construction site and a man falls. The other workers rush over and call for an ambulance.

Richard: Who’s Christ McKenzie?

Chris: He said “Christ, McKenzie fell.”

Suddenly another man hits. A worker looks up and sees people walking off of the top of the site and falling to their deaths.

Next scene opens on Mark Wahlberg teaching a class. Lots of “Say hello to your mother for me” jokes go around. Richard hasn’t seen the “SNL” skit so we pause and show it to him. Then we show him the Mark Wahlberg rebuttal. Laughs all around. Seriously though, Andy Samberg’s impression is spot on. Every sentence that Wahlberg speaks ends with his voice going up a little and no matter what he says I hear him saying, “Hello Donkey. Say hello to your mother for me.”

A principal or something interrupts his class in the middle of him asking his students why all the bees are dying. All the teachers are gathered in the auditorium and are told that there’s been a terrorist attack in Central Park. They’re releasing the students out into the streets.

The film ominously lingers on a quote on the chalkboard: “If the bee were to disappear off the face of the globe then man would only have four years of life left.” – Einstein.

John Leguizamo is also a teacher. I find that hard to believe. I saw Spawn.

Mark Wahlberg gets home to his wife (we deem her too good for him), Zooey Deschanel. A news report talks about the toxin. It causes you to kill yourself.

Richard: I think that she’s playing a role where she’s not as adorable as she usually is.

Chris: I think it’s her hair. She has very big hair.

Zooey, Mark, and Leguizamo all meet at a train station to head out and, I guess, get as far from NY as they can. Zooey and Leguizamo have weird tension. Jeanne and Richard decide that they’re having an affair together. Either that or Mark Wahlberg is having an affair with him.

Chris: That’s a small train.

Richard: That’s what she said.

Chris: That doesn’t make any sense, Richard.

Shots of Philadelphia. A cop and a taxi driver chat in traffic. That’s hard enough to believe. Then everyone stops walking. It’s Happening! A little doggy runs away. The cop shoots himself. The taxi driver gets out, gets the gun, and shoots himself. A lady with major cankles walks over and shoots herself, too.

Word gets to the main three characters on the train that Philadelphia’s been attacked. It started in a park. Parks are rising up from their years of enslavement, forced to pleasure the ungrateful masses and are now striking back! Our blood will feed their roots!

The train suddenly stops in Filbert, PA. It will be the last stop. Wahlberg harasses the train conductor until he admits that they lost contact with Mission Control or whatever it is that directs trains so they’re stopped. Mark Wahlberg actually says, “We’re in a small town. Nothing will happen in a small town.” Does this guy get to the movies at all? He starts trying to talk to John Leguizamo’s little girl by talking about auras and moods and stuff.

Richard: He’s wearing a mood ring. He’s a science teacher wearing a mood ring.

Chris: More importantly, he’s a 40-year-old man wearing a mood ring.

A woman sitting next to them pulls out her iPhone to show them a video she received. It’s a zoo worker who chooses his suicide method to be death by lion enclosure. He sort of pokes around near the lions until one grabs his arm and magically pulls it off at the elbow. He sticks out his remaining arm toward another lion who gladly grabs it and also magically yanks it off at the elbow. I’ve watched enough Discovery channel to know that is not how lions kill shit! They go for the throat. I’ve never seen them pull the legs off of a gazelle for the fuck of it.

Everyone from the train is huddled in a diner watching the TV reports of the terrorism spreading across the northeast. One guy asks where they are on that map. The diner guy says, “Right in the middle!” Everyone panics. Someone says that it’s not happening 90 miles from where they all are so they should go there. Mass exodus. I don’t understand. It’s clearly not happening right the fuck where they are so why don’t they stay there!!! Ugh.

Richard: We’re all gonna die some day, dude.

So suddenly every single person—except our main characters—has a car. Did they miss the line at the rental car place when every other person from the train got a car? Wahlberg finds a guy going to a farm that will take them. John Leguizamo decides to go alone in a jeep that’s heading to where his wife was at when they left. He ditches his daughter with Wahlberg and Zooey. There’s weirdness between Leguizamo and Deschanel. Totally fucking.

Back on the farm. The weird guy that picked them up starts rambling about how hot dogs get a bad rap. They’re a cool shape. Cool shape? Like Penis-y? He also talks to his plants. Chris and Jeanne are feeling that this will somehow come back to the plants. And their sinister plot for world domination.

Back to Leguizamo. In his car with that family they drive through a street where like dozens of people have hung themselves from light poles. Leguizamo tries to calm the screaming daughter in the car by giving her a math riddle. What the fuck? That would just make me even more unhappy. They all try to cover the vents and stuff to keep the terrorism out. Leguizamo looks up though and sees a small rip in the soft top of the jeep. Suddenly the driver accelerates and smashes the car into a tree. Leguizamo survives, sits down in the street and slits his wrists with some broken glass.

I’m not sure if I’m conveying this properly, but this movie is bad. Really bad. Like Sci-Fi channel bad. I feel ashamed for M. Night. He should do some community service to make up for this.

Wahlberg in the jeep comes to a road littered with bodies. The farm couple turns back and meets a military jeep. The soldier says the base has been affected. There are still two directions left so they’re trying to figure out where they can go. Cars happen to come in from those two directions and after speaking with those people they realize that all directions are contaminated.

Richard: (At one point the soldier says, “Cheese and Crackers” as an expletive.) I like that the only remaining soldier is like Elmer Fudd.

The soldier decides that they should all stay where they are. Now there’s a big group of people at the crossroad. A woman is talking to her daughter at college. Everyone else there is dead. She’s locked in her room but a few minutes into the call the daughter starts saying “calculus” over and over again and then kills herself. Wahlberg takes the phone.

Richard: (As Wahlberg) Stacey, you want me to say hello to your mother for you?

The farmer starts talking to Zooey and telling her that plants can target specific threats like tobacco plants getting wasps to attack particular caterpillars that are munching on them. So plants ARE killing people. Central Park never seemed so scary.

The soldier decides they need to head to somewhere without any real population. A local realtor suggests some Podunk place to the West.

Chris: (mocking the soldier) It’s attacking populations of people. We need to head West and stick together like a population…all together.

Everyone starts walking West together. During the walk Zooey Deschanel rambly confesses to going out and having dessert with a guy from work when she told Wahlberg that she was working late. He’s offended. A breeze rolls through the brush.

Jeanne: The plants are talking.

The soldier starts shouting, “My firearm is my friend. It will not leave my side.” He draws his gun…

The group with Wahlberg is just over the hill from them. They start to hear gunshots. Zooey Deschanel freaks out about being uninvolved observers. Wahlberg yells that he needs a damn minute. He decides that the plants targeted the other group because it was bigger. The part of the field that they’re on may not have been triggered. They need to split up into smaller groups. They divide into two groups and start running. Chris and Richard put their bets on the group with the fat chick dying first.

Wahlberg: “Could this really be happening?”

Happening!

Chris: (As Wahlberg) “I produce ‘Entourage.”

Wahlberg finds a house and they all go in and plan a strategy for getting to that Podunk place. He looks up and sees a plant in the corner of the room. He starts talking to it in a very soothing voice to, I guess, try and broker a peace agreement. When he gets close enough he realizes that it’s a plastic plant.

Chris: The vampires are playing baseball. [A review of the movie Twilight suggested that this term might replace “jumped the shark.”]

They leave the house and head out toward the fields. The stand on a hill and see two groups of people come together at the house they were just at. It’s too many people! A man turns on a giant ass-like golf course lawnmower and then lies down in front of it.

Wahlberg is walking with two teenagers. One says he likes Wahlberg’s mood ring and used to have one.

Richard: Yeah, when I was like 11.

They reach another house. The little girl gets on a tire swing attached to a tree branch.

Richard: Oh, you’re gonna piss off the tree.

Chris: Man that tree is so pissed.

They peer through the shutters and see a man in the house but the man won’t let them in for fear of contamination.

Chris: It’s Bruce Willis. He’s dead! He’s been dead the whole time!

One of the teenage kids is a jackass and starts kicking on the door and shouting that they want food for a little girl. The door opens a crack and the guy in the house sticks out a gun and shoots the kid in the chest. Then another muzzle comes through the window shutters and shoots the other teen in the head. Wahlberg, Zooey and the kid run for it.

Wahlberg and the gang come to another house. They meet an older woman on her porch. She says that Wahlberg is “eyeing her lemon drink.”

She invites them in for food but she’s totally crazy. She starts saying something about “who’s chasing who” I guess meaning is Wahlberg trying to fuck Zooey or vice versa. Then the little girl reaches out on the table for something and the old lady smacks her hand. Fucking crazy. She grows her own food and has no contact with anyone outside. No TV. No radio. When they start telling her what’s HAPPENING she tells them not to.

Zooey hits the fucking nail on the head by saying that there’s something “exorcist-y” about the old lady.

Wahlberg wakes up the next morning. Jeanne guesses that he’ll roll over and find the old lady naked in his bed wearing Zooey’s face but that doesn’t happen. He walks downstairs and finds a life size doll on a bed. The crazy lady barges in and starts screaming that he’s trying to touch her things and she wants him to leave. He sees the old lady outside in her garden talking to her plants. But then she starts to walk backward! Not backward! The wind blows through the trees and now we know that the plants are seeking revenge!

Richard: I’m no meteorologist but I’m pretty sure it’s raining bitches.

Wahlberg runs into the house and closes the door on the old lady. But the old lady is being driven by evil terrorist plants. She rams her head through several windows to let the evil in!

Wahlberg backs into another room of the house and shuts himself in. He hears Zooey and the little girl through a pipe in the house that leads back to a shed. It was used for communication when slaves were fleeing to the North.

Richard: A speaking tube. Really?

He and Zooey start having some romantic heart-to-heart through the tube. Mostly about his fucking mood ring! If I’m gonna die please don’t start talking to me about a $2 mood ring and how meaningful the colors were when we met. “What color means love?” GAG!

Wahlberg says he doesn’t want to die like this and that he’s going to go out and be with her. They walk towards each other across the menacingly windy field, hold hands and walk back into the farmhouse.

Chris: “It’s okay, plants. I’m cool. I produce ‘Entourage.’”

Richard: Nature hates us.

Chris: No, M. Night hates us.

Richard: The feeling is kind of mutual.

So far neither of them has tried to kill themselves.

Cut to three months later. Zooey is sending the little girl off to her first day back at school.

Chris: I still see plants. Wouldn’t they have burned all of the plants? I would have.

Close up on a TV screen in a house. Turns out that it was the plants. It was an act of nature and there is no explanation. The scientist believes it was a warning. The host of the show doesn’t buy it.

Zooey has plants in her fucking bathroom! What’s up with this! Why aren’t people more upset about the plants-trying-to-kill-us thing? She takes a pregnancy test. It’s positive. She and Wahlberg hug.

Cut to France. A park. Everyone stops walking. Oh no! Plants hate Parisians.

Chris: That was truly a horrible movie.

Watching the credits we see that M. Night has put himself in the credits as the guy that Zooey has tiramisu with. The guy that was neither seen nor heard throughout the entire film. WTF!?

Richard: I don’t think that Zooey Deschanel would have gone out with a guy who looks like M. Night Shyamalan.

Chris: Because Zooey Deschanel is racist?

Richard: No, she’s just too hot for him.

Chris: He might as well have put himself as, like, Jesus. Not seen, but presence felt.

We start watching the behind the scenes footage and M. Night says that the studio wanted him to make the film but they had one request…

Richard: That M. Night not be in it?

That it be a hard R rating.

It really wasn’t all that R rated.

It happened! Never see this movie. But say hello to your mother for me.

The Saturday Night Itinerant Brooklyn Gang is:

Jeanne Lopez, Cookie Monster

Rick Sayre, Pop-Culture Critic

Christopher Wilson, Vampire Hunter

BrooklynGang@picturesandframesmagazine.com

MUSIC:

Kanye West – 808s & Heartbreak

I initially hesitated embracing 808s & Heartbreak when it came out a month ago because I just can’t stand the auto-tune vocal effect that Kanye West uses in every song. I know that right now it’s popular to use this effect in Hip-Hop but years from now everybody will be making fun of all the artists that thought it was cool. Much like what happened with Disco, the talk box, synthpop or that hit song from Cher that everyone chose to forget (yes, I know you know it but please keep it to yourself). With this album Kanye West has made it very clear that he wants to do more than just rap, but we all know that his singing voice isn’t the greatest.

Unfortunately, in order to overcome this minor setback, Kanye decided to use the auto-tune vocal effect as a way to make his crooner-wish come true. Well, here’s a suggestion for your next album, Mr. West: You’re already an incredible artist both as a producer and as a rapper, there is absolutely no need for you to be the next Usher, Justin Timberlake or R. Kelly. I mean, Puffy got it. So with that out of the way I feel it’s only fair that I give you some insight into the album and why I think that it’s worth buying. (So far my favorite tracks are “Say You Will,” “Love Lockdown,” “Paranoid,” “Bad News,” and “Coldest Winter.”)

808s & Heartbreak deals with loss and heartbreak, specifically with the loss of his mother Donda West and of his long-time girlfriend Alexis Phifer. You could say that this is his most personal album to date but this is always subject to interpretation. Throughout the album Kanye chooses to use live drums, the electronic beats of the Roland TR-808, various synth sounds and live orchestration. I feel that in the making of 808s & Heartbreak Kanye took a minimalist approach in order to highlight the lyrics and arrangements. This album is a change of direction from his traditional Dance, Hip Hop and R&B inspired tracks. Most of you will embrace 808s & Heartbreak right away, but for many Kanye fans (myself included) this will be the album that grows on you. Overall, I have to agree with most critics and give this album the praise it deserves. I just wish that I could go back in time and steal the auto-tune effect from the studio the day before they decided to start recording vocals for the album.

Juanmarcos@picturesandframesmagazine.com

Nina Simone - To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story

My history as a listener of Nina Simone has tended to be the same old story over and over. I hear something amazing, decide to explore her work and then fall hard for a few tracks, only to feel somewhat apathetic to the rest. I can recognize her artistry; I know that what I'm listening to is remarkable on a technical/musical level, but I feel disconnected. It's something that happens to me a lot with artists that are (usually correctly) deemed genius, perhaps most infamously with hipster wunderkind Sufjan Stevens, the all-mighty Pink Floyd and pretty much all of classical music. For me, music has to make a personal connection before I can declare my love and fanhood.

So I've had a couple of Nina Simone collections and was madly in love with some of her earlier jazz standards, but much of her work left me cold. Recently under the spell of one of these songs, "My baby just cares for me," I decided to try Nina again. This led me to checking out the newly released box set, To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story. The set includes three discs of music and a DVD with a short documentary made during the 1970s. I watched the documentary first and found myself magnetically drawn to watching Simone perform. Then, listening to the discs and reading the informative and interesting song-by-song notes, I found my heart really opening to her work. I've admitted in the past to sometimes being a very casual listener and this is what the thing is: You must listen. To really appreciate her work in all of its breathtaking power and beauty, you have to surrender to it completely.

It's hard to classify Nina Simone as a jazz singer. She did everything, from standards to folk music to funk, even performing songs by Kurt Weill. Her work is epic in scope, her songs focusing on the relationships of men and women, black and white and all of humankind. Several of the recordings are actually live performances (in fact, one discovery is that she probably recorded as many live albums as she did studio albums) and you can absolutely feel her command over the audience (not to mention her musicians). If you have never given Simone a try, I can't recommend a better way than through this collection. She absolutely deserves her status as a legend, as important to music as Louis Armstrong, The Beatles or Elvis, and as audaciously original a genius as Rufus Wainwright or Björk are today.

Rick@picturesandframesmagazine.com

BOOKS:

The Exception by Christian Jungersen

Christian Jungersen’s The Exception is a gripping psychological thriller that dissects the perversions of human nature with a scalpel. Stitched into the narrative are studies on the nature of evil and accounts of real historical genocide, documenting patterns of savagery and entitlement that Jungersen then deftly reproduces in his characters. A recipient of the Danish Radio and Golden Laurels Prizes, nominee of literary awards throughout Europe, and New York Times Editor’s Pick, The Exception is a thought-provoking, tightly wound whodunit that lingers with the reader long after the book’s conclusion. Pity, then, that it’s also a clunky, sexist hackjob that, while getting the psychology of evil chillingly right, gets the psychiatry of its characters dangerously wrong.

The Exception centers on four women, coworkers at the nonprofit Danish Center for Information on Genocide, who begin to receive anonymous death threats. Their camaraderie soon devolves into a frenzy of accusations and scapegoating. Everyone is a suspect. Iben and Malene are best friends and romantic rivals. Anne-Lise is the office misfit who feels bullied by Iben and Malene. Camille shies away from the combustible office politics but has a torrid secret past that may implicate her in the threats.

Jungersen is at his best when jabbing at the hypocrisies of Western liberalism. He depicts the nonprofit world as one part hipster bacchanalia, two parts moral smugness—a keen and skewering observation that is conveyed with just the right amount of understatement. Early in the book, Iben finds herself speaking to a man who has abandoned his dream job, and its attendant financial insecurity, for a position in advertising. “Human rights and art,” he says, “great stuff but there’s no money in it.” Iben is incensed. She “jump[s] in and defends traditional values, such as ‘Money isn’t everything’ and ‘You can’t buy happiness,’” forcing him to justify not his profession but the very concept of remunerative employment. “In no time she realizes that this discussion is just a rerun of their old debates, as if they are all battle-worn politicians in the last days of an election campaign, able to predict their opponents’ arguments.”

Iben isn’t the only one intoxicated by moral superiority. The novel is determined to dismantle all delusions of moral grandeur. The four main characters each lay claim to innocence, even as they rationalize committing acts of increasing cruelty against each other—from petty lunchroom slights to outright assault. Meanwhile, their boss is engaged in a more systematic kind of duplicity, aligning himself with the country’s anti-immigration party in order to deny power to a rival board member, ultimately allowing the organization to become an instrument of the reactionary politics he claims to personally revile. There are also meaningful parallels between these characters and the Western world at large. When Iben “tries to concentrate on what a group of Dutch experts has written about Muslims in the southern Russian states,” her arrogance overlaps neatly with Western political arrogance—a Venn diagram of sanctimonies. The irony is delicious.

Interspersed throughout the novel are Iben’s fictional academic articles on the psychology of evil and the genocides in Bosnia and World War II Germany. Here we find Jungersen’s thesis: We—all of us—undermine our neighbors and our colleagues to acquire trivial advantages for ourselves, employing increasingly elaborate rationalizations to assure us of our rectitude. These acts are evil writ small, genocide in miniature. They are murder of the conscience, and with enough license, they become actual murder.

There is power in this argument, which explains The Exception’s enthusiastic reception. It raises important questions about the relationship between privilege and moral authority, and about the motives underlying liberal self-satisfaction. But this is also where the story begins to fall apart. A whodunit simply can’t end with every character equally culpable for the crime. So Jungersen undercuts his thesis with a twist ending that leaves one character as a literal martyr and another as a literal psychopath—embodiments of good and evil if ever there were. The Exception aspires to a moral calculus, but it achieves only arithmetic.

Even worse, Jungersen arrives at this unsavory conclusion by grossly misrepresenting the nature of mental illness. In order to designate a villain, he conflates a wide range of psychiatric disorders, implicating his evildoer first with an anxiety disorder, then with a split personality, and finally with antisocial behavior—as though common psychiatric illnesses can just flower effortlessly into psychopathy. It is a lazy trick to tidy up an unwieldy story, one that promotes a dangerous and outdated equivalency between mental illness and evil.

Worse still, Jungersen’s women all become obnoxious female stereotypes. Iben and Malene’s romantic rivalry is a Betty-and-Veronica frenemy cliché that borders on offensive. Camilla throws herself headlong into bad relationships, propelled by both her reckless libido and her reckless desire to please. And Anne-Lise is simply a hysteric who, at one point, must be restrained by her husband: “Anne-Lise runs around as a rush of thoughts overwhelms her. Why should I have believed they could bear to live with me? I’m bursting with evil thoughts…I must hit my face as hard as I can. I deserve to be punished because I’m a horrible wife. I’m a bad, bad mother.” Jungersen might have avoided this reductiveness if his writing wasn’t quite so childlike and expository. He (and his translator, Anna Paterson) use language as a tool of mere utility rather than art, and they treat The Exception as a novel of Big Ideas rather than one of nuanced storytelling.

I am saddened by the failure of Jungersen’s experiment (if the recipient of international accolades can be called a failure). His political philosophy is provocative but marred by inattention to story mechanics. Or alternatively, his story is an exhilarating psychological drama overburdened by politics. Either way, neither the ideas nor the story emerge intact. Iben, at one point, denounces “the lack of political awareness in American literature.” But when literature is done right, we shouldn’t see its political motives, much less be distracted by them. Subtlety is its own Big Idea.

Rebecca Zerzan

FOCUS:

SPOTLIGHT:

Gus Van Sant

July 24, 1952

There are three things that I realized in the span of researching the life and work of writer-director Gus Van Sant: 1) He is an artist in the Warholian-sense of the word; 2) He is neither a mainstream nor an independent film director; 3) And no one explores the intricacies of male relationships better than Van Sant. All of these things have pretty much determined the course of his work as a director and have made Van Sant the only openly gay director, save for Bryan Singer, to have a viable, critically successful (ahem, Joel Schumacher) career.

Gus Van Sant was born in Louisville, Kentucky but due to his traveling salesman father, he lived in many different states throughout his childhood, finally settling in Portland, Oregon where he still lives and shoots most of his films to this day. Van Sant attended the Rhode Island School of Design (Talking Heads’ David Byrne was a classmate) where he pursued his painting and eventually discovered a love for avant-garde filmmaking. Learning that Van Sant attended RISD was like a wheel clicking into place in my head—all of a sudden, all of the shots in his films—the especially arty ones—came barreling through, finally making complete sense.

Although Van Sant experimented with documentary film for many years, 1985’s Mala Noche was his first feature. The movie tells the story of a young gay Quickstop-esque clerk in love with a straight Mexican immigrant. What is incredible about this film is how much it closely resembles Van Sant’s later films, especially when it comes to the topic of unrequited love, a theme that he revisited time and again. But all of the shots are also there—the extreme facial close-ups of his lead male actors (My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy, Good Will Hunting, Milk), the interesting photographic sex scenes (my god, My Own Private Idaho), and the sweeping panoramic shots of the open sky and road (Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Idaho, Gerry, Last Days, Paranoid Park). Mala Noche was a critical success and played heavily on the festival circuit, and led to the financing of his second film, the equally successful, Drugstore Cowboy.

Drugstore Cowboy dealt with drugs and addiction in a way that had never really been seen before at the time. Films such as Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream were clearly influenced by it and the graphic and frank nature with which it presents the four junkies is pretty astounding for 1989. (Also astounding is the substantial cameo by William S. Burroughs.) The film not only revived Matt Dillon’s career, offering his first serious, non-heartthrob role, but it also launched Van Sant into another level as a filmmaker, one that allowed him to tell the stories that he’d always wanted to share on film.

Case in point: My Own Private Idaho. My Own Private Idaho was the first film that I ever saw by Gus Van Sant and it was pretty shocking to watch as an 11-year-old. For most of my childhood I was hugely obsessed with River Phoenix and up until that point all of the movies that Phoenix had been in had gained my parents seal of approval (read: PG). Until Idaho. I don’t remember how I managed to see the film but I know that when it was released on video I somehow got a copy of it and I was entranced by the film’s mood, by the Shakespearean dialogue, but most of all, by the blatant homoeroticism that underscored nearly every scene between Phoenix and Keanu Reeves.

Van Sant has a way of doing this, of taking whatever preconceptions you may have about a certain actor, and turning them on their head. He does it brilliantly in Idaho with Phoenix and Reeves, did it with Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy, Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Matt Damon in Gerry and even Sean Connery in Finding Forrester. Idaho was the first time that I had ever seen love between two men explored onscreen, and the scene between Phoenix and Reeves in front of a campfire, where he declares his love for him, is still incredibly moving to this day.

But for every My Own Private Idaho, which rings so very true, there are also missteps, albeit interesting ones, in Van Sant’s career. Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Psycho, Gerry, Finding Forrester (this film in particular is especially middle of the road for Van Sant), Last Days, Elephant and Paranoid Park are all worth watching, but none have the gravitas that Van Sant’s earlier work so effortlessly carried. Even his most successful films, To Die For and Good Will Hunting, both of which I love by the way, never feel as personal as Mala Noche or My Own Private Idaho or Milk do.

It is incredibly shady of me to point this out, and I hesitate to do so for fear of what it may actually say about me…as if to say that I prefer when Van Sant, who has been openly gay throughout all of his career, sticks to telling stories that deal with gay relationships…That is not what I’m saying at all. But in looking at his films again, I can’t help but notice the disconnect that occurs when Van Sant is not dealing with men in these very specific ways. He is able to explore the subtle intimacy that exists in male relationships in ways that few directors have ever been able to do (I can’t think of a single one right now actually…maybe Eytan Fox?). There are scenes in Milk, between James Franco and Sean Penn, that are eerily reminiscent of scenes in My Own Private Idaho, and I cannot help but feel that it is not a coincidence, that there is a connection to be made there. It is almost as if all of Van Sant’s films have been leading up to this point, which only leaves me to wonder what it is that Gus Van Sant is trying to tell us, the viewer, and where he will choose to go next. 

Lily@picturesandframesmagazine.com

Select Gus Van Sant Filmography

Mala Noche (1985)

Drugstore Cowboy (1989)

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

Even Cowgirls Get The Blues (1993)

To Die For (1995)

Good Will Hunting (1997)

Psycho (1998)

Finding Forrester (2000)

Gerry (2002)

Elephant (2003)

Last Days (2005)

Paranoid Park (2007)

Milk (2009)