New York times: Scorsese, MoMA, and The Third Man

I don’t know that I always appreciate my New York experience as much as I might, and that may be because my idea of going outdoors is to bury myself in a movie theater for two or three hours at a time. Every once in a while, though, events conspire to remind me I don’t live in just any city. I live in New York City. Thanks to Martin Scorsese, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Film Forum, yesterday was full of those events.

Scorsese is probably the highest-profile leader of the film preservation movement, spearheading The Film Foundation, which is dedicated to keeping the history of the medium alive in an ever-evolving landscape. The organization’s top priority has been the restoration of classic films shot on highly volatile nitrate film stock, but the movies themselves are not the only precious evidence of the art form.

In that vein, the New York Museum of Modern Art is hosting “Scorsese Collects,” an exhibit of 34 classic film posters from the Scorsese Poster Collection. The pieces run the gamut from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s gorgeous The Red Shoes to John Ford’s The Searchers to Scorsese’s own Mean Streets. The beautiful collection is a tribute to an increasingly lost and marginalized art.

Though small, the exhibit is a must-see for any film fan. I was absolutely giddy with delight to be within inches of each well preserved artifact of film history. There were a number of highlights, including a dangerous, sexy one-sheet for Jacques Tourneur’s classic Cat People and a wonderfully impressionistic take on Elia Kazan’s Best Picture-winning On the Waterfront that foregrounds the violence and brutality of the film’s story. Perhaps, though, the most essential work is the simplest: the iconic “Veronica Lake’s on the take” poster for Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, as perfect now as the day it was designed.

In the center of the room, there hangs a 6- or 7-foot tall poster for Carol Reed’s magnificent The Third Man, the imagery for which focuses on the stunning climactic foot chase through the Vienna sewer system. I have seen The Third Man five or six times, though never on the big screen, and while staring at the film’s promotional art, I remembered the NYC Film Forum was screening the film through the end of the week. That was all I needed, and I headed out the door of the museum, caught the train downtown, and settled in for two hours of one of the greatest mystery movies ever put to celluloid.

If pressed to name the top 10 films of all time, I would put The Third Man right there in the conversation, and its wonder only grows in proportion to the size of the screen showing it. The stark, Oscar-winning black-and-white cinematography still stuns, the writing is razor sharp, and Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles provide two of the great screen performances of the sound era. Welles, in particular, is just luminous, a true movie star, as commanding a presence today as he was when the film was released in 1949.

After the film, my girlfriend – kind enough to indulge me in a day of classic film nostalgia – and I strolled over to Washington Square Park, where to our surprise, the New York Jazzharmonic was giving its debut performance as part of the Washington Square Music Festival. All in all, I am not sure there was a more New York way to close out an art-filled day. It cannot happen every day for everyone, but sometimes, man, New York City really comes alive.

‘Reality on a special day’: White God and the power of a parable

Lili, played by Zsófia Psotta, and her dog, Hagen, share a moment of peace in White God.

I cannot tell you what White God is. That is to say: I can tell you what it is about, but I cannot tell you what it is. Recognizable tropes abound from such disparate genres as coming-of-age family films, satirical black comedies, grindhouse slasher pictures, and incendiary political thrillers. It is, by turns, each of these, and in so being, it transcends them all. White God is not defined by its genre but by the boundlessness of its scope and the vibrancy of its storytelling.

The film played last week in New York City as part of the Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art’s New Directors, New Films Festival. Director Kornél Mundruczó and co-writer Kata Wéber were on hand to introduce the film and stayed for a question-and-answer session after the screening. White God has played to rave reviews at festivals around the world, even winning the Un Certain Regard competition at Cannes last year, and finally opens in select theaters for American audiences this weekend.

‘A very fragile question’

Director Kornél Mundruczó

Lili (Zsófia Psotta) is an average 13-year-old Hungarian girl whose best friend seems to be her dog, Hagen. She is forced to stay with her father (Sándor Zsótér) for a few months while her mother goes on a trip with her new boyfriend. Faced with paying a fine because the dog is a mutt, Lili and her father must decide whether to take him to a shelter, where he will most likely be put down, or set him loose on the streets. Though Lili protests that they should do neither, her father leaves him on the side of the road, and so begins Hagen and Lili’s long journey back to one another.

It is a familiar enough premise and could have made for a simple tale about a girl and her dog, but Mundruczó, Wéber, their other co-writer, Viktória Petrányi, have no interest in simplicity. Instead, they tell the parallel stories of two loners living in a culture that treats outcasts with disdain when they are noticed at all. In their own ways, Hagen and Lili are both pushed aside, beaten down, and kicked around by a world that has no need for them. How they choose to rebel against this treatment is the basis for the movie’s final point about where we are all headed if we do not stand up and take notice of the culture we have let fester.

“I had a huge anger about my society,” said Mundruczó, through a thick Hungarian accent. “Just standing in a dog pound, I felt that shame that we’re talking about. I was also part of the [movie] business, and I have a responsibility to talk about my society and criticize my society as much as I can. This movie was on the one hand very slow because of financing and shooting, but we wrote the script in one month, with really reflecting how [criticizing our society] is a good thing. Let’s face it, our society, with the movie. Of course, still, it’s a very fragile question.”

Mundruczó paints a picture of a nation in decline and a society that is coming apart at the seams due to its inequities. On top are the authority figures such as the teachers, the police, and in Hagen’s case, the dog catchers. Below are the hungry masses, the abused, and the forgotten. As a system, it is unsustainable, and Mundruczó sees this. A change is going to come, and that the revolution is filmed from the point of view of hundreds of stray dogs is the film’s master stroke.

‘An emotional draw’

Lili’s story functions as a more traditional tale of a girl growing up, but Hagen goes through hell. While Lili experiences all the pains of adolescence such as run-ins with the law, experimentation with drugs, and trouble at home and school, Hagen is literally beaten and broken until something inside him snaps. At a key moment, after being forced to commit an unspeakably awful act, he decides he is no longer anyone’s dog. He is his own master. However, these two stories do not work without one another.

Though Lili and Hagen begin the story together and the story ends with them in the same place, their separate and complementary character arcs imbue the film’s climax with a depth of emotion that would have been impossible to achieve otherwise. In a more traditional narrative, the tension would be derived from whether or not these two will find each other again, but they are so fundamentally changed by the events that transpire that we are left to wonder if they will even recognize each other when they do.

“It’s a mirroring story, somehow, between these two characters,” said Wéber. “We wanted to make this film about the dog, a dog in Budapest, but then we realized that we need a counter-story, something that grabs our attention and gives us an angle, how to see the loss of this dog. … I think this helps us to really be able to follow the story as free as possible, almost like a child jumping from one genre to the other. So, I think that’s why it was a good choice to have this character [of Lili] and also an emotional draw, which can pull us through this whole journey with such different challenges and characters also.”

‘That was my lesson’

Mundruczó and co-writer Kata Wéber

On a technical level, White God manages to pull off a number of seemingly impossible feats, not the least of which is casting more than 200 real dogs adopted from shelters to portray the film’s revolutionary army, such as it is. In developing the film, Mundruczó had two hard and fast rules: There would be no CGI, and there would be no trained, purebred dogs. All of the dogs had to be “newcomers from the pounds,” as he put it.

“I’m quite a control-freak director – hopefully not anymore,” he said. “That was my lesson: to give [the dogs] lots of freedom, and they really played. It was shooting a very special method because we use one week shooting, one week training time, and [the dogs] drive the script. … They can’t do what they cannot, so it was really like we worked together, and it taught me a lot about patient curiosity and two races can cooperate.”

That patient curiosity pays off in spades in the film’s extended climax as wave after wave of dogs crashes down upon the city. Even before that, though, Mundruczó is able to capture the real world of these animals as they experience it. In a turn of events straight out of “Oliver Twist,” Hagen comes upon a group of stray dogs at an abandoned housing project that functions as its own little society. The dogs run, jump, play, and fight in ways that could never be taught, and Mundruczó is smart enough to let his camera simply observe the action.

Cinematographer Marcell Rév keeps the camera near the ground for much of the film, placing the audience squarely at the level of the dogs. What they see, we see. What they feel, we feel. It is an ingenious way both of putting viewers in the headspace of the animals and of subtly telling us who the true heroes of the story are.

It is to Rév and editor Dávid Janscó’s credit that the film never lacks for energy, despite being wordless for more than half its runtime. Janscó deftly cuts back and forth between two wildly different tones as the film shifts seamlessly from neo-realist drama to surrealist fable without sacrificing either its storytelling or its political ambitions.

‘It wants to be a parable’

The filmmakers’ facility for accomplishing both goals – relating a touching story about a girl and her dog, while creating a compelling metaphor for revolution – is finally what makes White God so impressive. Few filmmakers would have the audacity to put something so strange on screen, something that is equal parts Au Hasard Balthasar and Jurassic Park, two movies Mundruczó said he showed the crew while making the film.

The director and his collaborators never back away from the challenge they have set for themselves, allowing the everyday drama of the film’s first two acts to bleed into the fantastical final act without concern for breaking the “reality” of the story. Too often, as audiences, we demand movies be one or the other – hyper-real drama or far-fetched escapism. Mundruczó, Petrányi, and Wéber let the real and the surreal co-exist in their screenplay, as it does in so much of life, and the picture is more honest and gripping because of it.

“Sometimes, we say it’s a tale, but it’s more of a parable, which is different, where you can use more extreme characters because it’s a moral story,” said Wéber. “So, you can see it as a reality, but at the same time, it’s more dark because it wants to be a parable, and it wants to be more.”

Added Mundruczó: “It’s not a realistic movie, so we use more like a fairytale, like characters in a tale. But it’s like in our dreams. So it’s reality on a special day.”

Mind the gap: Unbroken and the gulf between intent and execution

Director Angelina Jolie (second from left), Jack O'Connell (center), Miyavi (second from right), Garrett Hedlund (far right), and Finn Wittrock (not pictured) brought their new film Unbroken to the Museum of Modern Art on Tuesday for its first public screening.

That Louis Zamperini is an American hero is unquestionable. That his life journey is the stuff of cinema is undeniable. There is a great film to be made from the story of an Olympic athlete stranded at sea during World War II, rescued by the Japanese military, and subjected to years of abuse in prisoner-of-war camps. Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken is not that film.

Jolie and the film’s stars, Jack O’Connell, Miyavi, Garrett Hedlund, and Finn Wittrock, brought the film to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its first public screening Tuesday. Judging by the enthusiastic applause that accompanied the credits – particularly for O’Connell’s laudable performance as Zamperini – the sold-out theater got what it wanted. Apparently, what the audience wanted was a flag-waving, xenophobic tribute to one man’s brutal journey to find the lord.

“We had the great fortune to meet Louis and spend time with him,” said Jolie of her friend and neighbor who died in July. “Even in his last days, he was so full life. His spirit was so strong. … Louis said, ‘Make a film that’s not about how extraordinary I am. Make a film that helps people remember that they have that strength inside of them.’”

This was an edict – from the man, himself – with which the assembled cast nodded in agreement. In fact, throughout the half-hour moderated question-and-answer session that followed the screening, the director and cast members spoke at length about their desire to display the humanity of all sides, to show the Japanese soldiers as more than one-dimensional villains, and to celebrate the spirit inside all people. They accomplished none of these goals.

It is almost remarkable how different Unbroken is from the film Jolie and company thought they were making and indeed felt they had produced. Told exclusively from Zamperini’s point of view, the audience is never given the slightest indication that any of the supporting characters have rich inner lives. They are merely there to bear witness to the feats of the hero at the center of the story.

During the Q-and-A, Jolie and Hedlund brought up the diaries of Zamperini’s fellow prisoners of war. Hedlund’s character is based entirely on the journal of John Fitzgerald, which would be a wonderful jumping-off point for a character if he were given anything meaningful to do in the film. Worse still, when Jolie mentioned other prisoners’ notebooks, she spoke of them only in the context of what they wrote about Zamperini. This is not what Zamperini would have wanted nor what Jolie said she wanted.

The film has many issues, but foremost among them is the disconnect between intent and execution. It would be one thing to set to out to make a bland story about an American hero and produce a bland film. Perhaps such an effort could be excused and simply chucked on the pile with the rest of the World War II film canon. However, Jolie begins with a set of well-intentioned and high-minded goals and proceeds to undercut and contradict all of them. Such problems take the film from the realm of the merely bland into the patently offensive.

Jack O'Connell stars as American war hero Louis Zamperini in Unbroken.

In particular, one sequence stands out as exemplary of the film that could have been but did not come to pass. After an Allied attack, the prisoners are marched through the streets of Japan on their way to a new camp. As they walk, they pass the bodies of the dead Japanese civilians and the loved ones left behind to grieve. In this scene – and only in this scene – we see the other side. Both sides incurred untold tragedies, and from a civilian standpoint, the Japanese suffered losses Americans could not begin to understand.

Such observations would have served the filmmakers well and helped establish the humanity they claim they wished to depict. Instead, the film’s Japanese representative is Mutsushiro “The Bird” Watanabe, played by Japanese pop star Miyavi. Watanabe is the villain of the piece, and that is all he is. He is a sadistic, petty man whose sole motivation seems to be jealousy of how great a man Zamperini is.

This view is confirmed by Miyavi himself who said during the Q-and-A that The Bird wanted to be like Zamperini and envied his inner strength. One almost feels bad for Miyavi having to play such a caricature, and he informed the audience afterward he was not aware of Zamperini’s story before being cast because the book on which the film is based is not translated into Japanese.

These are old wounds that have healed poorly. I have no reason to doubt the film’s claim that Zamperini was a man of faith, forgiveness, and reconciliation. These are the qualities Jolie said she hoped her film would “live up to,” but her cardboard antagonist serves only to inflame hate and stoke old grudges. It is a classic American World War II fantasy. The Allies are all good, while the Japanese are all evil; therefore, all actions taken to defeat the enemy are justifiable.

Unbroken is not the only film to fall into this trap. In fact, a majority of U.S.-produced World War II movies take this viewpoint. With the exception of Pearl Harbor, the war was never at our doorstep. The real horrors were across the sea in either direction. While one need not be impressed, one also cannot fault a movie for failing to transcend old tropes. However, when a film such as this sinks into the gulf between intent and execution, the audience has a right to rise above it and demand not to be pulled down into the muck.