Michelle Williams, lost in Oregon again, and Ace Ventura's director gives it all up
Move over Christopher Walken, there's a new crazypants in town, and he's whacking an elephant with a hook and throwing poor schnooks off a moving train in Water for Elephants, in which two characters in Sara Gruen's bestseller have been rolled into one, and since that gives Christoph Waltz more screen time one can't argue with that. As the owner of a second-rate circus, husband to its star, Marlena (Reese Witherspoon), and its sadistic animal trainer, Waltz has a bit more to do than in The Green Hornet. You will say he is just playing the same Inglourious Basterds Nazi with a twinkle in his eye, and maybe he is, but there isn't a more entertaining performance on screen right now.
And that's just as well, since entertainment is in short supply in Water for Elephants. Robert Pattinson plays Jacob Jankowski, a Cornell veterinary school dropout who, suddenly orphaned of his Polish parents, hitches a circus train and becomes the vet for the Benzini Brothers Circus, where animals perform until they drop dead. Jacob and Marlena fall in love, or so we're told, since they have no chemistry and Pattinson only has three expressions: squinting, cringing and looking like he's going to throw up. (The first makes sense when he's playing a vampire; the others come in handy when August is beating that elephant — who understands Polish, don't you know.) For all the richly textured Depression-era atmosphere, the dubbing is often so off the whole cast might as well have been speaking Polish. In the end everyone goes completely bonkers — including the animals — and Pattinson grows up to be Hal Holbrook, which may strike you as very wishful thinking.
With Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy and now Meek's Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt has now made three films with Jon Raymond about getting lost in Oregon, with diminishing returns. It is now 1845 (although that doesn't stop the film from, like its predecessors, commenting on current events), and three couples, one child and the titular crazy mountain man (an unrecognizable Bruce Greenwood) are headed through the desert for the Willamette Valley. As in Wendy and Lucy, the travelers in Meek's Cutoff have problems with their vehicle, and are left at a crossroads, perhaps peering into the abyss. And as in the preceding film, Reichardt is once again focusing on women, here the three wives (Michele Williams, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan), knitting, cooking and watching the men making life-or-death decisions in the distance.
The three women are often posed in interesting compositions on a 1.37:1 canvas whose aspect ratio, in opposition to the widescreen we expect of westerns, derives from a dated, essentialist idea of what constitutes the female perspective. Speaking of which, there was a reason “Little House in the Prairie” was shot in Southern California: You cannot see faces under bonnets and wide brims with the dim light available in Oregon. (Sometimes you can't even tell who's talking.) But perhaps the actors wanted to hide their faces because Raymond's fake old-timey dialogue is so awful. With Greenwood chewing the scenery and Henderson, Kazan and Paul Dano at their eccentric worst, Reichardt seems to have little control over her cast; only Will Patton, as Williams' new husband, can make Raymond's dialogue sound natural. The presence of Dano, along with Jeff Grace's eerie, cello-sawing score, bring to mind There Will Be Blood; the capture of an Injun (Rod Rondeaux) and ensuing debate over what to do with him a more recent American adventure in the desert. It is here where Meek's Cutoff shows its true cards, offering the art-house audience a smug pat on the back instead of an accusation of shared shame.
In 2007, Tom Shadyac, the director of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, Patch Adams and The Nutty Professor, was in a bicycle accident that left him with severe post-concussion symptoms that would not go away. Profoundly depressed, he reexamined his life: “The world I was living in was a lie and the game I had won at, which I thought would help to heal the world, might very well be what was destroying it.” So he sold his Pasadena estate, gave away his fortune and his car and moved into a trailer park. But those interested in extreme downsizing will be disappointed; Shadyac may title his film I Am, but he gives us no insight into what it's like to give up so much. Instead, he interviews others, including Noam Chomsky, Desmond Tutu and Howard Zinn, interspersed with hackneyed clips (the “Greed is good” speech in Wall Street, the end of It's a Wonderful Life), in an effort to answer two questions: “What's wrong with our world?” and “What can we do about it?”
What follows is the usual critique of capitalism and consumerism (Money doesn't buy happiness? You don't say), which soon goes astray. Looking at the animal kingdom, radio host Thom Hartmann equates cooperation with democracy, which is not the same thing (and begs this question: If animals from ants to chimpanzees “vote,” why don't we?). But the film is completely hijacked by the What the Bleep Do We Know? crowd, whose misunderstandings of quantum physics would be hilarious if they weren't so depressing. In one scene at an outfit called the HeartMath Institute, a fellow who looks like Will Ferrell puts electrodes in a Petri dish of yogurt to meter reactions to Shadyac's thoughts, and boy do they upset the yogurt.
From the “sending out good vibes” logic of the HeartMath experiment, Shadyac concludes that a day spent canoeing is just as positive as giving spare change to the homeless. The fundamental divide between the political left and the inward-looking New Age could not be clearer: the social change Zinn and Tutu speak of would not have been possible if everyone had just gone canoeing. Shadyac could have showed us what it's like to give up the American dream; instead, all he gives us is sloppy science and sad yogurt.
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