To Joy
1850. Directed by Ingmar Bergman
My first Bergman film! If you read this blog much, you know I’m a big Woody Allen fan, and since Allen’s favorite filmmaker is Bergman, I knew I had to watch some of his films. I grabbed two at random in the library last week. One was To Joy, a film that really runs the gamut of drama and both surprised and delighted me. What can I say that can even come close to all the well-educated published discussions of Bergman’s films? Probably nothing, but I can state my observations. First off, the language is beautiful. I’ve never seen a Swedish film with subtitles, and I was surprised by how melodic the language is. Secondly, the acting is raw and passionate to a degree I’ve never seen. It’s both melodramatic and realistic and it really drew me in. The film’s story is incredibly dramatic. A young couple meet while working in an orchestra. They live together and eventually get married. They separate multiple times, due mostly to the man’s infantile nature and lecherous tendencies, but each time they re-unite, they come closer. The title is also the focus of the story. What is joy and how do we find it in others? A tragic ending nevertheless concludes the film with a strange poignancy. For Bergman, joy can be found even in suffering not because of any Christian hope, but simply because of the spirit of human love and passion. To Joy is an excellently photographed and acted film with a wonderful classical score. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Bergman’s films.
Winter Light
1963. Directed by Ingmar Bergman
When someone who has never read the Bible writes a film script about a Christian pastor, that pastor has also not read the Bible. Thus, it is easy for a filmmaker like Bergman to paint a convincing picture of a small town pastor who, because he can’t believe in a God who lets bad things happen, abandons his faith. The reason that he cannot believe in a God like this is because he has never read Job, never read James, and for that matter never read the Bible as a whole, a narrative that includes God’s children suffering the consequences of a sin-stricken world. Screenwriting like this makes me sick. If I made a film about Hinduism and did not study the religion’s teachings in depth, I’d be laughed out of the cinema, but because Christianity is so despised by the world in general and the art world in particular, otherwise great artists like Bergman are praised for taking uneducated pot shots at it. Winter Light is a visual treat, and it’s pace and acting are soft and eloquent, and at times strikingly beautiful. It’s also a work of misinformed rage against a faith it doesn’t understand.
New York Stories: Oedipus Wrecks
1989. Directed by Woody Allen
New York Stories is actually three short films combined. I only watched the third film, entitled Oedipus Wrecks, because it’s by Woody Allen, whose massive filmogrophy I’m attempting to conquer. This is the simplest Allen film I’ve seen, mostly due to it’s short film format. It’s so un-complex that I don’t really know what to say. Allen’s character can’t stand his mother and the way she constantly criticizes him and talks about him in public. She magically disappears and Allen can finally pursue the woman of his dreams, but when she re-appears in the sky as a giant floating head, his life becomes a living hell. Only after he finds another woman who is similar to his mother does she come back down to earth. The Oedipus imagery is obviously present, but in a sweet rather than grotesque way, comically portraying the simple truism that a man tends to fall in love with a woman with the qualities of his mother.
Capote
2005. Directed by Bennett Miller
I have nightmares where I am convicted of an unpardonable crime. I am sentenced to death, and no one can help me. They all just shrug their shoulders and say it’s hopeless. These dreams are terrifying. As a Christian, I’m not afraid of death, or at least I shouldn’t be, but I must admit that the prospect of knowing the hour and time of death and knowing that it’s unavoidable is pretty scary. That’s what this movie captures so well. I knew very little about Truman Capote as I watched this, but I must say that Philip Seymour Hoffman delivers a wonderful performance as the man. I knew that Capote was a homosexual, but refreshingly this film is not a gay rights activist piece, neither is it an anti-death penalty piece. It’s simply a candid look at Capote the writer, his strange relationship with the two murderers he wrote about, and the mounting feelings of terror they experienced and he experienced through them as they awaited their deaths. It’s a very atmospheric and dark film that left me feeling sad and cold, but also a beautiful work of art. Many people say that this awful experience broke Capote and was the reason he plummeted into substance abuse and never finished writing another book. After experiencing this film, I can believe it.
The Purple Rose of Cairo
1985. Directed by Woody Allen
The Purple Rose of Cairo really helped me understand 1930s filmmaking. Watching high-life musicals and romances from that period, I’d always been a bit put off by the goofiness that goes on in them. What I thought were dramatic films left a bad taste in my mouth because of their laughable melodrama and cartoonish characterizations. There’s a scene in Purple Rose where we’re introduced to a theater full of film-goers. As they react to the film they’re watching, I finally realized that these films weren’t supposed to be taken seriously even back then. Even slightly silly lines get a chuckle and the wide-eyed, pith hat-wearing archeologist in this film-within-a-film, played energetically by a young Jeff Daniels, gets laughs from the audience for the buffoon his character is. The truth is, these escapist films weren’t supposed to be taken seriously. They were merely intended to wildly entertain an otherwise very depressed American public, and Woody Allen portrays this cinematic history brilliantly. Mia Farrow plays a young woman who needs all the escape she can get, and after seeing the same film again and again, Jeff Daniels’s character literally climbs off the screen to get a closer look at her. The real-life actor who plays the archeologist in the film comes to try to force his double back onto the screen he has abandoned and merry chaos ensues. For how fun and funny Purple Rose is, and it is quite a caper, it has a surprisingly dark ending. I think it’s Allen’s attempt at showing the truth about an era that was incredibly dark, in which many people found hope only in cinematic escape.
The Dark Crystal
1982. Directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz
If I could sum this film up in one word, it would be “icky.” Henson’s heart was in the right place, but the strange, grotesque 70’s fantasy visuals make an otherwise likable children’s film play like a terrible nightmare. There are scenes here that made my stomach turn, mostly to do with horrible giant bird creatures that turn out to be made of mostly rotting flesh under huge piles of gaudy clothing. The world of The Dark Crystal is an often complex and foreign one, and I admire the directors avoidance of explaining it all. Instead, we get to just look at it, and though most of it is unintentionally terrifying, there are a few truly beautiful scenes, most notably those set in a vast living jungle that must have taken hundreds of intricately designed puppets to pull off. It reminded me of some of the visuals in Avatar, but whereas those were CG, these were all impressively real. The love that clearly went into this production yields little enjoyment, and the ending is unsatisfying in its complete absence of moral truth. I’d much rather watch The Muppet Movie.