Love & Friendship

Directed by Whit Stillman, United Kingdom, 2016

Love & Friendship is a confusing title for this Jane Austen adaptation. There is a Jane Austen short story titled Love and Freindship (yes, with 'e' before 'i') written when she was only 15, but Love & Friendship is actually based on her unfinished novella Lady Susan, written when she was 19 and unpublished during her lifetime. Lady Susan tells, in epistolary format, of a middle-aged widower and social climber with a genius for manipulation. Considering it was written in 1790s England - and by a teenager, no less - Lady Susan is pretty risque. Its main character is an unrepentant schemer, sexually and financially ambitious, who is neither redeemed or overtly punished for her behavior. A tacked-on epilogue resolves the story and spells out Lady Susan's villainy, but up until its final pages Lady Susan is all scandalous wit. Jane Austen mines humor out of the drastic differences between Lady Susan's letters - depending on who she is writing to, her language is all sugary sweetness or politely phrased savagery. That Jane Austen could conceive of this character at such a young age is early proof of her cleverness and insight.

For superficial reasons it might be surprising that Whit Stillman, the oddball director behind Love & Friendship, would adapt Jane Austen. He's an American indie filmmaker, and none of his previous works were period pieces. But he's been making Austen-inspired movies all along. His 90s cult classics Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco are comedies of manners whose privileged characters are intelligent and erudite, but not as wise as they believe themselves, Emma Woodhouses stranded in the late 20th century. Stillman does justice to Austen with his first official adaptation of her work. Their sensibilities work perfectly together - many of the funniest, sharpest lines come straight from the book, but Stillman fleshes out and deepens the story, adding welcome touches of absurdist humor and a much more satisfying ending.

Playing Lady Susan would be an exhilarating challenge for any actress, and Kate Beckinsale absolutely owns the part. Most well-known in America for her role as leather-clad heroine in the action-horror series Underworld, Love & Friendship is a very different kind of project for Beckinsale and she clearly enjoyed the change of pace. It's her best performance since The Last Days of Disco nearly 20 years ago - which is, not incidentally, also a Stillman movie where she gets to show off her sharp comic timing. Lady Susan, described as a "genius of a diabolical sort" and "the serpent in Eden's garden", manages to manipulate every single character at some point in the movie. She knows exactly how to use deliberate language to twist the moral standards of the time and make herself appear appealing or innocent. Beckinsale plays Lady Susan with a quick tongue and a mischievous gleam in her eyes, self-delighted for pulling off her schemes.

Love & Friendship might surprise audiences with how directly comic it is. Previous cinematic Austen adaptations, though not entirely without humor, have mostly been romantic dramas (Clueless excepted). And though her novels are romantic, that side of her work has been overemphasized. Jane Austen is as practical as romantic in her view of couplings - she is always aware of the economic and social necessities men and women had to negotiate, and casts a gently satirical eye on the hypocrisies of upper class English society. Lady Susan in particular is all satire and no sweetness. Love & Friendship captures her cutting wit. For these characters, Lady Susan especially, language is a weapon and armor. Every polite, verbose conversation is a covert power struggle and battle of wills, characters using convoluted rhetoric and slyly (mis)applied moral principles to prove their rightness - or, at least, maintain the appearance of rightness.

Actually, the "appearance of rightness" is what's most important in this society. Even in how it tells its story, Love & Friendship makes clear that reputation is more important than truth to its characters. The most dramatic moments of the story are elided - two marriage proposals involving major characters happen off-screen. We learn about them by characters' discussions after the fact. This might frustrate some viewers hoping for a more dramatically conventional approach, but it's not accidental. What happens in this story is less important than what characters say about it, how they manipulate gossip surrounding events to further their own agenda.

Love & Friendship also makes clear that, for a woman in Lady Susan's place and time, manipulation was sometimes necessary. She's in a dreadful position - a middle-aged widow who, just by how her society is structured, must be entirely reliant on the hospitality of others for her livelihood. She's a proto-feminist in a way, relentless in the pursuit of independence and unabashed about her romantic and sexual ambitions. Her determination is impressive and a direct rebuke to the ingrained sexism of her times, a point underlined by Sir James's speech about the essential differences between men and women (deeply ironic in context). But Love & Friendship does not turn Lady Susan into a hero either - her schemes are clearly not just a necessary evil, but something she enjoys for the sake of it. And through her carefully-worded witticisms Lady Susan often unintentionally reveals her own faults. "Only by one's friends can one truly be known," she remarks sagely. If true, her one real friend, equally unscrupulous American expat Mrs. Johnson, exposes plenty about Lady Susan - as their entire friendship is founded on a shared disdain for everyone else.

Sir James Martin is one of the movie's most inspired embellishments from the book. He's described by Austen as "a bit of a rattle", a vague but apt description that Stillman and actor Tom Bennett take to absurd extremes. Sir James behaves like an alien attempting to communicate with the proper Georgian manners and failing disastrously. Tom Bennett's performance is over-the-top in the best way - the rambling scene where he cluelessly introduces himself is comedy gold. Both Sir James and Lady Susan are indelible comic creations, and both also, though in different ways, expose the hypocrisy of their society. Everyone around Sir James is clearly mortified by his lack of social graces. They only tolerate him because he's wealthy - making clear the values of their world. "He brings a lively new angle to things," they say euphemistically. Many of the foolish things Sir James says are uncomfortably revealing, not least of all his bizarre homily on "the Twelve Commandments". When cautiously corrected by another character that there are, in fact, only Ten, Sir James is delighted. Missing the point entirely, he now wonders which two commandments he can ignore. "Perhaps the one about the Sabbath. I prefer to hunt."

One of the running jokes in Love & Friendship is the ornamental nature of religion among its Anglican characters and their constant botching of the Ten Commandments. Lady Susan shames her daughter with the fourth (or is it fifth?) commandment, "honor thy father and mother". "Thou shalt not bear false witness" is addressed in a brief but telling moment - one these characters break gleefully and often. Sir James's foolishness is just a ridiculous reflection of the more sophisticated, refined foolishness of his society, and his Twelve Commandments gaffe is not just a gag. Religion is just another accessory to this world, which for all its moral posturing is motivated by wealth and status more than anything else.

But Love & Friendship is not all cynicism - in fact, some of Stillman's additions make it gentler than the book. Supporting characters like Lady Susan's guileless daughter, Frederica, offer a counterpoint to the more manipulative and cluelessly privileged characters. Frederica is the only character who seeks out the truth with humility. She visits the local curate looking for answers about how to really honor her mother. The curate's academic, over-zealous demeanor is amusing, but his words offer an alternative worldview to the scheming and complacency surrounding Frederica. He rhapsodizes about "the superb Baumgarten" and his "aesthetic trinity" - "Truth is the perfect perceived by reason, Beauty by the senses, and Good by moral will". I know nothing about Baumgarten or his theory of an aesthetic trinity, but can sense these principles at work in Love & Friendship, particularly the final scene. Lady Susan's schemes have been rewarded with triumph for her - she's now involved in a secret menage-a-trois, one man her desired conquest and the other providing income and blithely unaware of his position. But in spite of all her plots, the other characters have emerged largely unscathed and happy. Frederica and Reginald DeCourcy, both former victims of Lady Susan, are wed and seem blissful. Reginald reads a poem praising his wife's greatest beauty as "virtue", and Frederica (alternatively known as a "Kentish nightingale" or "Surrey songbird") sings "Love Will Find Out the Way", no matter what manipulations try to squash it.

For all its snarkiness and self-effacing humor, Love & Friendship is ultimately gracious and generous. This graciousness is the secret ingredient that makes Stillman's movies - deadpan and wryly postmodern on their surface - not only witty, but unassumingly wise. I always get the sense that he likes his characters, even as he pokes fun of their self-absorption, cluelessness and dishonesty. In the fashion of all the best comedies, Love & Friendship exposes and mocks the nonsense that people are capable of, but by the end all is well (or mostly all - Sir James would disagree if he had any awareness).

Viewing Journal - May 2016 #5

Love & Friendship (Whit Stillman, United Kingdom, 2016)

I'm now convinced that Whit Stillman was born to write and direct Jane Austen adaptations. While watching Love & Friendship I realized he's been making Austen stories all along - comedies of manners that are both satirical and affectionate - only in contemporary settings. His unique wit flourishes even more in the 1790s, and when matched with Austen's beautifully drawn characters. I haven't yet read Lady Susan, which Love & Friendship is adapted from, but in some ways it's an atypical Austen story. Lady Susan is a devious and cheerfully amoral character, a social climber with a genius for manipulation. She begins and ends the film unrepentantly horrible, but she is so witty and charismatic that we can't help but be impressed by her scheming ways. Kate Beckinsale clearly had a blast playing this character, delivering Lady Susan's politely wicked dialogue with virtuosic comic timing. Love & Friendship also has a welcome absurdist, irreverent streak, more reminiscent of Oscar Wilde or screwball comedy than Jane Austen. Yet, more than any other Austen adaptation I've seen, Love & Friendship captures her humor - her genius for mining comedy out of the gap between what people say and what they actually mean. It's one of the funniest movies I've seen in ages.

Enter the Dragon (Robert Clouse, United States / Hong Kong, 1973)

Despite considering myself a fan of Hong Kong kung fu flicks, I had never seen a single one starring the legendary Bruce Lee. Clearly I needed to correct this oversight. Enter the Dragon is a collaboration between East and West - made in Hong Kong with a local crew, but filmed in English with an American director and co-stars. It's a genre hybrid as well, both a martial arts extravaganza and a James Bond-style espionage thriller, with influences of so-called "blaxploitation" and psychedelia. About every B-movie genre popular in America or Hong Kong circa 1973 shows up in Enter the Dragon in one form or another. This democratic blending of East and West is typical of Lee, a citizen of both Hong Kong and the United States who was passionate about spreading the philosophy of martial arts across the globe. Enter the Dragon is also a total mess, though an exuberantly fun mess. I now see why Bruce Lee was such a star. He's not only an astonishing athlete but a magnetic screen presence. There's a mischief and wily intelligence in his eyes, and his lightning quick movements are mesmerizing. His body zigs when you expect it to zag; his bird-like shrieks in battle are amusing and terrifying.

The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, United States, 1932)

I love these horror-thrillers made in the early 30s, before the Production Code clamped down on what Hollywood films could show. Though tame by today's ultra-violent standards, The Most Dangerous Game remains an entertaining thriller that must have shocked audiences of 1932. Based on a famous and influential short story (which I have yet to read) with a perfectly simple, sinister premise: a wealthy madman and big game hunter entraps shipwrecked people on his private island to hunt them. If they survive a single night, he will release them - but none have survived before! Though it's only an hour long, The Most Dangerous Game spends much of its runtime building up to the hunt, as shipwrecked survivors are trapped inside Count Zaroff's gothic castle. The evil Zaroff is played by an over-the-top Leslie Banks; his bug-eyed expressions and preposterous Russian accent are difficult to take seriously but quite entertaining, especially next to Joel McCrea's stiffly stoic leading man. The really good parts arrive in the final twenty minutes, in a cat-and-mouse showdown in the jungle. The Most Dangerous Game was filmed on the same sets as King Kong - Kong would use the sets during the day, and Game at night. It's clearly an artificial jungle, but with all the grandiose charm and dream-like exaggeration of Old Hollywood. It's the perfect setting for an action-packed climax, as our heroes set elaborate booby traps, flee from hounds across logs bridging canyons, and do battle at the edge of a giant waterfall. The final fight is unusually realistic for the time, with sweaty, flailing desperation that looks unchoreographed.

Flirting (John Duigan, Australia, 1991)

Ignore the frivolous title. Flirting is the rare teenage comedy that treats its adolescent characters with dignity, as intelligent and thoughtful people. In 1965 Australia, two boarding schools, one all male and one all female, face each other across a lake. Danny is a gawky kid, intelligent, not athletic, teased by fellow students, though he's mostly unfazed by them. Thandiwe has just arrived to Australia from Uganda, and stands out from her peers for her race, her sophistication and irreverent humor. Both are attracted by the rebellious qualities of the other, and over a series of awkward and charming encounters grow to love each other. Flirting is the kind of well-observed film where even minor characters come alive as real, specific people, where you will laugh and cringe with fond recognition at their behavior. Noah Taylor and Thandie Newton give sensitive, lively performances as the leads, while Nicole Kidman and a baby-faced Naomi Watts appear in small early roles. Director John Duigan brings to Flirting a quiet beauty unique for its genre - like when Danny sneaks out at night to meet Thandiwe, rowing across a shimmering starlit lake out of a fairy tale.

Viewing Journal - May 2016 #3

The Saragossa Manuscript (Wojciech Has, Poland, 1965)

Two soldiers in the Napoleonic Wars stumble into an old abandoned inn as battle rages around them. There they discover a huge ancient book, filled with enigmatic pictures. It's the tale of a Captain of the Walloon Guard (a title he pompously brings up whenever possible) traveling across the mountains of Spain to Madrid. He gets lost in a rocky wasteland and stops at another old abandoned inn. Staying at the inn are two Tunisian princesses, who claim to have never seen a man before and beg the flabbergasted Captain to marry them both. The princesses force him to drink from a chalice made of a human skull; he awakes the next morning under a gallows where two convicted thieves are hanging. The poor Captain then wanders unwillingly through some kind of purgatory, one where everyone he meets wants to either kill him or tell him stories. Yet no matter how many stories he hears, the Captain always ends up back at the gallows, underneath the corpses of the thieving Zoto brothers.

I've often heard The Saragossa Manuscript compared to a Russian nesting doll, which is as good a description as any. Like a Matryoshka doll, The Saragossa Manuscript is made of stories within stories within stories. "Let me tell you my story," is how it always begins, but within the story that one character is narrating, a different character they meet will start telling their own tale. There are monks and sheiks, noblemen and women, bandits and phantoms, cabalists and Inquisitors; their stories involve duels, affairs, hauntings and supernatural trials. Getting lost within The Saragossa Manuscript is the point. Over a runtime of three hours, it dives deeper into layers upon layers of digressions, then unexpectedly will work backwards and re-emerge into a story begun an hour earlier in the film. There are many subterranean connections between the stories, as occurrences in one story will impact another, characters reappear in different guises, and similar events reoccur in a circuitous fashion. The Saragossa Manuscript has a similar impact on the viewer as the befuddled Captain - it is dizzying and disorienting, and though already lengthy it feels as if it could spin on for an eternity, ever weaving tales that are both new and always the same.

Thankfully, it's not as difficult as it sounds. Despite all its macabre imagery, The Saragossa Manuscript is playful and knowingly absurd. It fluidly dances between horror and melodrama and slapstick, always with a sense of delight at the infinite possibilities of storytelling. Though its rambling structure requires patience, The Saragossa Manuscript always pays it off with satisfying "a-ha!" moments of sudden clarity - only to pull the rug out from under your feet again with a wink. And I was thrilled to get lost in the rich world it created. Every image is busy - packed with bones and skulls, animals and people, talismans and esoteric knick-knacks, each suggesting stories of their own. At the end of its wild three hours, I was dazed but delighted.

Pride & Prejudice (Joe Wright, United Kingdom, 2005)

Period piece adaptations of British literature are often the stiffest and stuffiest movies around. Even many good ones feel theatrical instead of cinematic, with great actors in dress-up, their period-appropriate dresses and suits looking like they've just been taken out of shrink wrapping. From its first shot, this 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's classic is notable for its liveliness and its immersive, detailed sense of a certain place and time. The dresses look worn, the houses look lived-in. People talk over and around each other like in real life, not like actors waiting for their cue. Joe Wright's camera is always on the move, circling through the rooms of the Bennett household, weaving through dancing and gossiping crowds in ballrooms. Stunning long takes are an earthier successor to the fluid camerawork of Max Ophuls's films.

As an adaptation of Austen's masterpiece it's quite good. Joe Wright is a very romantic and sensual filmmaker, and his Pride & Prejudice is more swooningly romantic than the book, or at least my reading of it. His Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy seem destined to be together from the start, despite their misunderstandings. In one fantastic flourish, as they dance together everyone else in the ballroom fades away. Mr. Darcy's disastrous first proposal is re-envisioned in the pouring rain, where the romantic longing and sexual tension are just as vivid as the angry, haughty words spoken. In the novel, the proposal scene is hilariously pathetic and sad; it never feels guaranteed that Elizabeth and Darcy will grow to love each other, let alone tolerate each other. This makes it all the more delightfully surprising when Elizabeth's tender feelings grow against her will, and all the funnier when these two very intelligent, very decent people are rudely awakened to how stubbornly wrong they can be.

But I don't mean to sound negative. Joe Wright's more romanticized vision is still a valid interpretation of the book, and it works well in the context of the movie. Partially because of how beautiful it is. The cinematography and Jean-Yves Thibaudet's score are exceedingly lovely, and the images of the English countryside are breathtaking. A well-cast ensemble brings life to Austen's characters - I think this is Keira Knightley's finest moment as an actress, she embodies Elizabeth Bennett's fierce intelligence, and her quietly passionate, decent sensibility. Pride & Prejudice is also director Joe Wright's best film by a significant margin, and among the finest Austen adaptations I've seen.

Viewing Journal - May 2016

Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, United Kingdom, 2013)

An alien, in the form of a desirable woman, stalks the streets of Scotland looking for male prey. A basic plot description makes Under the Skin sound like a trashy sci-fi thriller in the vein of Species, that late night cable mainstay aimed at boys eager for a side of pin-up sexiness with the main course of B-movie alien action. The fact that said sexy alien is embodied by Scarlett Johansson no doubt brought much of the same crowd to Under the Skin in droves.

Many were probably disappointed, as Under the Skin is almost entirely lacking in sexy, gooey genre thrills. This is one of the strangest, most challenging science fiction films of recent years. It opens with an abstract animated sequence, reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which might represent the alien being formed - circular shapes emerge from light and darkness to form an eyeball, a woman's voice pronounces syllables that form words. We then see a nameless woman (Johansson) driving the streets of Glasgow in a white van, picking up lonely men. She flirts with mechanical skill, but otherwise has a blank, impassive face. The men (whose Scottish accents are so thick that I only understood half of what they were saying) are amazed by their luck that this beautiful woman is interested in them. They fall into a lustful trance as she lures them into her inky black lair, where they slowly sink into a dark pool and disappear.

Under the Skin not only centers around an alien, but the film itself adopts her alien perspective. There's an unnervingly discordant, off-kilter rhythm to the editing, the sound design, and the soundtrack, which consists of shrieking strings and eerie droning synths. The scenes set on the streets of Glasgow are filmed with mundane realism and a coolly observant quality, similar to a nature documentary. But once we enter the alien's lair, Under the Skin becomes stylized and uncanny. When the alien witnesses tragedy - an entire family swept away by the seas on a rocky Scottish beach, a truly disturbing scene - she observes calmly, totally unaffected. The camera mimics her perspective, filming the horror from a distance, detached from their struggle.

We begin to wonder how much the alien knows and what she is thinking. Does she know what her victims want from her, or is she ignorant and merely programmed to complete a task? Can she even be called a "she"? Cracks begin to appear in the alien's facade. She observes herself in the mirror, lingering on her reflection with some sort of dawning awareness. She begins to watch people, with curiosity more than predatory intent. And she meets one victim who is different than the rest, in a moving and surprising scene. This causes a change of heart that perhaps not even the alien can explain. Considering her fame, it's amazing how quickly I forgot that I was watching Scarlett Johansson in the role. Under the Skin would not have worked if she could not convincingly play a non-human character, but she does - it's a quiet but unique and unearthly performance, free of any celebrity ego.

When I was a kid, I wrote a short story about an alien who visits earth and views humanity from a different perspective. My alien was a sentient blue glob and not a seductress, and the story probably did not add up to anything of insight, but I've always been fascinated by that idea. Under the Skin is the best take on that concept I've seen. As the alien becomes increasingly fascinated by humanity, she discovers its capacity for kindness and for hatred. She tries to become one of them, yet runs against her own alien nature. Her attempts to navigate this foreign place are bizarrely endearing, but ultimately pathetic and tragic. Under the Skin provokes many divergent reactions, often within the same scene. It is somehow compassionate while being pitilessly cold and cruel. It is frightening and disturbing, but exploratory and curious. As someone who loves both creative cinema and thoughtful science fiction, I found it exhilarating.

Watch trailer here

High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood, United States, 1973)

A nasty, brutish western with a supernatural twist. It opens like many a classic Clint Eastwood western. A Man with No Name rides into town, and his mysterious presence immediately causes a stir among the skittish townspeople. He is the meanest bastard Eastwood has ever played, a cold-blooded murderer and rapist. The town has a troubled history. We see flashbacks of its former sheriff being whipped to death by hired killers, while the townspeople stand by and do nothing. Without stating it outright, the film eventually makes it clear that Eastwood is the sheriff's spirit, returned from the grave to seek vengeance and expose the communal sins of this cowardly town. Despite his righteous anger, he's no hero, merely a vengeful agent of chaos. There's nobody good in High Plains Drifter, just the bad and the ugly.

High Plains Drifter is among Clint Eastwood's earliest efforts as a director. Stylistically, it's a classical all-American western, but ultimately little about it is comfortable or familiar - it is tinged with horror and black comedy, and has a subversive sting of cynical social satire.

Watch trailer here

Vampire's Kiss (Robert Bierman, United States, 1988)

The Cage is unleashed, and it's a glorious thing to witness. Vampire's Kiss is essentially a showreel for Nicolas Cage at his most deranged. The film is dominated by Cage's insanity - the inexplicable way he enunciates words, his unnatural body language and bugged-out eyeballs, his bizarre outbursts.

Sure, there's a story here. Cage is an 80s yuppie and businessman, and an obnoxious misogynist who harasses his poor secretary. After a bat flies into his apartment, he meets a woman who bites his neck. He begins to believe that he's turning into a vampire, though it's clearly a delusion. There's something like a social satire here, though it's never clear what the movie is actually satirizing. It's easy to imagine Vampire's Kiss as a dark psychological thriller, but in practice that's not what happens. In practice it's Nicolas Cage prancing around Manhattan yelling "I'm a vampaya! I'm a vampaya!" while wearing plastic fangs he bought at a novelty shop, chasing pigeons, shrieking at crucifixes and begging passerby to drive a wooden stake through his heart. And whatever the hell this was all about.

It is, legitimately, one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I am at a loss as to what Vampire's Kiss was trying to be, but I'm equally delighted that it exists and is so totally bonkers. A must-see for Cage cultists.

Watch trailer here

Barry Lyndon

United States / United Kingdom, 1975
Directed by Stanley Kubrick

Barry Lyndon is seemingly Stanley Kubrick's most "normal" film. Based on an 1844 novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, it outlines the rise and fall of Redmond Barry, an 18th century Irishman and opportunistic social climber, who fights in the British and Prussian armies in the Seven Years' War (and deserts both), ascends to the highest levels of society through lies, luck and seduction, and ultimately loses it all. The broad strokes of Barry Lyndon are typical, it's a story we've all heard before. There is nothing here as obviously outrageous as many of Kubrick's other films - including, prior to Lyndon, a political satire ending in nuclear holocaust (Dr. Strangelove), a trippy science fiction epic (2001), and a bizarre shocker about crime and punishment in a dystopian London (A Clockwork Orange). Yet in its own way, Barry Lyndon is every bit as unusual and challenging as any of them, and just as clearly an uncompromised product of Kubrick's vision.

Barry Lyndon's opening sets the tone for the 3 hours to follow. The funereal notes of Handel's "Sarabande" blare on the soundtrack as the opening titles appear.

The first image shows, from a distance, two men about to engage in a duel.

We cannot see their faces, and their human drama - of life-or-death importance to them, obviously - is dwarfed by the landscape surrounding them. The scene almost looks more like landscape painting than photography. A narrator informs us, without an ounce of emotion in his voice: "Barry's father had been bred, like many other young sons of a genteel family, to the profession of the law. And there is no doubt he would have made an eminent figure in his profession -" BANG "- had he not been killed in a duel, which arose over the purchase of some horses." And we see Barry's father fall limp in the distance.

This opening tells us several things about Barry Lyndon. 1) This is a highly formalized film - from the overwhelming classical music, to the fussily decorous titles, to the painterly cinematography. 2) Largely due to 1), this is a distant, cold film. We are observers of these people and their tragedies, but Kubrick never invites us to feel sympathy for them. We are always kept at a distance. The dry narration often tells us what is about to happen before it actually does, flattening suspense or typical engagement with the story, and it even makes sardonic little jokes at the expense of the characters, which leads us to 3) this is all quite absurd. The duel may have been of the utmost importance to Barry's father, but to us it looks petty and foolish - a dumb quarrel erupting over an event as comparatively trivial as the purchase of horses. The grand aesthetics do not elevate the characters and their tragedies so much as parody them.

Barry Lyndon's attitude of bemused detachment is what makes it so unique. Our main character is never particularly likable, and star Ryan O'Neill intentionally plays Barry as a blank slate of a person. The film moves along at a steady pace - about the speed of a glacier, also an apt comparison for how warm and friendly it is. I've probably made it sound deeply unappealing: Barry Lyndon is beautiful but cold, and unconcerned with character development or traditionally engaging storytelling. Yet it is mesmerizing, and even surprisingly enjoyable. How so?

For starters, I'm not using the word "beautiful" lightly in this case. Barry Lyndon is one of the most gorgeous movies ever made. If every artform has at least a handful of indisputable genius artists, then Stanley Kubrick must be considered one of the true geniuses of the movies. From the cinematography to the music to the editing, Barry Lyndon is masterfully crafted. Every image is carefully composed and lighted - Barry Lyndon used natural lighting instead of set lights, which at the time required the development of a new type of camera lens (also used by NASA). The effect is magical, especially in the scenes lit only by candles. The images have a soft glow that, along with the film's slow, steady rhythm and beautiful music, has a hypnotizing power. Taken purely as abstract art, Barry Lyndon is remarkable.

But there's more to it than that. The images of Barry Lyndon are designed to look like paintings, not only for beauty's sake but to communicate the story's themes. Redmond Barry wants to attain a certain status within a society that prizes a rigidly aestheticized lifestyle. He lies, cheats, and transforms himself to achieve his goals, and as he does so, the images themselves become more formal and stylized. Through much of the first half, detailing Redmond's humble beginnings as an Irish lad and anonymous soldier, the imagery is painterly, but has an openness and freedom to it.

As the film continues and Redmond reaches the highest levels of his society, the photography becomes more static and controlled. In Barry Lyndon, the indoors, ritualistic life of the high class is portrayed like a luxurious prison. Characters are trapped in beautiful images resembling the tableaux of 18th century paintings. The Lyndon estate becomes as claustrophobic as the Overlook Hotel of Kubrick's next film, The Shining.

The highly controlled camerawork is violated during several violent moments of the story. Redmond starts a fistfight with another soldier during his time in the British army. Kubrick films the fight with a handheld camera, giving it an intimate, visceral quality shockingly different from the cool distance of most of Barry Lyndon. We hardly ever see Redmond happier than during this scene, where he is beating the hell out of another man.

Stanley Kubrick rarely had a kindly view of human nature, and his Barry Lyndon is a savage satire of the classism of 18th century society. As Kubrick views it, there is a brutal animal nature beneath the formality of high society. All the rituals and grandeur of their civilization are just fancy trappings on a "survival of the fittest" Darwinian struggle to be the biggest and the best, to crush any competitors. A perfect society for a sociopath like Redmond Barry to flourish in. Moments like the aforementioned fight scene are just the characters - and the film itself - dropping any pretense and revealing their true nature. Kubrick plays much of this for sardonic, bone-dry comedy, and it is surprisingly hilarious at times.

Yet, to the film's credit - and keeping it from becoming totally misanthropic - Redmond Barry is not entirely unsympathetic despite being a nasty cad. He is also tragically misguided, a young man in search of his place and in want of a father figure. We see him behave gently and honorably around only a few people - including a superior in the army who becomes a mentor, and Barry's young son who he loves dearly - and he loses all of them. For all its frigid cynicism, Barry Lyndon accumulates moments of tremendous power, particularly towards the end. Kubrick may be ruthless in his view of human folly but Barry Lyndon is not entirely heartless.

Another Year (2010)

United Kingdom, 2010
Directed by Mike Leigh 

Watching Another Year, I was reminded of certain people in my own family. They have a stable home. They love their children. They are involved in their community. Many of their friends, while lovely people in their own right, have not been so fortunate in their life's journey. Their family lives are stressful, they are anxious or insecure, they have debilitating financial or health issues. My relatives always extend welcome to them. Their doors are open, ready with a meal or a listening ear. They may grow exasperated with their friends' messy behavior, but their friendship is consistent and loving. They offer a peaceful space where their friends can be accepted unconditionally.

Mike Leigh's Another Year centers around one such couple: Tom and Gerri Hupple. The film drifts in and out of one year of their life - as they work (as an engineering geologist and therapist), tend to their garden, and spend time with their family members and friends, some of whom are terribly unhappy. There is no real plot to speak of, just observations as they go about their day to day lives. British filmmaker Mike Leigh is renowned for these kinds of meandering character studies. Leigh's approach to filmmaking is not entirely traditional. He begins with a premise, and basic ideas about characters. He then meets with his actors weeks before filming starts, and together they embark on a collaborative process of improvising and developing full personalities and backstories, and creating the flow of the story from there. In Mike Leigh's films, storytelling emerges from character, instead of characters being bent to the predetermined beats of a plot. The lengthy rehearsal process shows in the results. In Another Year, the weight of untold personal histories is felt in how these people dress, how they walk, how they interact. And the acting is uniformly terrific, even the smallest roles are played with subtle detail and depth. It is rare and revelatory to find a director and his actors work in such perfect unison.

It is equally rare and encouraging to see a good, healthy marriage in a film. Tom and Gerri Hupple are a long-time couple still very much in love. Their marriage is not idealized or perfect, but they have reached a place of peaceful, tender equilibrium with the other. It's hard to imagine them separately. They are good at their jobs. They are intelligent and compassionate. They have established healthy routines. They are growing old, but are content. Watching them garden, cook, drink tea and read together is endearing. I particularly fell in love with Gerri, played by the luminous Ruth Sheen. With her calm demeanor, sincere smile, and bright clothing, she is a source of warmth for everyone she meets, even the most difficult people.

Tom and Gerri's old friend Ken used to be happy, but those days are long gone. He comes to visit them in London. Many of his friends have passed away. He lives alone, has become obese and an alcoholic. He hates his job but does not quit, because other than work his life is a void. Tom offers a small helping hand but Ken dejectedly does not accept, perhaps out of embarrassment or self-hatred. There is only so much a friend can do. Gerri and Mary have been co-workers and friends for twenty years. After a divorce that ruined her financially, and a disastrous affair with a married man that ruined her emotionally, Mary is a nervous wreck. She too is an alcoholic, but clearly in denial. Every time that she smokes a cigarette, which is fairly often, she anxiously explains that she doesn't usually smoke and is trying to quit. Her desperate loneliness is tragically obvious and leads her into embarrassment, like when she unsubtly hits on Tom and Gerri's 30 year old son. Mary is the kind of person most people avoid like the plague, as she is incredibly irritating and draining to be around, but as played by a fearless Lesley Manville, she is impossible to hate. Her pain seems so real and raw that you want to reach through the screen and comfort her.

Another Year is about the unequal distribution of happiness. Why is it that some are so blessed to live fulfilling lives into old age, while others fall into despair and neglect, or never had happiness to begin with? Why are some blessed with the support of a loving spouse and children, while others are betrayed by those closest to them and have no one to care for? Personal choices and responsibility absolutely play a large part, but that cannot be the entirety of it. Those who have more must give of themselves, freely and without expecting anything in turn, to those who have less. After all, any one of us could be, or has been, in a similarly unfortunate position. We need to have understanding and patience with those less fortunate than ourselves. Another Year illustrates the need for hospitality. It is a comforting film for its lovely portrait of Tom and Gerri, but also a heartbreaking film for its refusal to sugarcoat the misery of others. It offers no easy solutions, just presents a bleak reality - but neither does it suggest that Ken or Mary are beyond hope.