INSIDE DAISY CLOVER - FILMSTRUCK

This review was originally part of a larger piece covering the Natalie Wood Signature Collection and published in 2009.

Trading heavily on Natalie Wood's screen persona, the self-reflexive, strange, and oft-times surreal Inside Daisy Clover, is a fictional tale about a child star in the 1930s. Wood plays Daisy, a 15-year-old tomboy who lives with her senile old mother (Ruth Gordon) on the beach, selling forged autographed pictures of movie stars to passersby. Daisy is an angry, expressive young lass, prone to cigarettes, graffiti, shouts instead of whispers, and reacting to situations with her fists. She also dreams of being a singer, and she cuts a record at a fairground booth and sends it in to Swan Studios for their talent contest, thus changing her life.

Daisy is shuttled off to the movie lot in a limousine. Her mother believes it to be a hearse and warns her of accepting rides from strangers, but Daisy does not listen. She is looked over by studio head Raymond Swan (Christopher Plummer) and his wife (Katharine Bard) and given a screen test, a musical number about stardom and ambition (and the one time in the movie that Natalie Wood sings herself). Its lyrics foreshadow Daisy's oncoming success; in fact, both of the musical numbers in the movie, "You're Gonna Hear From Me" and "Circus is a Whacky World," both written by Andre and Dory Previn, work as funhouse mirrors, meta devices that break down the movie. By the time Daisy sings "Circus," she is a disillusioned star, the magic of Hollywood having been exposed to be as fraudulent as the forged photos she used to sell. Separated from her mother, married to a philandering leading man (Robert Redford) with a dirty secret, and generally turned into a cog in the machine, Daisy has been hoodwinked.

Inside Daisy Clover was made by the director/producer team of Robert Mulligan and Alan J. Pakula, who also made To Kill a Mockingbird and another Natalie Wood vehicle, Love with the Proper Stranger. As inside-Hollywood movies go, it's as savage as one might expect, the entertainment business loves to hoist itself on its own petard. In some ways, the mysterious tone of much of the back-lot action reminds me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Last Tycoon, though unlike that book or the Elia Kazan adaptation from the 1970s, or really any of the more famous moviemaking movies, Inside Daisy Clover lacks any sense of awe or wonderment in regards to how films are put together. Normally, the on-set re-creations are given a tantalizing surreality, life reimagined as giant spectacle. In this movie, Swan Studios--which is actually the Warners lot--is a dark and empty place. There are no huge crowds, and the few stage pieces we see are lonely and almost appear to be on their way to the junk heap, like the bizarre totem we see on a crane when Daisy first arrives. In this portrait of Hollywood, put together by writer Gavin Lambert (adapting his own novel), the heavy fugue of moviemaking is in inverse proportion to the joy the movies bring the world.

Wood spends as much time with reactions as she does action in this movie, if not more. As the center of attention, she sometimes draws more by standing back and observing. She's very good at it, her doe-eyes soaking up what everyone else is doing. They are relying on her even as they demand that she rely on them. It's an important distinction, as well, because as soon as Daisy is accepted by Swan, she stops acting on her own and starts doing what she is told--even Redford's character orders her around. In the final moments, Daisy is taking back her action. She's through taking orders.

Despite the promise and the larger issues at work here, Inside Daisy Clover doesn't entirely gel. Pakula and Mulligan are maybe trying a little too hard to be anti-everything, to be too unconventional, and the forced oddness creates a gulf between the film and its audience that is never fully traversed. Even so, it is a singular enough effort to warrant a look.

THE PLAYER - #812

My thing about movies that are about movies is that the good ones make me want to watch other movies. If I watch The Bad and the Beautiful, for instance, I’m going to want to chase it with Cat People. Who didn’t watch the opening of The Player back when it was released in 1992 and not immediately go view--or even re-view--Touch ofEvil? Or how about pairing it up with Bicycle Thieves [review]? Better yet, another movie about movies, based on a book about movies, Elia Kazan’s vastly underrated adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Monroe Stahr, the movie mogul in The Last Tycoon, was modeled after Irving Thalberg, whom surely director Robert Altman and writer Michael Tolkin had in mind when they created Griffin Mill, their motion picture wunderkind, as played by Tim Robbins.

And it’s not just that The Player is about movies, it’s utterly in love with them. You get that right from the virtuoso opening shot, which runs without cutting for 8 1/2 minutes (certainly no coincidence), referencing not just Touch of Evil, but The Sheltering Sky and Rope and a couple of other films that pulled off similar feats (this was pre-Tarantino, mind you). There are easter eggs throughout this thing, and not just the cameos by then au currant celebs, but jokes and winks and the careful placement of other films and filmmakers to cue the audience to what is coming next. Be it Griffin walking under a movie marquee as the lights go out on The Bicycle Thief to signal his own oncoming moral dilemma, or the fake-out of Lyle Lovett walking by a Hitchcock photo as an indicator of suspense and a deep visual pun about “the wrong man.” The murder victim declares, “See you in the next reel, pal,” ironic last words befitting the noir plot Griffin Mill will find himself in, as predicted by the posters in his office.

If you’re a cinephile, you’re going to eat this stuff up.

If you’re not, if you’re just a casual movie fan, then no worries, you’re going to dig The Player, too. It’s more than a collection of in jokes and elbowing Hollywood in the ribs. Altman and Tolkin bring an honest-to-goodness murder plot along with all the references. The Player is a movie that aims to be as good as all the other movies it emulates.

In terms of story, it’s simple. Griffin Mill is a hotshot Hollywood producer who appears to be going cold. In the midst of his concerns that his boss is bringing in his replacement (Peter Gallagher), he’s also getting harassing post cards from an anonymous writer that he never called back. When the threats turn scary, Griffin tries to figure out who it is, settling on one writer in particular, David Kahane (played by a young, nearly unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio). Griffin tracks Kahane to a revival screening of the Neorealist classic The Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves) and tries to reason with him. Only, Kahane isn’t the guy--even if he hates Griffin all the same. Accusations cause tempers to flare and a scuffle ensues, leading to the writer ending up dead and Griffin trying to make it look like a robbery.

And he’s successful for the most part. The only problem is, someone saw the two of them together, and the cops (Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett) think it’s suspicious that the movie exec was somehow randomly the last person to see a no-name scribe alive. This line of thinking is only heightened when Griffin starts dating the deceased’s girlfriend (Greta Scacchi). In any conventional script, Griffin would certainly look guilty.

Which, of course, we know he is, but that’s immaterial. The question that lingers, what will he do to get out of it? That’s what any good suspense movie is about. Plus, we know that the real stalker is still out there, and he could strike at any minute. Somehow these things have to converge, right? That’s what the rules of screenwriting have taught us. Not to mention that the fake moviemakers in the movie we are watching keep harping on the need for a happy ending. Griffin Mill has to find his way out of it, or The Player will fail.

That might actually be The Player’s most ingenious bit, how Tolkin builds in all this conventional wisdom about what makes a successful movie--twists, turns, sex, surprising rescues, happy endings--and then delivers on each. It’s the artiest of blockbusters, The Player is. Like if the Kaufman Brothers in Adaptation cracked the code and managed to sincerely make it work. (Which, let’s be honest, it works in Adaptation; as soon as Donald takes over, the film becomes a crowdpleaser.)

Tim Robbins brings an interesting energy to his performance. He is both slimy and trustworthy, at times believably dim and yet otherwise extremely cagey. It’s excellent casting, how we feel about Griffin is probably how a lot of people feel about Robbins, who himself can be seen as a little pretentious and also a bit of a windbag due to his openness about his politics. Yet, he also always seems like a decent guy, he’d probably be pretty nice in person. We like him, but we want to hate him, too.

Fans of Hollywood lore will see other nods to history in The Player, perhaps most deftly in Fred Ward’s fixer character, which resembles MGM’s Eddie Mannix, immortalized in both the films Hollywoodland and more recently Hail, Caesar! There is also some amusing commentary about television actors wanting to be in movies, which seems only ironic and outdated given how so much and so many have shifted from the big screen to cable television for better opportunities in recent years. Tim Robbins himself was last seen on HBO in a bad Dr. Strangelove rip-off.

Television may be the current perceived assassin of big studio pictures, but moviemakers have had many threats before this one--including TV, which was originally supposed to be the death knell of the moviegoing experience back in the 1950s. Most would say the changing of the guard in the 1960s was the true end of Golden Age Hollywood--which is largely what Altman is paying tribute to here. His movie studio resembles the classic system as much as it does the bloated 1980s version he’s critiquing. The Player actually came at a time when independent films were having their heyday, and the Sundance crowd was moving in. I guess these things are cyclical. If the auteurs of the 1960s and 1970s gave birth to the blockbuster, then the indie scene of the 1990s gave us the mega blockbuster. Would there even be a Griffin Mill now, or would he just be a collection of stockholders?

I guess it doesn’t really matter. All we can say for sure is that he’d still be getting away with it. Now more than ever.

Tim Robbins, Sydney Pollack, and Robert Altman on set.

METROPOLITAN - #326

Whit Stillman released his first film when he was nearly 40: Metropolitan, an erudite, witty portrait of New York rich kids nearly half his age. That was in 1990.

I graduated high school in 1990. If memory serves, I saw Metropolitan sometime in my first year at college. Its appeal for me was similar to the appeal of F. Scott Fitzgerald or the portraits of the upper class in Vanity Fair magazine (which I particularly like to read for when it all goes wrong and some millionaire has to cover up a murder). It has a voyeuristic draw. I am the outsider with my face against the glass, or peering over the fence. Or, in the cases of The Great Gatsby and Metropolitan, I am Nick Carraway or Tom Townshend: the outsider invited to crash the party.

Metropolitan’s Tom is played by Edward Clements, a first-time actor who, interesting bit of trivia, went on to become a preacher in Canada and never made a film again. For the majority of the cast, this little examination of manners and morals was their only acting work, adding not just to the movie’s indie cred but also its sense of realism. These are not actors with pre-formed personalities. Even the ones who would go on to do other things, like Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols, we know mostly from the other movies they made with Stillman. Like Woody Allen before him, Stillman is telling a New York story that is very much contained by his own worldview--urbane, dry, knowingly self-involved, and totally enticing.

Stillman’s story takes place over the course of one winter break and follows a group of well-to-do college students from party to party, though focusing mostly on the after parties, when the rich boys and the debutantes drink, play cards, gossip, and wax philosophical. Tom joins this group by sheer accident. He is leaving the same soiree as his soon-to-be new friends, and they mistake him for having dibs on the taxi they want. In truth, Tom can’t afford the cab ride and intends to take public transportation home. The other kids completely ignore his explanation, however, and rewrite his narrative for him: he was getting in the cab, they can all share, and he might as well come to their friend Sally Fowler’s house.

It’s a great example of how the privileged operate. How they perceive the situation must be true. This is perhaps the most pronounced theme of Metropolitan. To these spoiled students, perception is everything. Whether it is judging an experience they never actually had or fretting over their reputations, how they look at the world and how it looks back at them is paramount. Maybe it’s unfair to lay this on them because they come from money, because as we’ll discover, Tom, the would-be poor boy and socialist who is too good for such social events, is no different. He hides his family background until the situation requires a revelation, and he professes to prefer reading literary criticism to actual literature. “You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it,” he said (and thus predicting the internet). He is no better than the people he criticizes, and he also falls quite easily into their lifestyle.

The literary discussion Tom has mainly centers around Jane Austen, and Mansfield Park in particular, a book described in the film as being about the morality of a group of children putting on a play. The comparison here is obvious, as we are watching not just a fiction (Tom hates fiction because he knows someone made it up, it never happened) being acted out by a group of young people, but a fiction about a group of young people whose whole social interaction is its own kind of performance. It’s all about your tux and your dress. (Stillman, of course, would go on to release a Jane Austen adaptation this year, Love and Friendship, only his fifth film, and a very good one at that; it’s what inspired me to dig back into his earlier work.)

Amidst all this conversation, we also get to peer in on the personal dramas that affect each participant. The Mansfield Park debate, for instance, is actually part of the flirtation between Tom and Audrey (Carolyn Farina), a gamine who has a crush on the ginger-haired intruder. Audrey is the nice girl, arguably pure of heart, and Tom’s treatment of her gives us our clearest indication that he is not the staunch idealist he would pretend to be. In fact, he’s rather judgmental, letting his preconceived notion of what the rich kids are like color how he interacts with them. There is also an irony to how quickly he gloms onto the story Nick (Eigeman) tells about another trust-funder who treats women badly. Tom’s behavior may not stray into the date rape allegations Nick contrives, but he is callous to Audrey’s feelings. In fact, the whole group lacks any empathy, for the most part. Their selfishness is in wanting their problems to matter above all others. Thus, Tom’s mistreatment by Serena (Elizabeth Thompson), a girl with a boyfriend at every Ivy League school, is tragic to him, but he never gives a thought to how it affects the other boys in her pen-pal chain, much less Audrey.

On paper (or, I guess, your screen), I imagine my descriptions of Metropolitan make it sound insufferable. Why would anyone want to watch a bunch of spoiled college students blowing smoke up their own asses, like some kind of cinematic equivalent of a Vampire Weekend record? Well, that’s the charm of Stillman. Like the aforementioned Nick Carraway’s narration of Gatsby, Stillman’s own storytelling is a wonderful mix of genuine affection and gentle disdain. His humorous writing serves as a self-critique. He is not afraid to let his characters sound ridiculous, even as he forgives them since they are so incredibly earnest about it. It’s basically the core of all his movies, showing the self-absorbed slowly become more aware of the world around them, eventually stepping out of their comfort zones to get on with life. Eigeman is always the quintessential Stillman hero/rogue, in that he believes the bullshit most of all, even while affecting an air of indifference. He’s obnoxiously charming, and at least here, the guy who is pretty much exactly who he says he is. (See also Greta Gerwig’s well-meaning buffoon in Damsels in Distress [review]. Given her love of dance crazes, she’d surely dance the cha-cha-cha with Nick.)

For much of the group, their changes require them stepping away from the cliques. Sally (Dylan Hundley) and Jane (Allison Rutledge-Parisi) find other men to date; Nick leaves to visit his family. The optics change, as well. While most of Metropolitan takes place inside New York apartments, the final scenes force Tom and Charlie (Nichols) to leave the familiar, acknowledge how helpless they are (neither can drive), and essentially try to have a real experience. The fact that it’s one they concoct to defend Audrey’s honor, cobbled together from various white-knight scenarios straight out of the sort of books Audrey would read, right down to Tom’s comical derringer, turns out to be a sly send-up on Stillman’s part. These boys have a lot of growing up to do.

Yet, there is real change by the time credits roll. The final scene of Metropolitan is no longer Tom walking alone, as he tried to do the morning after the first party, but he and Jack and Audrey having to figure out how to get home from the Hamptons, hitchhiking on the side of the road. It’s the same light-of-day camaraderie we will see at the end of The Last Days of Disco [review], when the main cast leaves the nightclub and heads off to whatever is next. In this fashion, Whit Stillman’s films are always about characters in a state of becoming--perhaps not a strange view for a man who suddenly started making movies as he approached middle age to adopt. It’s a bit Sherwood Anderson, this shift from sales and advertising to the role of artiste, but for Stillman, it’s a shift that paid off.

 

L'AVVENTURA (Blu-ray) - #98

For me, I think what is most compelling about Michelangelo Antonioni’s challenging 1960 drama L’Avventura is how it so effectively upends the mystery genre to serve the director’s own thematic purpose.

More than fifty years before Gone Girl, Antonioni crafted an oblique narrative about a young woman bored to death with her future husband and the state of love in general who in some manner orchestrates her own disappearance. Anna (Lea Massari) is a rich man’s daughter, engaged to Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti), and yet disconnected from her own privileged existence. She tells her father she has no intention of marrying the man, but then makes her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) wait outside while she has an afternoon quickie with him. The three of them then join other friends on an overnight boat trip to remote waters. While swimming, Anna lies about seeing a shark, presumably to see how everyone will react. She only confides this secret to Claudia. Thus, the other girl is understandably suspicious when Anna goes missing later that day. The travelers have docked at a desolate island. There is no one else on it with them, only an empty shack, and no other way off. Yet, when it’s time to go, Anna has disappeared without a trace. Someone thought maybe they heard another boat, but there is no real proof.

And so L’Avventura becomes a manhunt--at least, after a fashion. The police come to investigate, accusations are thrown, with the fiancé being the first suspect. Sandro and Claudia lead the charge--though separately whenever possible, Claudia does not trust him--and they remain the most dedicated, following whatever leads come up, pursuing a trail that may not be there. It’s along this search that they also derail their own efforts. Sandro kisses Claudia, she rebukes him...and yet, she is drawn to him. Eventually, their attraction takes over. The investigation becomes a romantic getaway. By the time the pair rejoin their other friends--who, bored and unaffected, have carried on with their perpetual holiday--they are behaving as a married couple, alternately bickering and being affectionate. Claudia hates herself just a little; Sandro, as ever, is nonplussed.

But ain’t that just like a man? At least in the way Antonioni depicts Italian society. The men are driven by lust, emerging in the streets as one predatory pack whenever a woman is left to walk unescorted. It happens first with the young American of questionable morals (Dorothy De Poliolo)--who herself claims to be lost and could be seen as a double for Anna--and then when Claudia decides to wait outside when Sandro goes into a shop where Anna had possibly been seen. It’s a reversal of the earlier scene, when Antonioni and cameraman Aldo Scavarda artfully framed Claudia through the crack in the curtains in the room where Sandro and Anna are having their tryst, the audience peering out at the girl peering in, as if perhaps she desires to be up there with them. She is isolated in both scenes, but in the later instance, she becomes the object of sexual craving rather than rebuked. And its Sandro who is now outside observing, witnessing the threat from inside a doorway. Of course, it’s significant that this is immediately after the two of them have made love; the wild animals sense the change.

It’s a split that runs through all the couples in L’Avventura. Anna is not the only one who finds the male/female relationship wanting. (It’s telling that she is reading both F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, a novel about adultery and the disappointment of marriage, alongside the Bible when she disappears; it’s one of God’s few appearances in the movie, faith is as absent as true love.) The wealthy older woman Patrizia (Esmeralda Ruspoli) tells her would-be paramour Raimondo (Lelio Luttazzi) that she was not made for love, and she rebuffs and belittles his advances. He, in turn, proves he can’t handle delicate things, dropping the antique crockery found on the island, a symbol of a lost civilization that the bored socialites argue over. Who owns it? How would you use it? Even knowing where it comes from makes you the object of ridicule. Why be smart or concerned about things long since dead?

Maybe this is why the woman who is made fun of for allegedly wanting to take the pot and put flowers in it is the one to truly transgress. Giulia (Dominique Blanchar) at first seems like the sweetest of the crew, but when Claudia rejoins her friends, she finds Giulia carrying on with a young painter. She is defiant about it, challenging others to judge her, even rubbing it in her husband’s face. The sweet has been made to run sour. There are no happy endings in love stories, only prison sentences. Which is why Anna gets out before she is locked in. Ironically, by doing so, she dooms her best friend to that same fate. Claudia and Sandro are bound together more by their shared concern over Anna’s vanishing then they are any true affection. The final images of L’Avventura show them unable to separate, subject to their roles (he the philanderer, she the long-suffering devotee), and filled with despair. By all evidence, there is nothing else out there for them because nothing is all that modern man truly has.

It’s been several years since I last saw L’Avventura. I wrote about it the last time, too, in connection with a showing of The Big Sleep to promote my comic book You Have Killed Me. It’s funny how much more obtuse the movie becomes with distance. (Perhaps I am remembering L’eclisse more?) Watching it again, I was struck by how much of a standard mystery the movie really is. Except for the missing woman, there are no strange goings on, no tricky editing or confounding digressions. Sandro and Claudia follow a pretty strict path, going from one clue to the next, the narrative adopting somewhat of an episodic structure. This makes it no less intriguing, though; on the contrary, the simplicity only heightens the tension, leaving wider spaces for the viewer to ruminate on Antonioni’s existential commentary, which he doles out sparingly. Each incident is almost like a prompt, a short philosophical riddle for the monastic cinephile to meditate on.

Monica Vitti proves a marvelous vessel for delivering these messages. She appears innocent and empathetic, truly curious and caring, defying her glamorous image, more like the blonde girl next door to Lea Massari’s more calculating woman of the world. It fits noir conventions, they are analogues to Rhonda Fleming and Jane Greer in Out Of The Past, though they are sadly stuck without a reliable Robert Mitchum. Gabriele Ferzetti makes for interesting casting. He appears too old for both of them and physically unremarkable. Not exactly handsome, you wouldn’t notice him without a spotlight. Not the way you would Marcello Mastroianni or Alain Delon, the stars of Antonioni’s next two movies, which form a thematic trilogy (and which I will be revisiting next).

This might be over rationalizing, but it’s possible that my seeing L’Avventura more clearly has as much to do with the new restoration as it does time. The 4K digital upgrade used for this new Blu-ray presents the film in a way that far surpasses any prior release (my screengrabs, for the record, are from Criterion’s 2001 DVD). The clarity with which one can now view the black-and-white landscapes of Antonioni’s movie is quite something. The desolation felt when stranded out at sea, or how small Vitti and Ferzetti appear in the final moments, is illustrated not just by the widescreen framing, but also the depth of detail that is now evident in high definition. That ocean goes on for miles, and the cliffs and balconies give way to a bottomless view. By contrast, the interiors are confining, whether the hull of a boat or a hotel room. Antonioni’s sad figures are at once trapped by their surroundings and humbled by just how insignificant they appear within them.

As an audience, we are left to feel the same way. I can’t imagine the added effect of seeing it in a theater, of the images writ large. The vastness of Antonioni’s vision would blanket the auditorium. L’Avventura is a haunting motion picture, teasing out answerless riddles while making us feel all the more lost for the fact that the lack of any solution is somehow a fault of who we are.

This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review. The stills shown are taken from the standard-definition DVD release and not the Blu-ray under discussion.