For the week of April 15th, Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment is bringing The Secret Life of Walter Mitty to Blu-ray. This comic fantasy, based on James Thurber's iconic short story, has been filmmaker Ben Stiller's long-gestating passion project, and early previews suggested he'd done the impossible: the teaser, a series of gorgeously composed images of Stiller's title character cut to Of Monsters and Men's "Dirty Paws," looked like a four-quadrant entertainment capable of real emotional resonance. And for about forty minutes, the actual film holds up to that early promise. Mitty is a winning loser, and Stiller has continued to grow as a director in the years since Tropic Thunder. The way he contrasts Mitty's daydreams with the drudgery of his day-to-day existence feels like a synthesis of Robert Zemeckis and Wes Anderson. The problem is, one the plot kicks in, this nice mix of high fantasy and monotonous reality falls apart. Mitty has to find a very important photograph in order to placate his boss (a sneering, nicely unctuous Adam Scott), and his search turns him into a real globetrotting hero; Mitty finds himself swimming with sharks and skateboarding through the Himalayas and generally becoming the confident man he's always wanted to be, and it's all more than a little unbelievable.
Part of the problem is that Stiller shoots these scenes in the same hyperreal aesthetic as the fantasy sequences, so it takes a while to visually accept that Mitty is actually accomplishing such great feats. But dramatically, the move into wish fulfillment leaves The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with no place to go. Once Mitty starts engaging with the world, his character arc effectively ends, and Stiller has trouble eking pathos from a guy who finally has everything he's wanted. On the page, Thurber dealt with this problem by making his story one of psychological escape – his Mitty knows his life won't improve, so he just keeps retreating into ever more elaborate dreams. Now, Stiller certainly isn't beholden to Thurber, but his big screen retelling ends up dramatically inert since Mitty finds himself with a few reels still left to go. It's a major miscalculation (even more than the rampant product placement – eHarmony is literally a character in the film), and even though The Secret Life of Walter Mitty still has a lot to recommend it – lovely supporting work from Shirley MacLaine, Kristin Wiig, and Sean Penn; a nice alt-rock soundtrack; and Stuart Dryburgh's beautiful widescreen cinematography – it never coheres into a satisfying whole.
Jeffrey Kauffman's Blu-ray review noted that "there are a couple of inherent problems with this approach, and one of them is frankly tied directly to Thurber's source story. Is it even possible to craft a feature length film out of a rather brief anecdotal tale of a guy who gets lost in daydreams? That was obviously one of the obstacles that Ken Englund, Everett Freeman, and Philip Rapp sought to overcome in the first film adaptation, a gambit which Steve Conrad only enlarges in the remake. But Conrad only gives us a precious few minutes with the daydreaming Walter before plunging (again literally) Walter headlong into a series of adventures where Walter 'finds' himself, in one of the most time honored, yet obviously cliché ridden, exercises in the annals of screenwriting. The fact that Walter seems to be setting off on what seems to be a somewhat analogous quest to that of Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams' wonderful The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to find the meaning of life (or in this case, the meaning of Life) may appear to be a reasonable enough concept, but it's ultimately divorced from Thurber's original idea. While this Walter Mitty may in fact not be that Thurberesque, if taken on its own terms, it's always enjoyable, if never quite as deep as it seems to be aiming for. Walter has a seemingly pointless journey which only gets him back to where he started, albeit perhaps a bit wiser and more courageous than when he began, but it's a trek that Stiller imbues with a nice visual sweep."
Universal Studios is offering two classic film noirs this week: Double Indemnity and Touch of Evil. In many ways, Double Indemnity might be the most important noir feature ever made; working from James M. Cain's terse novella, director Billy Wilder and his co-screenwriter Raymond Chandler made a film that came to define the noir genre. It's all here: an amoral protagonist (Fred MacMurray), his beyond duplicitous femme fatale (Barbara Stanwyck, terrifying even under a ridiculous blonde wig), and a "perfect murder" that goes south in so many nerve-wracking ways. Sure, newer film noirs have been able to take advantage of more permissive attitudes towards sex and violence – the neo-noir favorites The Last Seduction and Body Heat make explicit all the sex and violence that Double Indemnity only suggests – but this 1944 favorite still provides a lurid kick. Credit Wilder, who expertly tightens the noose around MacMurray and Stanwyck until we're practically choking, as well as his and Chandler's script, which tosses out so many pulpy one-liners that Double Indemnity practically qualifies as a comedy ("I killed him for money - and a woman. I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman." "I was just fixing some ice tea; would you like a glass?" "Yeah, unless you got a bottle of beer that's not working." And one more – "Do you make your own breakfast, Mr Neff?" "Well, I squeeze a grapefruit now and again"). Wilder also uses co-star Edward G. Robinson to make sure that, despite its criminal nastiness, Double Indemnity never comes off as a cool exercise in nihilism. With maybe twenty minutes of screentime at his disposal, Robinson turns his insurance investigator Barton Keyes into a moral exemplar for the ages – it's a thrill to watch this paragon of decency struggle with his increasing certainty that MacMurray – his co-worker and best friend – is up to no good.
In his Blu-ray review, Michael Reuben wrote that "Almost every aspect of Double Indemnity has been analyzed and commented upon at length, but one facet that is often underappreciated is the literacy of its script. Wilder could tell a story visually as well as anyone else - he invented on the spot a wordless scene immediately following the murder that worked so well it has now become a cliche through imitation—but he also trusted the power of words. In Double Indemnity, he often has the actors speaking their dialogue at breakneck speed, almost as if they were playing a comedy, but the pace wouldn't work if the dialogue weren't so lucid and intelligent. A classic example is the scene in the office of insurance executive Edward S. Norton, Jr. (Richard Gaines), who summons Walter and Keyes to hear his theory that Mr. Dietrichson committed suicide, which wouldn't be covered under his policy. Keyes proceeds to destroy his boss's theory in a lengthy speech about actuarial tables - yes, actuarial tables. The phrase alone would make most people yawn, and today the speech would probably be cut from the script. But as written by Wilder (who got most of it from Cain) and forcefully delivered by Edward G. Robinson, the scene comes alive, because suddenly these things matter. If you set up the right dramatic context and choose the right words, even the driest figures become fascinating, and no one understood that better than Billy Wilder."
If Double Indemnity is the epitome of a classic noir thriller, then Touch of Evil subverts the formula until it's an acid-tinged funhouse. Touch of Evil only looks normal - on the surface, it's a story of police corruption, as a brutal murder ends up pitting idealistic drug enforcement officer Jacob Vargas (Charlton Heston, who's 100% unbelievable as a Mexican but perfect as a crusading, lantern-jawed do-gooder) against Orson Welles' crooked police captain Hank Quinlan. That setup is a prime-time police procedural, but Welles, who also directed Touch of Evil, is up to something much more perverse. He keeps Touch of Evil's plot specifics deliberately obtuse - even in the 1998 reconstruction version that editor Walter Murch orchestrated to bring the film closer to Welles' original vision (like so much of Welles' post-Citizen Kane body of work, the 1958 theatrical cut was taken out of his hands and drastically re-edited by Universal), things don't quite make sense - and structures the battle of wills between Vargas and Quinlan as some kind of waking nightmare. At times, Touch of Evil plays like a lost David Lynch picture: the level of casual surrealism is off the charts here, from Dennis Weaver's giggling hotel clerk to the hair troubles that Akim Tamiroff's sleazy crime boss keeps having, and these blackly comic punctures make Touch of Evil's descent into madness all the more bracing. By the time Welles subjects Vargas' innocent wife to the depredations of a Mexican gang (led by a supremely unsettling Mercedes McCambridge), Touch of Evil has almost wholly exchanged gritty realism for true horror. Filled with bravura setpieces (the opening scene, shot in one bravura take; Vargas and Quinlan's final showdown) and surprising empathy, Touch of Evil is Orson Welles at his finest, and the irony is that Welles never even wanted to make the picture. But, to quote John Travolta in Get Shorty, "Sometimes you do your best work with a gun to your head."
Michael Reuben commented that "Some films draw strength from their flaws. Orson Welles's last film as a Hollywood director, the pulp thriller Touch of Evil, was a flop when Universal first released it in 1958, and even Welles's most devoted fans had to admit that much was wrong with the picture. But word quickly spread that Welles had not been allowed to finish Touch of Evil as he wanted, that Universal had taken it out of his hands, shot additional scenes, and re-edited major sequences. Just another tale of a brilliant artist's vision ruined by a heartless studio. But the real story isn't so simple or straightforward. Touch of Evil was hardly a passion project for Welles. Originally titled Badge of Evilafter the novel by Whit Masterson, the film was initially intended as a straightforward crime film. Welles was cast as the villain, and the studio used his participation to lure Charlton Heston to play the hero. It was Heston who suggested that Welles direct, and Welles, eager to show a major studio that he still "had it", took the job as a director-for-hire. But being Orson Welles, he couldn't help but transform a genre film into something more substantial. He rewrote much of the script and reconceived the entire movie, even though he wasn't being paid for it...It's unfortunate that we will never have the final version of Touch of Evil that Orson Welles envisioned when he was shooting the film for Universal. What we have, though, is a unique and memorable creation of such compelling power that an unprecedented effort was mounted to bring the film as close to its creator's vision as the existing materials would allow."
Finally, Criterion is bringing Lars von Trier's Grand Prix-winning Breaking the Waves to Blu-ray. Von Trier had made some successful pictures prior to this one, most notably Europa and his TV series Riget, but Breaking the Waves brought him a whole new level of acclaim and – some might argue – notoriety. The film is a romance, of sorts, between a deeply religious young woman (Emily Watson) and her earthy oil-rigger husband (Stellan Skarsgård, one of von Trier's favorite leading men). I'm loath to say much more because a) I don't want to spoil the film's secrets for the uninitiated and b) I don't want to scare anyone off, but suffice to say, viewers familiar with Antichrist, Melancholia, and his recent masterwork Nymphomaniac will know that von Trier is unafraid to take his audience into dark places. From its opening scenes, which detail the drudgery and fundamentalism of Watson's religious community, von Trier has us on edge; something is slightly off about Watson's wide-eyed innocent, and the only evidence seems to lie in the severity of those village elders. When she meets Skarsgård's character, the film grows more intimate – and sexually graphic – and the feverish lovemaking throws Watson's values into even stronger relief. By the end, Breaking the Waves has become a kind of horror film tinged with violence and emotional destruction, though von Trier's ever-impish spirit gives the on-screen maladies the irony of a fairy tale: he delights in the universe's cruelty as much as he is terrified by it. Almost twenty years after its release, Breaking the Waves remains a spellbinder, difficult and endlessly challenging, and Watson's performance is a tour de force, and one the greatest big-screen debuts for an actor (this was her first theatrically released feature).
Svet Atanasov wrote that "There are two key relationships in the film that are examined in ways that force the viewer to reevaluate the power and importance of faith. The conventional one is between Bess and Jan, who are madly in love and fully committed to each other. When their relationship is tested, Bess' faith gives her the strength she needs to continue supporting and loving her husband. The more unusual relationship is between Bess and God. It is a relationship that is never tested. Bess simply approaches God when she needs His wisdom and then follows His advice. Then she suffers - a lot - while God is watching. The film is so direct and uncompromising that at times it feels like von Trier is simply trying to get the viewer out of his comfort zone - or maybe not. Dangerous fanaticism, sickening indifference, and a lot of abuse are easily rationalized by bizarre pretenses of civilized morality. The question the film asks is this: Are these pretenses a thing of the past? The film is broken into multiple chapters and its visual style has a lot in common with the one promoted by the famous Dogme movement - the action is filmed on location, the hand-held camera constantly moves, there are numerous uneven close-ups, and light is frequently under/overexposed. Von Trier and cinematographer Robby Muller's (Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, Barbet Schroeder's Barfly) use of color throughout the film is also quite unique. (Von Trier directed his first Dogme film, The Idiots, two years after Breaking the Waves). Watson, who made her acting debut [here], is sensational. Frankly, it is difficult to imagine that without her the film would have been as absorbing as it is."