For the week of August 29th, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is bringing Jon Favreau's live-action The Jungle Book to Blu-ray. I suppose "live-action" might be a tad imprecise when describing this family-friendly adventure. Most of the time, star Neel Sethi (who plays young Mowgli) is the only real thing on screen; Favreau approached this feature much like Robert Rodriguez's Sin City, shooting the entire film in a studio (in downtown L.A., as opposed to the jungles of India) and digitally generating all the environments and non-Mowgli characters. It's always a risk when you resort to this CGI gambit. As visually accomplished as, say, Sin City is, you're always aware you're watching a recreation of something, and that knowledge can act as a barrier between story and viewer. Not so with The Jungle Book. Favreau's digital world is one of the most persuasive digital "realities" I've ever seen, with Sethi integrated perfectly alongside his animated counterparts. We never doubt the reality of this world, and it's surprising how invested we get in the narrative even though it's all an illusion. But going back to the first Iron Man or even Zathura, Favreau has always been a canny manipulator of VFX: he knows he needs to sell you on the weight and reality of it, and his biggest coup here is his incredible voice cast. It's a series of no-brainers. Ben Kingsley as the noble, compassionate panther Bagheera. Idris Elba as the villainous tiger Shere Khan. Scarlett Johansson as the serpentine seductress Kaa. Christopher Walken, putting all his Walken-isms into the delightfully weird King Louie. Best of all, Bill Murray as Baloo, which is a powerful an illustration of the "born to play this part" argument as I've ever seen. To some extent, Favreau is relying on typecasting, but in the best sense: he uses our associations with these actors to fill in the gaps in their artificial counterparts. And that's not the only positive about The Jungle Book. The film even softens much of the unpleasant colonialism that plagued Rudyard Kipling's source material AND the 1967 Disney original. However, for all its strengths - and they are many - watching The Jungle Book feels slightly hollow, and for the most unavoidable of reasons: the limitations of home media. In theaters, this picture offered a transcendent experience - Favreau has created an immersive experience that holds up under scrutiny of both the big-screen and the 3D technology, the latter of which was as indelible as James Cameron's groundbreaking work in Avatar. But at home, without the benefits of a forty-foot screen and 3D (and in this country, at least, Disney isn't offering a 3D version), The Jungle Book can't help but seem slight by comparison, a tech demo reel without the tech. It's still watchable. It's still accomplished. But it's just not as grand.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that the film is "much darker than its singing-and-dancing, vibrantly colorful, and often full-of-cheer animated counterpart. While that film did indeed dabble in many of the same themes, it kept open exploration to a minimum, preferring mild peril, cuddly companions, and song. The 2016 re-imagining finds a much more definitive balance between the dueling stylings. While most of the songs have been removed (two key tunes remain) and Mowgli is depicted as dirty, scarred, and even bloody for the duration of the film, there remains an underlying charm beyond harm's way in his interactions with his animal friends, whether the wolves, Bagheera, or Baloo. The favorite bear, voiced by Bill Murray, lightens the mood considerably but plays a critical part in reinforcing themes of family and friendship both as he's introduced and at a key moment late in the film. Director Favreau keeps the film perfectly balanced, never allowing its very tangible frights, or its welcome and familiar lighter moments, to dominate. The film's adventure is perilous, its humor joyous, and its heart obvious. It is, in many ways, a better film than the original, lacking the simplistic charm but finding its center, and its own identity, in its ability to tell a more complete story while maintaining a similar, but not quite so effortless, family friendly balance."
From Sony, AMC, and the BBC comes the six-hour miniseries The Night Manager. The film version of John le Carré's 1993 spy novel, The Night Manager stars Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, a mysterious, tortured British expat who becomes drawn into the orbit of international arms dealer Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie, in a fantastically menacing turn). Roper is the kind of baddie whose legitimate connections make him more untouchable than any run-of-the-mill thug, but Pine has a personal vendetta against him, so when Olivia Colman's world-weary MI6 agent conscripts Pine to help her bring down Roper, Pine willingly makes the leap from hotel night manager to undercover agent. Now, this is not "great" television. We live in the age of The Knick and Better Call Saul, so of course The Night Manager is going to seem lightweight by comparison. It relies a little too much on convenience (gotta love Colman, but would a talented MI6 operative really enlist a relative novice for such a clandestine operation?) and stereotyping (Tom Hollander and Elizabeth Debicki are playing stereotypes from central casting: the peevish henchman and the villain's conflicted mistress, respectively) when trying to fit as much of le Carré to the screen as possible, and the end result often feels less dense than it does glib. John Irvin's 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy miniseries still remains the gold standard for all le Carré adaptations. But The Night Manager does have two big elements working in its favor. For one, it's always entertaining and never boring, and I credit director Susanne Bier for maintaining that propulsive, energized tone. Even when we recognize the moves Bier is making, we're still having a good time on the way. But most importantly, the show acts as the grandest showcase yet for Marvel Big Bad and Taylor Swift paramour Tom Hiddleston. Even when The Night Manager is ordinary, Hiddleston is anything but, drawing on reserves of both decency and ambiguity so that we're never quite sure how Pine will act until he does. It's a magnetic performance, and much as I hate to throw more fuel on this asinine media fire, I'd be remiss in my duties if I didn't mention how qualified it seems Hiddleston would be playing a certain iconic super-spy. The Night Manager often feels like an audition tape in the same way Layer Cake was for Daniel Craig, and the Broccolis would be wise to give this miniseries a viewing when thinking about the future of 007.
Finally, we end the week with the Criterion Collection giving a big boost to Orson Welles: the label is bolstering his representation with Blu-rays of both 1965's Chimes at Midnight and 1968's The Immortal Story. We'll start with The Immortal Story, if only because it's the slightest of the two features. Clocking in at just under an hour, The Immortal Story finds Welles adapting a short story by Karen Blixen, of whom he was an ardent fan. Blixen's tale is short, allegorical: a successful merchant (Welles), nearing the end of his life, becomes fixated on a fable about a rich man paying a stranger to conceive a child with his wife, and so the merchant labors to make that story a reality, with little regard to how his machinations will impact the naive sailor (Norman Eshley) and embittered young woman (Jeanne Moreau) he conscripts to "perform" in this recitation. That's about it, and Welles's fidelity to Blixen's original text keeps him from inventing narrative filigrees that might pad out the film to feature length (apparently, Welles wanted to make an anthology feature using a number of Blixen's stories, but concerns about the crew and - you guessed it - the budget prevented him from further adapting Blixen's work). The Immortal Story is a film of surfaces, whether it's the clarity of the deep-focus camerawork (courtesy of Willy Kurant) or the luscious colors (even though Welles publicly denounced color photography - he once quipped that "it is impossible to name one outstanding performance by an actor in a color film") or the emotional textures present on the faces of himself and especially Moreau. And within the context of the film itself, that surface-level quality isn't a bad thing. In this case, it allows The Immortal Story to maintain this air of casual surrealism and mystery - we'll never be able to get to the bottom of why these people are behaving the way they are. That said, Welles is incapable of not letting his films lapse into autobiography, and from that perspective, The Immortal Story proves even more fascinating. Welles was just as fatalistic about his own death as his film's protagonist was, particularly with regard to the idea of legacy, and both men share the same need to remake the world according to their own fantasies, and damn the cost to anything else. Viewed in that light, The Immortal Story plays like a necessary first step on the road to F for Fake, where Welles dispensed with the subtext and made his own manipulations the star of the show. An interesting little curio.
And now we move on to Chimes at Midnight, which stands as not just the finest achievement of Welles's later career (it just edges out F for Fake, in my humble opinion) but one of the four or five greatest films he ever made. Ironically, it's also the one Welles picture that eludes most of his biggest fans. As part of the film's completion budget, Welles sought funds from James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, and Welles claimed that arrangement doomed the film, that Saltzman kept Chimes at Midnight from receiving the kind of widespread distribution it deserved. That meant that outside of a few supporters (Pauline Kael, for example, was an early and passionate champion of the picture), Chimes at Midnight flew well under the radar of most North American viewers. But anemic viewership was somehow the least of the film's problems - just finding a watchable copy proved somewhat of a Holy Grail for film buffs, given that most extant prints suffered from unwanted editorial elisions and some horrific sound-sync concerns. To save money, Welles re-recorded all the sounds in post, but as part of the general neglect the film faced, much of the dialogue didn't loop correctly with the mouths of the people speaking it. Yet Chimes at Midnight would not die, and ultimately, film preservationists found a beautiful 35mm print that let to the full-scale restoration of the film. Viewers today have an even clearer sense of what Pauline Kael saw all those years ago: that Chimes at Midnight is a masterpiece. No longer do the sound and print issues detract from the grandeur of what Welles has done. Through smoke and mirrors, practically (Welles had almost no money to make the film, so he had to shoot it in Spain and force perspective to gain a sense of epic scope), Welles created the definitive Shakespearian character study. His subject: Sir John Falstaff (who Welles also played, of course), raconteur and jovial brigand, large of both waist and heart, and one-time mentor to King Henry V (Keith Baxter, appropriately callow). Shakespeare himself focused more on Henry than Falstaff, and that fact should clue you in even further to what Welles has achieved. Re-appropriating and re-positioning different sections from both parts of Henry IV, Henry V, and The Merry Wives of Windsor (Welles liked to claim he never used a line that Shakespeare didn't write), Welles shifted the focus to Falstaff and his misadventures. The early goings provide Welles with fodder for some of his most purely pleasurable movie-making moments as Falstaff and Henry drink and carouse; imagine an extended version of the Citizen Kane musical number, and you'll have a good sense of the tone Welles hits. That said, the film is as emotionally nimble as its hero, and that bonhomie slowly gives way to despair, first when Henry shuns his friend and then when Falstaff stumbles into the brutal Battle of Agincourt. Welles's love for cinematic experimentation always made him the most "modern" of classic directors, and his battle sequence follows suit: he drops frames to crank up the action, and the result looks like a black-and-white take from Braveheart or Gangs of New York, so ferociously does Welles pace the carnage. Still, what lingers most is the man himself, and if The Immortal Story flirted with autobiography, Chimes at Midnight embodies Welles in everything but name. He and Falstaff were both life-forces undiminished by time and weight (unlike his iconic turn as Hank Quinlan in Touch of Evil, Welles didn't need that much extra padding to create Falstaff's girth), who maintained their idealism even as the world spun away from them, and there's something extra touching in Chimes at Midnight's last scenes when Falstaff finds himself a man without a country. We could be looking at Welles himself, far from anything resembling public success and closer to the end of his life than the beginning. You understand why Welles would take on something like those embarrassing wine commercials just to stave off irrelevancy for a little longer. You're also thankful for how that bracing self-awareness imbues Chimes at Midnight with more humanity than even Shakespeare provided. A great, great film.