For the week of April 8th, the Criterion Collection is offering HD upgrades to two films by the great Jim Jarmusch: Stranger Than Paradise and Night on Earth. Jarmusch might be the most important figure in contemporary American indie cinema, and this Blu-ray pairing marks, whether intentionally or otherwise, the ways that particular film landscape changed over just seven years. In 1984, Stranger Than Paradise felt revolutionary - Jarmusch made something that played like a rebuke to everything that people considered "entertainment." It felt like Jarmusch was blending the character-driven dramas of the 1970s with experimental arthouse fare: how else to explain this long, strange trip about two nobodies (Richard Edison and John Lurie) who don't do much in New York, then meet Lurie's Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint) and don't do much with her, travel to Cleveland where they don't do much except be cold, and then travel anticlimactically to Florida? It's almost an exercise in patience. Yet as is Jarmusch's wont, Stranger Than Paradise maintains this dry vein of absurdist humor, and so it plays as way more accessible than it should. And speaking of accessible, it only cost $100,000, an amount that inspired a whole generation of indie filmmakers (from Spike Lee to Kevin Smith) to go out and do likewise on their own modest budgets. With this one movie, Jarmusch became the poster child for the independent-film community, winning widespread acclaim at the Cannes Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival, and the National Society of Film Critics. But by 1991, everyone with an idea and a little startup cash was making movies, so Jarmusch's traditional minimalism couldn't seem anything but slightly out-of-date. That's the only way I can justify the relative indifference afforded to Night on Earth, which might be an even better, richer film than Stranger Than Paradise. It's certainly more complex. Jarmusch riffed with the triptych format in Mystery Train (sidebar: that film quietly inspired the whole narrative structure of Pulp Fiction, people), but he divides Night on Earth into fifths for an anthology tale about cabbies and their nightly fares. Even the format acts as a wry joke. This is Jarmusch's most expansive picture, bopping from Los Angeles to New York to Rome to Paris to Helsinki, yet the director presents these environs solely through a cab's limited perspective. But the conversations between the different pairings are so funny and thoughtful that, again, we never feel bored or constrained. In a sense, Night on Earth feels like Jarmusch saw Slacker, which definitely took its cues from something like Stranger Than Paradise, and said, "I can do better than Linklater." And he could, and he did, and it wasn't enough. This movie deserves better.
Of Stranger Than Paradise, Svet Atanasov wrote that the film has a "heart...as big as the Grand Canyon. It quickly befriends you, lets you know that it can be trusted and then invites you to have a few laughs with its colorful characters. It is one of those films that are absolutely impossible to dislike. Jarmusch divided it into three sections. The first is set in a shady area of Manhattan's Lower East Side, the second in Cleveland, and the third supposedly somewhere in Florida. It is incredibly relaxed and casual but unusually witty and cool. And it has to be said that it is not cool because Jarmusch kept trying until he got it right, the cool is part of the film's DNA. Everything, from the attitudes to the jokes to the parallel tracking shots, naturally came together really well and made the film what it is. The acting is wonderful. In fact, it is hard to tell if the actors are actually acting. For the duration of the film the two hipsters and the goofy girl are two hipsters and a goofy girl that you believe never noticed the camera that followed them. The film oozes that kind of lightness and sincerity." And of Night on Earth, Atanasov noted that "the beauty and charm of this film are in the small details - the way the cabbies and their clients casually reveal their insecurity and frustrate each other while trying to remain politically correct or warm up to each other against their will. These are the type of 'meaningless' details big-budget Hollywood films routinely ignore. There is plenty of Jarmusch's trademark offbeat humor, but it would be quite a stretch to label Night on Earth a comedy. It is a touching and free of sentimentality observation of different people existing in modern societies across the globe who use words in a variety of different ways to create and destroy the common barriers that separate them."
From Universal Studios Home Entertainment comes Welcome to Marwen, and with it, the latest reminder that we may have lost Robert Zemeckis to the sands of time. Maybe only Rob Reiner has squandered as promising a career as Zemeckis has. I'm still struggling with how the populist master behind Back to the Future and Cast Away succumbed to whatever Welcome to Marwen is. The irony is, Zemeckis is drawing on the most interesting human story of his career: after experiencing a violent homophobic attack, Mark Hogancamp (played by Steve Carell) retreated into art so he could heal, building a whole 1/6th-scale village filled with characters and situations that symbolically reflected his trauma. If that sounds interesting to you, then you're in luck! You can procure a copy of Jeff Malmberg's brilliant documentary Marwencol, which I can't recommend more highly. Zemeckis, on the other hand, is offering the sitcom-ready version. Carell can be a fine, sensitive performer (he gave the great performance no one saw in last year's Last Flag Flying), but Zemeckis indulges all his hammiest tendencies, and so Hogancamp feels more like a collection of tics than a real human being. So it goes for the cast of characters surrounding Hogancamp. There an inherent irony here - the film was originally titled The Women of Marwen, yet we never get a sense of the female cast's importance beyond easy typecasting: Leslie Mann is The Love Interest, Janelle Monáe is the No. B.S. Badass, Gwendoline Christie is the Imposing Bruiser, and Diane Kruger is the Evil Witch. However, what elevates Welcome to Marwen from mediocre biopic to catastrophic trainwreck is Zemeckis' puzzling over-reliance on digital effects. Lest we forget, Zemeckis spent way too much time tinkering with off-putting CGI motion-capture in Beowulf, The Polar Express, and A Christmas Carol, and apparently he didn't kick the addiction after Allied and Flight. Marwen uses the same digital technology to realize the world of Hogancamp's art, and the effect is less exciting or moving or profound than it is dead-eyed and creepy. I guess the CGI makes us grateful every time we return to the real world, but as fringe benefits go, re-appreciating mediocrity isn't a stellar one. I will say this about Zemeckis: at least films like The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol had the decency to tell people they were phony. Marwen wants you to think it's People as opposed to Product.
In his Blu-ray review, Martin Liebman wrote that "the film is not without a heartfelt center and purposeful narrative, but both are fumbled in an occasionally jumbled presentation that is not difficult to follow or feel but that does seem somewhat incomplete, sharing Mark's new life and fears and coping mechanisms but not often really getting deeply and intimately inside the man himself. The film plays more superficially than it should. Zemeckis cannot balance the externalities, which are wondrously realized in the anthropomorphized world of Marwen, with the flesh-and-blood soul that should be the movie's dominant and defining component. Carell works hard to find that character center but his performance often feels overwhelmed by the script's inability to get to the character's heart and center, which Zemeckis has done before, with great success...Leslie Mann's work is strong as the romantic interest who may be interested in more or may simply be content to stay in the 'friend zone,' but the character feels underdeveloped, a stand-in to propel the plot rather than rewrite it as a fully realized character. The film would have benefited by exploring Mark's relationship with Roberta (Merritt Wever's character) with more depth and focus; their scenes together are often the best of those that take place in the real world."
The first twenty minutes of Mimi Leder's Ruth Bader Ginsberg docudrama On the Basis of Sex are almost perilously bad. Screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman adopts a fairly traditional biopic format - we begin with Ginsberg (a miscast Felicity Jones) as a fresh-faced Harvard Law student in 1956, trying to balance her love of law with the school's regressive attitudes towards gender - but he can't give any of it real stakes. We slog through conventional cultural misogyny (personified by Sam Waterston's officious Dean Griswold) and dollops of melodrama that glance off the plot and have almost no impact. Heck, Ginsberg's husband (Armie Hammer) contracts a near-terminal case of testicular cancer in the first act, and the movie has all-but forgotten about it by the start of Act 2! Very few scenes advance our understanding of the characters or the larger story: it's just artless exposition. It does not help that almost none of this material meaningfully influences the next ninety minutes; On the Basis of Sex would be 20% better if it started with Ginsberg already well into her post teaching law at Rutgers. That said, once we get into the 1970s, the movie stops jumping time periods and settles down, focusing exclusively on Ginsberg's controversial championing of Appeals Case Moritz v. Commissioner, which ultimately helped weaken gender-based discrimination. This material isn't bad, in a TV movie sort of way. But it's also not good. I'm reminded of The Post, in that the film spends so much time mooning over big ideals like Justice and Equality that it forgets to engage us with actual legal process and strategy. Your average episode of The Good Fight is wonkier and more legally interesting than this picture. And Jones is a big part of the problem. She's playing an icon and she knows it, and she's so charged with lionizing Ginsberg that she never makes this iteration of the Supreme Court Justice feel like, y'know, a human being. After a while, Jones's Ginsberg becomes such a zealot of righteousness and decency that you want to tap out - it's an aggressively one-note turn. If On the Basis of Sex has any bright spot, it's Hammer, who delivers an effortlessly charismatic and empathetic performance as Ginsberg's husband Martin. However, even praising the most high-profile male performance in a movie about a strong woman makes me feel weird, good as Hammer may be. It's another reminder of everything the film gets wrong.
Martin Liebman wrote that the film is too "predictable: predictable in purpose and predictable in presentation. What should be -- and what obviously wants to be -- an inspiring film about a key figure in the fight for gender equality in the second half of the 20th century is instead a film that feels like it was made in a movie factory, pieced together from prefabricated components that work well together and tell a coherent and commendably critical story, but the movie is often without soul. Ginsburg faces the expected onslaught of sexism, both overt and unintentional, that forces her to double down on fighting not only for herself but for everyone held back by their gender. One of the movie's best scenes, one of the few that feels genuine, comes when Ginsburg is looking for a job after graduating from law school. She's been turned down a dozen times, and she spouts off a list of the excuses she's been fed as to why she's unhirable. She would be 'too busy at bake sales to be effective.' 'Women are too emotional to be lawyers.' Another firm hired a woman a year ago, she is told, and they certainly don't need two. Jones delivers the scene with gusto, from a wounded, but still steadfast, center that tells her she's better than having to face such conspicuous discrimination. The seemingly sympathetic lawyer with whom she is interviewing and shares this story of rejection ultimately does the same, citing his as a 'close-knit firm' where her presence would make the lawyers' wives 'jealous.' Another flimsy excuse. But such powerful scenes that really get to the point with any kind of resonance are few and far between. Mostly, the movie is a makeshift exercise in theme building, in throwing together chronological highlight reels of Ginsburg's hard work to break through the glass ceilings of her time, which were obviously much higher and much more shatter-resistant in those days."