Quick Reviews: Cafe Society and Nocturnal Animals

Cafe Society. The first Woody Allen film I've seen since... Midnight in Paris? Kind of a shame, as this semi-trifle is a pretty enjoyable effort, if not a little too slight to be entirely interesting or totally memorable. Reprising their chemistry nurtured in the quite likeable Adventureland and American Ultra, Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart are still super darned cute together. It's the 30s, and Eisenberg's Billy moves from the Bronx to Hollywood to hopefully get a job from his powerful studio-mogul uncle Phil Stern (Steve Carell, nicely toned down). He immediately falls for Stewart's Vonnie, Phil's secretary. The two connect immediately, but she's got a “journalist” boyfriend that keeps them from hooking up entirely. Plot twist? The journalist isn't a journalist, it's Phil. Oh, boy.

I kind of figured the entire movie would be a screwball comedy of missed connections and delayed declarations of great loves, but Cafe Society eschews anything so simple. Allen not only edits to surprise, extending throwaway character bits beyond their narrative purpose and then popping a revelation out of the blue, but the film shifts halfway through from something cutesy to something approaching something short of depressingly realistic. Before you know it the entire affair has shifted back to New York and Blake Lively livens up the show as a stupendously hot shiksa (can I say that?  I haven't read Portnoy's Complaint recently enough to remember if it's a bad word or not) while “House of Cards”' martyr of choice Carey Stoll magnificently suspenders-it-up as a smart-talkin' gangster.

Worth seeing? Yeah, depending on your tolerance for Eisenberg and Stewart (I have an abundance of love for both). It's pretty and cute and the aforementioned shift in tone is interesting enough if not really all that novel for an Allen film. Does it look like you'll like it? You'll like it.

Nocturnal Animals. Middlebrow thrillers are pretty rare now, what with theatres now oscillating between eye candy for teams of semi-drunk office ladies on prowl and uh, hot guys in spandex flying around and tackling each other.

I haven't seen director Tom Ford's A Single Man, but now I kind of want to, just to see if it's as frustratingly nearly-there as Nocturnal Animals. A sort of a story within a story, the film has Amy Adams once again wandering around a glass house with beautiful vistas (see also: Arrival). Adams is Susan, an L.A. art dealer/curator/somethingrather who puts on high budget art shows of the kind that cultural Marxists (like myself) love but probably only make sense to other cultural Marxists or their groupies.

Susan not only hates her job, because she wishes deep down she was an actual artist, but she's in the death-throes of a horrifically casual marriage to a cheating cad (the way-too-wholesome-to-authentically-play-a-cheating-dick Armie Hammer). One morning she receives a manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal), who she dumped long ago when his failing career as an author didn't match up with her somewhat “realistic” needs for a more standard lifestyle.

The novel, dealing with Tony (also played by Gyllenhaal, surprise), deals with both the horrific assault on Tony and his wife and daughter in the Texas hinterlands and the subsequent revenge scenario. Susan, of course, reads the novel as a metaphor for their failed marriage and is immediately struck by existential dread. But as she moves further along a hope seethes within her, a hope for a return to a more idealistic time in her life, before her beauty-queen Texas mom and her consumerist, all-American values drove her to a real career and away from Edward.

This is one of those movies where your final reaction is either “oh, that's nice, I can get out of bed tomorrow” or “Oh Jesus Fuck, turn on the oven” depending on the very last shot, and on that level Nocturnal Animals is pretty good, even excellent. It has a lot to say about how the power of art is derived from our own personal reactions to how it relates to our life experience; Edward is literally using art to expose Susan to her unconscious self and it's pretty genius in that way as a dark, nearly cynical polemic on why art is so vital to human existence.

But there's something missing, some kind of directorial flourish or idiosyncrasy that you might have seen from other thriller experts like Da Palma or Verhoeven or even recent genre-apers like Jeremy Saulnier. The first few minutes is totally dynamite, opening on an art-piece consisting of buck naked, quite overweight women dancing while wielding American flags and sparklers, then cutting to visions of a smoggy, lethargic LA landscape, but after that Nocturnal Animals is stylistically sort of bland.

Worth seeing? I don't know. I think it's more of a curiosity than a must-see, a relic of earlier cinematic times. I almost want to champion it just for its ambition within the genre, but we all know that that's a slim rationale for a recommendation.  

Blue Valentine and the Lovely Transience of Love

Go, pretentiously.

There's a sense of permanence fuelling the desperation behind Valentine's Day. “If I don't have a partner for this one, I never will”. Obviously that's not the words actually flowing through singles' minds at the time, it's more of a subtext, an unconscious feeling that gives the whole thing a sort of existentialist dread. The same dread, in a way, pervades Blue Valentine. Derek Cianfrance's grungy, grimy, all close-up look at the two-day expiration of a marriage is laden with references to ageing, death, and impermanence... all framed within the context of various supposedly permanent institutions: America, capitalism, family, and most importantly (but never without ties to the others), marriage.

The film takes place in two timelines following the lives of Dean (Ryan Gosling) and Cindy (Michelle Williams), one a grim procedural of what might be their last two days as a couple and the other a greatest hits tour of how they met cute and got together quick some five years prior. Cianfrance expertly flits back and forth between the two, giving us a truly insightful look at how the lives of couples are a mishmash of memory and perception and history, how both subtle, passive-aggressive jabs and brutal, knock-down arguments are often tied up with emotionally positive moments of the relationship's past.

Obviously, this isn't your typical Valentine's Day film, one that I only retroactively realized had “Valentine” in the title, weirdly enough, but while a lot of people would find it overly depressing and not in the spirit of the holiday itself, this writer would beg to differ. Of course, the (possible, goddamn spoiler alert) dissolution of a marriage is not a good thing, but Blue Valentine's aforementioned emphasis on the very ephemeral pleasures of the current moment are what I think power the film's essential meaning: find pleasure in the current moment, for it could fade and disappear at any time.

This may certainly be the waylaid desires of a critic/bachelor attempting to salvage hope from a film that, ostensibly, is about the futility and impermanence of “love”. After all, it's fucking Valentine's Day, and holy shit isn't that just a great reminder that you have failed at the Great American Dream of two cats and a fence or something.

It may be, but I've seen enough films to realize that it's not the ones that everyone else calls “depressing” that depress me. Things like your typical romantic comedy are the depressing ones, because you know there's no goddamn way your lower-middle-class butt is going to ever be that repressed millionaire who booked it halfway across Manhattan to make sure your Manic Pixie Whatever Girl doesn't get on the flight to London.

No, films like Blue Valentine, films that acknowledge that love is temporary, that love would mean absolutely freakin' nothing without the possibility that it could someday end – like life, amirite – these are life-affirming. The way in which Cianfrance muddles the timelines of the events makes the chronology of them immaterial. It doesn't matter when Dean and Cindy were so truly in love, his shitty ukulele playing and her awkward tap-dancing staging a gorgeously perfect moment of connection on a Brooklyn street, that moment is completely out of time.

In this way that I, a single man who ain't quite Hey Gurl young no more, can look back at my own past moments like this and acknowledge that their past-ness doesn't matter. I mean, you'll never see me singing with a ukulele, but I have ripped off a drunken serenade of “All of You”. It's as if love is always and will be always. And all of you in couples right now, maybe having just made love, or sitting waiting for your lover to come out of the bathroom so you can make love, or even parked on the couch Netflixing without any likely Chill to come (heh), reading this, remember that this moment is right now, but in a way it will always be always.