NYLON - January 2009 - (Page 141) WENDY AND LUCY With her beloved dog Lucy by her side, Wendy (a brunette Michelle Williams) embarks on a roadtrip to Alaska to work at a fish cannery and begin a new life, but unexpected car trouble threatens her meager pocketbook and leaves her temporarily stranded in a nondescript Oregon town. After a desperate money-saving attempt to steal dog food at a grocery store, she is jailed and fined—thanks to an obnoxious law-abiding cashier—and subsequently loses Lucy, whom she has left tied to a storefront bike rack. Wendy takes to sleeping in the woods, recycling the same flannel shirt and corduroy cutoffs, refusing to skip town until Lucy is found. With a fast-dwindling money supply, no wheels, and limited help from those around her, Wendy must make a heartbreaking decision. Director Kelly Reichardt successfully delivers this quiet, minimalist film about an emotionally reticent yet strong-willed woman faced with economic decisions on the edge of American society. The decelerated, wandering pace may frustrate the average viewer, but Williams’s potent performance—a delicate composure masks torment and humiliation— anchors this timely tale of life-altering financial woes, a form of suffering many of us may come to know in the near future. BECCA RODRIGUEZ pulled before, but never with such impact as here, in creating the stark formal differences between Che’s opposing parts. If time in part one is a fluid thing, in part two it’s a ticking bomb: it passes as a relentless count of Guevara’s days in Bolivia, where he struggled to do for South America what he did for Cuba. Whereas the Cuban campaign was buoyed by hope and history, Bolivia feels like a lost cause from frame one, which is exactly what it was. Yet despite the weight of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s central presence in the film, little is learned about him; Soderbergh’s interest lies less with the man than with Che, the soldier of the revolution. Though in the end this is less a movie about revolutions than it is one about filmmaking: No other director working about winning an arduous struggle as part today has explored the possibilities of modern two is about losing one. Part one jumps production as thoroughly as Soderbergh, whose restlessly between years: Guevara, played by résumé reads like a compressed biography Benicio del Toro, meets Fidel Castro, speaks at of cinema itself: there were the times of the UN, and moves up the ranks to become a experimentation, the independent years, the trusted commander. Director Steven Soderbergh Hollywood-funded Golden Age. And now, with lends each narrative its own unique look two radically different war movies disguised as using what for him is a familiar cinematic an epic history, Soderbergh has given us his shorthand. It’s a neat trick, and one he’s most audacious film to date. MIKE HARVKEY CHE An early title for this four-hour opus was Guerilla. Given the film’s fascination with the details of waging a difficult campaign— details that reveal all the dreadful everyday circumstances, yet mostly leave the fighting men and women in the dark—it might have been a better choice. Che is really two diametrically opposed films of equal length placed back to back. Part one is as much There’s a stunning slow-motion shot in Gus Van Sant’s Milk that zooms out from Harvey Milk (Sean Penn) and his lover, Scott Smith (James Franco), kissing outside of their new camera store directly in front of a sign that reads, YES WE’RE OPEN. Such was Milk’s bold arrival to San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the ’70s, which he would eventually shape into a haven welcoming gays and lesbians and become America’s first openly gay man in political office. In this extraordinary biopic, Van Sant continues telling Milk’s legacy as a hero and gay icon who dedicated the Talk about a slippery slope! Left-leaning literature professor John Halder is approached by the government last eight years of his life to advocating equal rights for to write a paper advocating euthanasia. It’s a position homosexuals. Penn and Franco give Oscar-worthy he’d previously taken, so what could be the harm? performances, supported by equally brilliant co-stars Emile It all depends on context, and Good’s is a doozy: It’s Hirsch, as Milk’s protégé; Diego Luna, as Milk’s needy 1930’s Germany, the government in question is the Nazi lover; and Josh Brolin, in a sympathetic performance as party, and this is a game of moral dominoes. The film’s Dan White, Milk’s fellow city supervisor and eventual argument is that no single action taken by this basically assassin. Milk predicted his assassination in his tapegood man (Viggo Mortensen, who is too unusual to make recorded will, a motif that writer Dustin Lance Black (Big mild-mannered believable) is harmful in and of itself. Love) utilizes effectively as narration throughout the film, Yet one thing leads to another and the dominoes quickly allowing for incredible insight into Milk’s hopes and fears fall. Before long a slew of “harmless” services have for America’s future. His relentless energy and courage been rendered, for increasingly compromising rewards, recruited thousands for the gay rights movement and and one day our good man looks in the mirror to find a reminded them that they were not only fighting for change, Nazi staring back. but also for their lives. BR In adapting Good from the Broadway play, Brazilian commercial director Vicente Amorim makes a common mistake: He tries to have it both ways. Where bold decisions were needed about what to take from the stage play and what to dismiss, he opts instead for a middle-of-the-road approach that strips import from the play’s most unusual elements (such as characters breaking spontaneously into song, here more inert than unusual). A more experienced hand at the helm could have resulted in a truly unnerving film, which is ultimately what Good should have been. It’s a pity, because there’s a lot to like here, just not enough to turn a good play into a great film. MH milk GOOD THE CLASS The teacher of The Class is no hero, nor will he inspire his students to greatness. But he knows when to celebrate his victories—however small, however rare—each time he coaxes one of his students out of his or her insolence. The Class eschews a happy conclusion that conveniently coincides with the end of the school year because, well, there wasn’t one. Director Laurent Cantet’s film is based on Francois Begaudeau’s autobiographical, award-winning memoir of a year spent teaching middle schoolers French Literature in one of Paris’s tougher neighborhoods. In the film, Begaudeau stars as himself, the teacher who must cajole his disrespectful class into learning something. The film’s drama revolves around truant student Souleymane (Franck Keita). His antics eventually erupt into a random act of violence; the scenes leading to his disciplinary hearing are the film’s most charged. Teachers debate their accountability in his expulsion against the greater threat posed by Souleymane’s father: The boy’s ejection will mean his deportation to Mali, where the violence awaiting him will be greater than in any classroom. After a rare unanimous vote, this film took the Palm d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival. The adolescent non-actors who make up Begaudeau’s class were never given scripts; rather, dialogue was improvised in weekly workshops—their performances are the films greatest triumph. It’s their unrelenting indifference (despite Begaudeau’s most creative efforts), however, that makes viewing The Class both fascinating and frustrating. This is an entirely worthwhile return to the classroom. LAURA HAYNER
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