By Chris Luckett
The second day of Hamilton’s World Film
Festival had two highs and a low. Serendipitously, though, each movie was
better than the last, culminating in what is bound to go down as one of the
best films of 2012.
Image property of Zeitgeist Films |
Jokes fell flat far more often than they
landed. (A father accidentally ingesting acid? A middle-aged man being told by
the young girl he’s fantasizing about that he reminds her of her grandfather?
Such bits were already worn out by the ‘90s.)
Torn between wanting to tell an American Beauty-esque tale of mid-life
crisis and a Serious Man-ish modern
cuckold comedy, it fails at accomplishing either. The Salt of Life ultimately suffers most from just not being
entertaining.
To
Rome, with Love marks a return to form for Woody
Allen that Midnight in Paris flirted
with but couldn’t quite reach. Not only is it his most well-written movie since
Match Point, it’s his outright
funniest in over a decade.
Image property of Sony Pictures Classics |
Another tale, recalling Allen’s quirky
comedies of the ‘70s, involves an Italian who is an amazing singer, but only in
the shower (which leads to one of the best sight gags of the movie, at the climax
of that thread’s story).
The third storyline is a delightful
commentary on people who are famous simply for being famous, with Roberto
Benigni hilariously the center of national attention for no real whatsoever and
providing hysterical reactions to sudden and truly random celebrity.
The last of the four tales is where the
pictures fumbles, with lazy writing and a barely passable farce involving a
husband accidentally introducing to his parents a prostitute as his wife and
sticking with the story (while his wife is concurrently seduced by an Italian
movie star).
The prostitute/fake-wife storyline fell
flat at every turn, which prevented the movie from reaching the heights of some
of Allen’s classic comedies. Even so, having three-quarters of a brilliant
comedy still keeps To Rome, with Love
in the upper tiers of post-‘80s Woody Allen.
Image property of Fox Searchlight Pictures |
So much of the joy of the movie is its
unpredictability. What happens in the movie is best left unrevealed. This much
can safely be said: Beasts of the
Southern Wild is about a community of people who survive in a land called
“The Bathtub.
It’s not directly addressed at the start of
the film just where The Bathtub is located, or even when. Six-year-old
Hushpuppy (a mind-blowing performance by Quvenzhané Wallis) and her father Wink (Dwight Henry) simply exist there,
along with the other member of their makeshift community. They survive without
many modern conveniences like cell phones, toothpaste, or even electricity
(save for some generators being run by a dwindling supply of gasoline).
So much of the power of this movie is in
the way director Benh Zeitlin makes you feel like The Bathtub exists, real and
yet so amazingly fantastical. The events also unfold as filtered through the
perspective of young Hushpuppy, who sometimes fills in gaps with the kind of
things that seem logical to a child simply because they don’t truly understand.
The acting is beyond good. Wallis,
especially, is revelatory in the nuanced performance she gives, despite seemingly
being too young to even understand most of the script. Every single character
in the movie seems real. They don’t feel like characters, they feel like real,
existent people. And it doesn’t feel like a movie, it feels like something
that’s actually happening.
Watching Beasts of the Southern Wild is an incredible experience. It doesn’t
have any recognizable actors in it and it isn’t an easy movie to describe. But
it’s a singular vision, and one that’s never been depicted on film before. This
movie is going to be one of the biggest films at the Oscars next year. Count on
it.
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