I didn't watch that many movies in the last three months. I'm hoping I'll have more to write about next time.
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
Ellen Burstyn's Alice is the best performance in any of Martin Scorsese's films. Alice walks on a knife's edge, and Burstyn captures the extreme stress she experiences. But Burstyn simultaneously conveys the familial love and hope that Alice uses to power through the stress.
The film is unpredictable. It lets us form expectations as the story heads off in one direction, then, there will be a sudden upheaval that sets it on a totally different course. Sometimes the tone is ironic, sometimes it's harrowing. And Burstyn's performance somehow works with all the different registers the film adopts.
That
said, the film turns out to have a sort of tragic repetitiveness,
something for Alice's dreams and the film's more romantic devices to
struggle against. The film isn't afraid to suggest she nurtures her hopes in vain, even if they're indispensable to her life. Occasionally, it presents us with impressive vistas of the American west. Such expansive, sublime imagery that bears a contrast to the closely personal story and the cramped spaces where Alice lives with her son. The film paints a vivid picture of a world that is vast but inaccessible, and a person who persists in believing she might eventually find contentment in it, even when she finds no lasting reward.
The Desert of the Tartars (1976)
A group of soldiers linger at a medieval castle. Their nominal duty is to defend the nation's border from the Tartars. They do drills, practice fencing, and perform their daily rituals, but never see action. The film follows a soldier, Drogo, who is stationed at the castle in his youth and sees how it changes over the years.
Some at the castle fall ill and die. Some become paranoid. An officer posted at the castle is finally reassigned after several years. On his last day, he travels deep into the desert and shoots himself. One character suspects that these things happen because something in the castle walls poisons everyone who stays there. Soldiers who've been at the castle for years gaze into the desert and swear they can see strange things in the distance, but nothing comes of it.
Real bonds of warmth and respect form between the soldiers, but each of them meets a bitter and arbitrary end. Whatever camaraderie they have is warped by the fact that they spend their lives at the castle waiting for a crisis, for their chance to prove that they weren't simply brought together at random. They hinge their lives on the idea that they're the best people to take the deep history of the Tartar steppe on their shoulders.
Mystic River (2003)
The top reviews of this film on Letterboxd are all very negative, coming from people disgusted by the film's glorification of violent men and brutal treatment of Tim Robbins's tormented character. The film's most violent character, Jimmy, is someone you could imagine certain kinds of young men latching onto. The film ends with a disturbing speech from his wife. She tells him the reckless, worthless killing he commits at the film's climax was in fact a sign of his virtue. It showed the lengths he would go to for his family, and that he has power.
This speech struck me like the final lines of Blood Meridian. Judge Holden will never die because he's "a great favorite." People are fascinated by him, much like how the characters in Eastwood's own Unforgiven are fascinated by Sheriff Little Bill and William Munny. In this film, that fascination combines with knee-jerk aversions to people whose suffering we can't understand. Clint Eastwood is still probably more sympathetic to Jimmy than I am, but I find it hard to believe that this movie can really be reduced to what that speech says at face value.
Noah (2014)
I want to address a point raised in another post I read on this film. The author claims that "environmentalism" isn't an element of this film. I think this is plainly wrong. Part of that author's argument was that Noah's family being vegetarian is faithfulness to the biblical story, and has no thematic significance. I don't see why it can't be both. Also, I find it somewhat confusing. I know some Bible scholars believe
that God intended humans to be vegetarian before the flood,
because He tells Adam and Eve that He has given them the plants of the
Earth for food and makes no mention of meat. But
Cain killed Abel because he was jealous when Abel, a shepherd, was
favored by God for offering "the choice firstlings of his flock." I
don't know what those scholars think of this.
More to the point, if there wasn't supposed to be an environmentalist bent to this, I don't think Aronofsky would have made the story depend on the overmining of a fictional mineral resource that isn't even in the Bible.
Really, this film benefits a lot from its many expansions on the biblical story. Some of it is just amusing--imagining the lineage of Seth as a bunch of warrior-monks--but some of it is also quite poignant. God doesn't speak clearly in this film, and the characters clash over what they think God's messages mean and how they should respond to it. Noah actually forms the belief that God doesn't intend for any humans to survive the flood. Tubal-Cain, meanwhile, believes humans need to overcome God's will. The rest of Noah's family disagree with them both, and believe that God intends to preserve something good about humanity.
There's a surprising scene in the middle of the film when Noah recounts how God created the world. Up to that point, the film is full of plainly supernatural things, some from the Bible and some invented. But when he tells the story, we are presented with a sequence depicting the creation of the world in fast-forward. It's not the biblical creation. We see the solar system form from a cloud of matter in space. The creation of the moon by an impact of some large object with the Earth. The 4 billion-year history of evolution up to the origin of the human species. Suddenly, everything we've seen in the film is a metaphor. Once we realize this, we can see the story of the flood as a human attempt to deal with fractured beliefs.
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