No one, as far as I know, has come to the Berlinale in search of Gillian Anderson, the strawberry-blonde vixen who set millions of hearts aflutter — and not just male ones — with her role in the supernaturally beloved ’90s show The X-Files . But Anderson has surprised those of us who love her by showing up — in small roles, but still — in two films here, James Marsh’s Shadow Dancer and Ursula Meier’s Sister . In Shadow Dancer , a thriller set in early-‘90s Belfast, she’s a British secret-service officer who squares off against a colleague (played by Clive Owen). In Sister , she’s the well-heeled patron of a tony Swiss ski resort — and a mom — who befriends a young thief and rapscallion who barely knows what it means to be a child. Anderson hasn’t really been in hiding. She was one of the best things — perhaps the only good thing — in last year’s Johnny English Reborn , and she recently played Miss Havisham in the British TV adaptation of Great Expectations . She chooses her roles carefully and doesn’t seem particularly attracted to big Hollywood vehicles — though it’s more likely that Hollywood isn’t particularly interested in her, which is certainly its loss. There are plenty of movies to parse and examine here at the Berlinale, but at dinner last night with some colleagues (who happened to be guys), Anderson came up in the conversation, and we just looked at one another: “Gosh! Isn’t she something?” is the gist of what we said. Perhaps we love her more because she shows up so infrequently and so fleetingly, like a ginger comet. Her role in Shadow Dancer is small and tokenlike, but it’s interesting for its metallic coldness, not a quality we usually associate with Anderson. Then again, maybe it’s really just a mirror angle of the clinical skepticism she brought to the role of Dana Scully in The X-Files : She’s good at playing characters who can turn the warmth off when it gets in the way of the goal at hand, and in Shadow Dancer , she plays a character who’s all about goals. In Sister , Anderson isn’t strawberry blonde but truly blonde, and the first glimpse we get of her is a mane of glorious, rich-girl hair. At first I could see only the oblique planes of her face and, not knowing she was in the movie, I thought to myself, “Could it be…?” Her role is small but potent: Her character, skiing at the resort with her own kids, meets the young thief Simon (played, beautifully, by a kid actor named Kacey Mottet Klein), and the two are immediately charmed by each other. He pretends to be a the son of the resort’s owner, when really he’s a mighty mite of a hustler who scrambles to make a living for himself and his sister (Léa Seydoux). Anderson scrutinizes his face as he advertises this fanciful false background — you can see, in this tiny but potent scene, that she’s amused by him and yet somehow, instinctively, she also feels protective. It’s not that she doesn’t believe his tale (she seems to buy it all); it’s that her better judgment tells her that this kid is in need of something, and though she can’t be the one to provide it, she grants him the kindest gift she can: She takes him seriously, reacting to him as if he were the miniature adult he’s trying so desperately to be, meeting him on his own scrappy turf. That’s a lot to pack into a few small scenes, and it’s a bit frustrating that her character’s role in the drama isn’t better worked out — her final encounter with Simon doesn’t feel true to the woman we met earlier. On the whole, the picture is unevenly worked out, but it’s ultimately touching, thanks to the bittersweet grace notes scattered throughout. Anderson is one of those grace notes; her presence is as subtle as a sigh, but it’s the kind that sticks with you long after the credits roll. Read more of Movieline’s Berlinale coverage here . Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
You might have heard that it’s Valentine’s Day, which means romantic ruminations and reflections and perhaps an irresponsible outlay of cash in the humiliating pursuit of way more than a kiss goodnight. You know who you are. For others, it’s a chance to look on at the utter futility of love in all its heart-shattering horror. We know who we are, and it’s time to represent. To wit: Let’s talk about the most pulverizing break-ups in cinema. I’ll just get right to my pick: Cloris Leachman letting Timothy Bottoms have it at the end of The Last Picture Show . No Valentine’s Day is complete without a good, wracking cry, and I now can say I’ve had mine: Mrs. Popper’s classic “Never you mind” does technically open her relationship status with Sonny up to some ambiguity, but “You shouldn’t have come here; I’m around that corner now” pretty much cements the deal for me every single time . I’d also argue it cemented Leachman’s Oscar win for her performance; alas, that’s a conversation for another time. Your emotional mileage may and likely will vary, of course, so let’s hear about it below. Life is too short for love. Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Here’s a trailer for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter , the forthcoming Timur Bekmambetov film featuring our 16th president as an axe-wielding killer of the undead. There’s not much more to say that you can’t derive from the super slo-mo, mega-loud hyperviolence promised herein. America’s youth has got to get its history from somewhere, I guess. The film opens June 22.
Films about geniuses are so numerous that they almost constitute their own genre. One seems to pop up every few years, always with a few distinct markers. We usually see a brilliant character whose ideas are a little crazy, a couple of “normal” characters against whom the genius’s difference can be easily identified, and a Very Important Project that puts those crazy ideas to the test and ultimately validates the lead character’s oddball behavior. Most informed movie-goers can set their watches by these plot developments, but to me, even the worst ones have a certain appeal. Watching great ideas brought to life is thrilling, and the really good ones, like The Social Network or Good Will Hunting , seem to tap into something universal. One could argue that, rather than a genre unto itself, films about genius can be categorized as a sub-genre of the biopic; there is a lot of cross-over between them (see Pollock or Amadeus or Surviving Picasso ), even though it probably has roots in more conventional mad-scientist genre films, like Frankenstein . However, their most important aspect, more than their supposed biographical integrity, is how prominently ideas figure in the story. Rather than merely a large amount of screen-time for geniuses, like in the many Sherlock Holmes films or like Doc Brown in the Back to the Future series, films about genius humanize difficult concepts. Because another defining characteristic is that, as opposed to superheroes with mental powers that are very obviously beyond human capabilities, like Professor X, whose telekinesis is basically supernatural, the sort of film genius I’m talking about is grounded in plausibility. Their abilities are mythical but not supernaturally so. Film geniuses do what everyone else does, using recognizable materials, only they do it much, much better. Still, after a point somewhere off in the horizon, that which distinguishes the genius from the rest of us isn’t a measure of degree, but of type. These films take great pains to “other” their subjects, or make them seem different even above and beyond their achievement. It isn’t enough that they can think better or create more beautiful things. They have to be kind of weird, too. It’s no wonder that, while we have films about total non-geniuses like Abbie Hoffman, or genius peripherals like Edie Sedgwick, Hollywood has yet to produce an Oscar-winning film about someone like, say, Jonas Salk. Because while Salk was no doubt a genius, he also seems to have been a fairly nice, conventional person in his everyday life and, thus, not great fodder for the Hollywood machine. Nobody wants to watch a movie about someone who goes to work and pays his taxes and gives exact change at the grocery store. This will happen. The rules for portraying difficult ideas on film, which seem to profit from a certain graphical fleshing out for the general moviegoing public, don’t really apply to the construction of a compelling character arc, which thrives in danger and conflict. For example, in one film about genius, A Beautiful Mind , we see the concept of governing dynamics explained very succinctly and transparently by way of a scene about a bunch of guys hitting on a girl in a bar. (Visually, it’s a good scene, though the dialogue sounds like everyone’s reading straight from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations .) However, when director Ron Howard employs a similarly graphical rendering of the schizophrenic delusions of the genius main character, mathematician John Nash, by revealing that people he had been interacting with throughout the film were actually only in his head, the technique seems totally inappropriate. A helpful graphic as filmic teaching moment for a difficult concept, sure. But a descent into madness, or in this case the retrospective unveiling of a madness into which one has already long descended, require a somewhat more emotionally charged visual than the director indicating, “Shucks, those guys aren’t actually there…” In contrast to such transparently clear filmic infographs, a character whose personality is meant to fill the screen and hold interest should be sort of messed up, harder to figure out, and certainly not party to the kind of M. Night Shyamalan-ian reveal employed in A Beautiful Mind . That said, I still liked the film — in part because of how it portrays the descent into madness as an actual hindrance to the production of important ideas. A lot of other movies merely portray such pesky foibles of personality as inevitable side effects of genius itself, easily overcome with a few cathartic moments and liberally applied theme music. Obviously, some of this just has to do with biographical information where applicable, because the particular genius in question actually experienced schizophrenia’s debilitating effect and, lo and behold, wasn’t helped along in his career by having it. But judging by the middle section of the Venn diagram for most films about geniuses and biopics, where the stories are roughly “based on a true story,” one could easily conclude that social ineptitude or mental instability are prerequisites to having great ideas. Never mind that there are quite a lot of brilliant people who don’t display any kind of odd behavior at all. And so the biggest flaw in the films about genius genre seems to be a sort of lopsidedness in execution concerning the relationship between a genius and his or her ideas, despite the fact that formal guidelines would seem to dictate that these two aspects be treated with equal attention. One film that gets this relationship right is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , in which the visuals very closely relate to the ideas of the subject, writer Hunter S. Thompson. * Director Terry Gilliam inhabits the perspective of Thompson in relating the story of his drug-fueled ride through the Nevada desert, and we see the world through the lens of Thompson’s inimitable manner and, thus, understand what his ideas amount to, in spite of the fact that no helpful infographs are provided. There is only one scene in which the Thompson character actually explains anything — where he gives context to his nihilistic fervor as cast against the idealism of the ’60s peace movement — and this is probably the least successful scene in the whole film. Hearing Benicio Del Toro’s Dr. Gonzo scream the lyrics to “One Toke Over the Line” while driving through the desert, his face a grotesque mask in Gilliam’s skewed frame, is pretty much all the audience needs to understand the point. One lesser example of the genre is Pollock , a film about the artist Jackson Pollock, which doesn’t really treat the actual art with enough care. The performance by Ed Harris in the central role is excellent, and the story is actually pretty interesting: We see the most fruitful period of Pollock’s life, his relationship with artist Lee Krasner, his problems with mental illness and alcoholism, and, most interestingly, him at work in his studio. But the problem is that getting an up-close view of how Pollock’s art is made sort of deflates the effect it’s supposed to produce. Much of the fascination people have with Pollock’s art is wrapped up in what those paint splatters don’t represent. One would want a portrayal of Pollock that grows in mystery as it grows in scope, but the “un-abstracting” of how the paintings were made in this film, even by way of a story about a fairly abstract human being, seems to detract from the artist’s original vision, if only because it employs a representational aesthetic. This is an example where learning the backstory of the ideas actually detracts directly from the ideas themselves. The problem isn’t that films about genius tend to highlight people with world-changing ideas who have no power to change their own complicated, messed up lives. Basically all strong characters start at this point, whether a genius or not; that’s the basis of a character arc, a problem that initially seems unsolvable. The real issue is that a lot of filmmakers don’t seem to get that, while a conventional plot might necessarily rely upon a messed up, complicated central character, that character’s viability relies on whether or not his or her ideas are actually interesting independent of that complication. And oftentimes, if there is a conflict of interest between the portrayal of a brilliant character and that character’s world-shattering idea, the idea gets short shrift for the purposes of “character development,” and the whole structure falls. And so, the real mark of quality for these movies has to do with inhabiting difficult ideas through aesthetic forms, like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , as opposed to the popularization of difficult ideas in favor of a less interesting biographical story, like in A Beautiful Mind and Pollock . Good films about genius embed the relevant concepts within the film medium itself, allowing them to animate the filmmaker’s own aesthetic impulses. Less good ones tend to water down the ideas and focus on important biographical stuff like how geniuses have a hard time talking to people at parties. In any case, it must be a very difficult thing to make a film about a person whose achievements are more important that can really be expressed creatively, and many times, which are actually more important than the film — or any film — itself. * I’m not interested in arguing whether Thompson was actually a genius. He was portrayed as such in the movie, and that’s all that matters. [ Back ] Nathan Pensky is an associate editor at PopMatters and a contributor at Forbes , among various other outlets. He can be found on Tumblr and Twitter as well.
Based on a true story out of World War II-era Lvov, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), In Darkness seeks to distinguish itself from the painfully distended genre of Holocaust movies with relentless “you are there” realism. It’s not quite Smell-o-vision, but the idea seems to be to try and make the experience of the 12 Polish Jews who hid in a sewer for 14 months as uncomfortable for the audience as it was for them. It seems significant that even a movie like The Reader paused in the midst of its “I was deflowered by a war criminal” melodrama to acknowledge that there is nothing to be learned from the Holocaust. Because its stories of annihilation and survival have taken on the ritual interplay of genre, often they have as much to tell us about current narrative appetites as they do about history. In Darkness , currently nominated for a Best Foreign-Language Feature Oscar, is foremost a Holocaust movie that asks to be measured against all the others; its primarily lessons are directed toward the genre itself. Not all of the victims, for instance, are noble or even particularly nice. Director Agnieszka Holland ( Europa, Europa ) seems so enamored with her own resolution on this account that little more is offered in the way of characterization. But making the victims “human” does not necessarily make them complicated, or well drawn; in fact it leaves them vulnerable to cliché. So here we have the upper-class couple (Maria Schrader and Herbert Knaup) and their two small children, the resourceful hero (Benno Furmann), the rogue (Marcin Bosak), the pretty sister (Agnieszka Groshowska), the wanton redhead (Julia Kijowska), and a few others who never really emerge from the sewer’s shadows. Crammed together into a miserable crevice of the Lvov underground after a pogrom destroys the city’s Jewish ghetto, they all behave badly some point. There are fights over food, space, noise — and though bitter religious recrimination occasionally erupts, it feels more like a requirement of the genre than a reflection of deteroriating inner lives. In Darkness is based on the story told in a 1991 book called In the Sewers of Lvov , by Robert Marshall (adapted here by David F. Shannon). Its central figure is also one we have come to recognize on film: the benevolent gentile. Leopold Socha was a Catholic Pole and prolific thief when the war broke out; he also worked in the sewer system, and offered to help hide the group of Jews in exchange for payment. Robert Wieckiewicz, an enigmatic performer with a tough potato face, plays Socha as a Polish Tony Soprano by way of Graham Greene, with all the charisma, martyr issues and ambivalence about his own better nature that suggests. In Darkness is most successful when it follows Socha through a city where life goes on despite the nightmares unfolding in plain view and underfoot. The opening scenes use an effective contrast to set up the question: What kind of times are these? Socha and his sidekick (Krzysztof Skonieczny) shake down a couple of teenagers in what appears to be a middle-class family home; during their getaway they cross paths with a group of naked women racing through a forest, pursued to their death by nattily uniformed gunmen. From there Holland continues to effectively exploit the tension between Lvov’s ominous sense of suspended reality and the denial human beings are capable of when not directly threatened themselves. Socha and his wife (Kinga Preis) speak about the massacres that take place in their streets like they have just read a report about a country halfway around the world. Though the tensions are not addressed in depth, the fact that German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian are spoken more or less interchangeably evokes the clashing ethnic currents that made Poland the Holocaust’s crucible, a better host than most of the region for genocide. Absolutely everyone is on the take, and the sudden perishability of human life has only heightened the instinct for self-preservation. That that instinct is more acutely felt in the character of Socha and his life above ground suggests the overriding misery emanating from the film’s depiction of life in the sewer. With a few exceptions — including cinematographer Jolanta Dylewska’s bravura depiction of a flash flood that threatens to drown the stowaways — Holland cannot make the group’s determination felt because she’s so intent on making us feel the mortification of their suffering. The squeaking and scampering of rats becomes a motif over two and a half hours — it ends almost every scene with one last dash of disgust — and the seemingly high incidence of sewer sex gets lingering attention as well. Rather than beginning with the assumption that there is no possibility of our coming to know that kind of suffering exactly and using imagination and insight to truly take us inside the Lvov Jews’ plight, Holland makes the base conditions of their confinement a narrative as well as aesthetic priority. And frankly it’s boring as shit. Follow Michelle Orange on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Fox seems to think so: “Sean Hayes, Chris Diamantopoulos, and Will Sasso — starring as Larry, Moe & Curly — in the all new The Three Stooges movie from Twentieth Century Fox, will start the action by delivering the green flag at the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s most prestigious race, on Sunday, February 26th.” [Press release]
After spending the last year with her Oscar and her new baby, Natalie Portman is set to return to acting with a busy year with not one, but two Terrence Malick films. The Black Swan star will join Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett to film Knight of Cups this summer, with all three reuniting in the fall to film Malick’s Lawless with Ryan Gosling , Rooney Mara , and Haley Bennett. Plot details for both films have been kept under wraps, so tee off with your thoughts on the Portman addition and the unusual double film casting move below. [ Deadline ]
I had a feeling this was coming: Two years after songwriter Ryan Bingham photo-bombed his own Oscar-nominee luncheon group photo, the customary portrait once again met its match with animators Brandon Oldenburg and William Joyce. Good for them! Someone ‘s gotta have some fun at these things. The filmmakers, whose The Fantastic Flying Books Of Mr. Morris Lessmore is nominated for Best Animated Short, just barely edged out a slightly crimson Nick Nolte as the annual group photo highlight. Congrats to all, and find the full portrait and more from Monday’s luncheon at the Academy’s Web site . Follow S.T. VanAirsdale on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
In director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s horror tale The Intruders , Clive Owen investigates spooky happenings at home and discovers that something supernatural may be haunting his young daughter. How scary is this mystery perpetrator who makes things go bump late at night? Well, just hit the jump to get a good look at what it did to poor Owen’s handsome face. Ready? BOOM. What. The. Hell. The Intruders , in theaters March 30, involves a creepy faceless entity known as “Hollow Face” who comes for Owen and his daughter (Ella Purnell) at night. Good luck getting Clive Owen’s scruffy no-face face out of your nightmares. [via Millennium Films]
