Gerry Potter

Saw three films this weekend: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban, Dead Man, and Gerry. Everybody I know whose seen Dead Man seems to have seen a second time and done a 180 on the film, so I'm going to leave my comments for now at "meh." It was someone else's dream that I didn't particularly feel invited into or wanting to go to. It may be that Rosenbaum and Hoberman are right, and it's the greatest film of the decade, but there's a self-congratulatory air to the casting of the oddballs populating the scene (putting Iggy Pop and Robert Mitchum in highly visible nothing roles in the movie seems to say nothing more than "I know Iggy Pop and Robert Mitchum.")

As for Harry Potter, it's amazing what a difference a good directory makes. Cuaron makes the world of the film seem both like the product of a cleverer imagination, and more organic. There's not a feeling of highly talented British actors (and kids) hamming it up on sets out of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but of a real organic world following it's own eccentric rules. And the actors feel alive in a way that they didn't in the first film (I didn't see the second). David Thewlis, as Professor Lupin, is particularly good- he summons up a whole host of memories of sympathetic teachers in shabby clothes and vaguely disappointing lives. Everyone tired of fake looking digital creatures should take a look at Buckbeak the hippogryph who really feels substantial and alive and animal-like. But the main thing is Cuaron has such a sympathetic yet objective eye for his teenage characters, that like in Y Tu Mama Tambien, he doesn't make any special pleading for them the way Columbus (and sometimes Rowling) have to.

I still haven't seen Gus Van Sant's Columbine film Elephant, but Gerry was on the Sundance Channel this weekend. If you haven't seen it, it's a near dialogueless film starring (sort of) Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, as two guys- both named Gerry- who go off into a desert that looks somewhat like Death Valley for a "thing" and end up lost, wandering aimlessly around without food or water. For most of the movie, neither of them seem upset or angry or worried or much of anything. They're frequently shot from a distance- there are only a few close ups, and rarely do we see both their faces clearly in the same frame. The relationship between the two of them is never explicated-are they lovers? friends? brothers? some sort of play on the Matt'n'Ben relationship?- and there's not a sense that Van Sant wants us to experience the characters as characters or as representations of something else. They're simply figures moving through the landscape. Van Sant keeps everything on a human level that normally occupies the foreground that tamped down and vague (like a Harold Pinter Comedy of Menace without any menace. Or, except for some brief improvised dialogue, comedy) while the background nature, stark and characterless (there's no sense of an interaction between the Gerrys and their environment) occupies most of the frame and our attention. This may be the most boring thing ever to you. To me, it was oddly fascinating, but fascinating like a particularly brilliant screensaver. The landscape never seems to make sense- Van Sant gives you no shot where you can get your bearings on the surroundings, or even connect one shot with the next- at one point they're on a brilliantly white surface that looks like an ice skating rink, but there's nothing nearby that looks anything like it. Van Sant shows some shots of time passing represented by cuts to speeded up views of clouds passing overhead some mountains somewhere, but we never get a sense of how long they've been in the desert and how near they are to dying of exposure or dehydration. The mood of dead desperation that he summons for an hour and a half is so seductive that I found myself resistant when Van Sant fianlly switches things up, showing hallucinations and tears on the faces of the characters, and finally, at the end, some drama, but the emotional impact is incredible at the end, and somehow he's able to make us feel an extreme amount of tenderness for what were stick figures throughout the film. In the final close up on a character's eyes, you feel like you can see the entire dead world he inhabits inside him.