Criterion Corner-DVD/Blu-ray Reviews
Entries from September 2018
“EARTHLY AND
IMPERFECT LOVEâ€
By Raymond Benson
Ingmar
Bergman’s celebrated six-part mini-series, Scenes
from a Marriage, premiered on Swedish television in 1973. For markets
outside of his native country, Bergman cut the 297-minute TV version down to
169-minutes (not quite three hours) for a theatrical release in 1974—which is
the version I first saw.
Having
recently discovered Bergman in the early 1970s while attending college, I
welcomed Scenes with enthusiasm and
awe, as did most critics. The film received numerous accolades, although the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences deemed the picture ineligible for
Oscars since it had previously been a television mini-series. The acclaim for
the film, director/writer Bergman, and the movie’s two brilliant actors, Liv
Ullmann and Erland Josephson, was through the roof.
In
a nutshell, it’s the intimate, often painful, sometimes joyful story of the
twenty-year relationship of a married-then-divorced couple. The tale begins in
1965. Upper-middle-class Marianne and Johan have been married for ten years.
They have two tween daughters (who are seen only very briefly in the first few
seconds of the picture) and are seemingly happy. However, when Johan has an
affair with “Paula†(who never appears), the inevitable separation ensues,
followed by a divorce. But as ten more years elapse, Marianne and Johan
continue to occasionally see each other—even when they’re dating or married to
others—in an ongoing, never-ending tryst.
In
fact, in 2003, Bergman made a sequel to Scenes
from a Marriage. Saraband was a
Swedish TV-movie that was also released theatrically worldwide, and it featured
the now elderly Marianne and Johan, again played by Ullmann and Josephson. (Oddly,
their daughters’ names in Scenes are
Karin and Eva, whereas in Saraband their
names are Martha and Sara! Go figure.) Saraband
was Bergman’s final film.
What
made Scenes so remarkable back in
1973/1974 was its frankness, realism, and the camera’s near-claustrophobic
closeness to the actors—especially their faces and what they revealed through
subtle expressions or glances. Bergman, perhaps more than any other filmmaker,
used the landscape of the face to reveal the genuine subtext of a character’s
thoughts. The intimacy achieved in the work was revelatory, and the film is
said to have gone on to influence other filmmakers (most notably Woody Allen).
I
had revisited Scenes from a Marriage a
few times since its first release, but now having the chance to dive into The
Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray edition, I approached the picture with a
fresh eye and mind, especially informed by the experience of age and a long marriage
of my own.
I
came away this time a bit puzzled. Who are
these people, that they can be so matter-of-fact about adultery and
mistresses and lovers? It’s as if it’s taken for granted that all married
people will have affairs at some point. Back in the early 70s, I suppose we all
thought that this was being “civilized†or “behaving like adults.†Or perhaps
it was a Swedish or European thing!
It
is more likely, however, that Scenes from
a Marriage was written and directed to be a somewhat autobiographical
treatise. Ingmar Bergman was married no less than five times, had numerous love
affairs (and mistresses while married), including a five-year romance with Liv
Ullmann (he was the father of her only child). Maybe in his world, or in the contemporary universe of artists and the literati in which Marianne and Johan
reside, this kind of attitude existed.
Continue reading "BLU-RAY REVIEW: “SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE†(1973/1974; Directed by Ingmar Bergman) (The Criterion Collection)"
“GRACE VS. NATUREâ€
By Raymond Benson
Not
many filmmakers since the great Stanley Kubrick have had the same kind of
mystique, but one who easily fits that bill is Terrence Malick, a
writer/director who has endeavored to redefine the narrative form of cinema in
visually poetic terms.
Malick
doesn’t create movies, he makes cinema in verse. The story in a Malick film is
not a priority, although there is often a profound tale at work. A Malick picture
is all about the emotions, the visual beauty, the aural splendidness, and
taking part in a cerebral, yet primally impressionistic experience.
The
reclusive filmmaker disappeared from the public eye after his two acclaimed,
more “accessible†works (Badlands,
1973, and Days of Heaven, 1978). He returned
twenty years later and made The Thin Red
Line (1998). Something was immediately different about his art. Malick’s
storytelling was more oblique, nonlinear, and lyrical. This trend continued more
intensely in The New World (2005).
Never one to be labeled “prolific,†Malick brought out his fifth feature, The Tree of Life, in 2011, and it
featured a radical progression in this elegiac, non-traditional way of spinning
a yarn.
The Tree of Life received Oscar
nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Cinematography (by Emmanuel
Lubezki), but there were many audience members who just didn’t get it or
refused to meet the film halfway. I remember counting many walkouts from the
theater in which I first saw it. Its comparison to the initial reaction to
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is
apt. This was a new kind of film, something that challenged the viewer into sitting
back, opening the mind and the heart, and going with the flow.
And
flow it does… the picture is much like a symphony of sight and sound. The imagery
of the world in all its glory from
the ground, sky, and sea to the plants, animals, and people is breathtakingly sensual.
The music—mostly classical pieces and some original scoring by Alexandre
Desplat—is practically continuous as the pace of the editing moves frenetically.
How anyone could call this a boring movie is mind-boggling.
There
is a story. The focus is on the
O’Briens, a family in a small town in Texas in the 1950s, particularly utilizing
the point of view of the oldest boy, Jack (played by newcomer Hunter
McCracken). Brad Pitt is the stern, sometimes over-the-top disciplinarian
father, and angelic Jessica Chastain is the loving mother. Jack’s two siblings
are played by Laramie Eppler and Tye Sheridan. The entire family’s performances
are superb. Scenes in the present day feature an adult Jack (Sean Penn), who is
somberly “remembering†the events of the film. Something has triggered old Jack’s
memory of when the middle brother died at the age of nineteen (we don’t know
how… possibly Vietnam?).
And
then there’s the creation sequence, something else that is comparable to the
Star Gate section of 2001 (and that
film’s co-visual effects supervisor, Douglas Trumbull, is a consultant on Tree). We see in a nearly twenty-minute
segment how the earth was formed in the heavens, how life began in the waters,
the rise of dinosaurs (yes, dinosaurs!), the predatory disposition of certain
species, and their eventual destruction to make way for man.
Continue reading "BLU-RAY REVIEW: “THE TREE OF LIFE†(2011; Directed by Terrence Malick) (The Criterion Collection)"
RETRO-ACTIVE: THE BEST OF THE CINEMA RETRO ARCHIVES
"THE SON-OF- A -BITCH
CAN ACT!"
By Raymond Benson
It’s
well-known that when John Ford, who had worked with actor John Wayne on a
number of films prior to seeing him in Howard Hawks’ Red River, proclaimed that he didn’t know that “the son-of- a-
bitch could act!â€
His
words were apt. Prior to the release of Red
River in 1948 (it was shot in 1946 but didn’t appear in theaters until
’48), Wayne had mostly played the likable, stalwart “John Wayne†character that
had first appeared in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939).
But in Red River, Wayne plays a role
that turned critical and public opinion of the actor’s thespian abilities. He
pulls off a remarkable feat—Wayne’s character, Thomas Dunson, is a first-class
S.O.B., a guy you really want someone to punch out throughout the movie; and
yet, Wayne manages to make him likable. He carries an audience through over two
hours of hardcore western, and he delivers one of his two or three best
performances. It doesn’t hurt that Wayne is ably supported by Montgomery Clift,
who plays Wayne’s adopted son. In many ways, it’s really Clift’s picture—he’s
the protagonist, and the story is seen through his eyes. But wait—maybe it’s
seen through Walter Brennan’s eyes in the original, rare theatrical cut,
released here in a glorious 2K digital restoration on Blu-ray.
In
fact, I had never seen the theatrical cut, the version preferred by director
Hawks. A longer cut, by about six minutes, was the one that was shown on
television and appeared on previous home video releases. The longer version was
actually intended as a preview for studio execs; it utilizes on-screen textual
transitions (as if the audience is reading from a book) and an extended final
confrontation between Wayne and Clift. The theatrical cut dispenses with the
textual transitions and instead substitutes sequences narrated by Walter
Brennan, who then, arguably, becomes the character through whose eyes we see
the story. Why this version, which originally played to audiences in 1948,
didn’t become the standard edition after that is a mystery; in actuality, Hawks
was quite right—the theatrical cut is the
better one, except for the trimmed final fight between the two leads. As Hawks tells Peter Bogdanovich in an audio
interview included as an extra in the Criterion Collection’s elaborate box set,
the best way to watch Red River is to
view the theatrical cut up until the last few minutes, and then change to the
preview cut at the point when Wayne marches through the heads of cattle to
confront Clift at the corral.
Another
thing that is remarkable about Red River is
that it was Hawks’ first western. He would go on to make a handful more (good
ones, too!), and was known for making pictures in all genres, but the fact that
he went out of the gate with one of the greatest westerns of all time is truly
an achievement. Red River, without
question, is one of the five best
American films of the genre.
The
story is a fictional account of the first cattle drive from Texas to Kansas
along the Chisholm Trail, the hardships the men overcome, and the battle of
wills between Wayne, the tyrannical leader and father, and Clift, the calmer,
perhaps smarter right-hand cowpoke and adopted son. Hawks manages to capture the
perilous trek with uncanny realism, assured composition and tempo, and drama.
Hawks once said that the key to a good film was “three good scenes and no bad
ones.†Well, Red River has far more
than three good scenes. The stampede sequence is nothing short of astounding.
Criterion
went all out on this one. It’s a four-disk set—two Blu-rays and two DVDs
containing identical material. Both versions of the film are included, along
with a couple of interviews with Bogdanovich, who explains the difference
between the two cuts and presents his views on the picture. Critic Molly
Haskell talks about Hawks in a new video interview, and film scholar Lee Clark
Mitchell tells us all about the western genre in an interesting piece. There
are audio excerpts from interviews with Hawks and novelist Borden Chase, as
well as a Lux Radio Theatre adaptation of Red
River featuring Wayne, Joanne Dru, and Brennan. Besides the usual
essay-filled booklet, the box comes with Chase’s original novel, Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail, from
which the film was adapted.
Great
stuff, and worth every penny.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON
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