Movies

An Incomplete Guide to “The Tempest” on Film

I haven’t caught Julie Taymor’s adaptation of The Tempest, and by the way it swiftly disappeared from the marquees of local moviehouses (while The Social Network is going on it’s fifth month in theaters), it looks like I’ll be waiting until it leaks on the Internet or shows up in Netflix. I have now seen five other versions that range from relatively strict adaptations to films that, at their surface, resemble the play in little more than use of the plot device of a father and daughter in some isolated circumstances. The Tempest is by no means a favorite of Hollywood and some of the screen versions, including a 1911 silent film, have become particularly difficult to track down. These five stand out in the The Tempest‘s filmography as the most popular, accessible, and interesting in their takes and plays on Shakespeare’s themes of sorcery, redemption, and theater as a conjured illusion.

Yellow Sky

(1948)

After harmlessly (and rather comically) robbing a bank, “Stretch” Dawson (Gregory Peck) and his pack of bandits flee from a unit of garrison soldiers into an expansive stretch of salt flats–a clever inverse of a storm at sea. (Some of the film was actually shot in Death Valley.) Just as the robbers and their horses are about to die of thirst, they come upon a ghost town inhabited by an aging prospector (a witty play on “Prospero”) known only as “Grandpa” (James Barton) and his gun-toting granddaughter Mike (Anne Baxter). Tension ensues, along with 2 1/2 or so attempted rapes on Mike. The misogyny is actually quite difficult to take in the stride of historical context and even though we know Pecks’s character deserves to get the girl, he goes about it with a capricious morality.

Morality is what the movie’s all about, where in the play, it’s more or less an afterthought, as the all moral agency belongs to Prospero, who after a little meddling, is quick to forgive and forget. Prospero’s restoration of moral order is plotted and guaranteed from the beginning, and the upsetting of the order he restores happens at great distance from readers and audience members; completely off-stage and years earlier. There’s no question as to Prospero’s ability to restore it, only the slight question as to whether he will choose to act with or without vengeance, and if he’ll stick to his deal with Ariel.

Stretch and his men arrive only looking for water and food to, quite literally, get back up on their feet. But, once they learn Grandpa is sitting on a large cache of gold, their objectives shift. Grandpa lacks any sorcery to deter these thieves, so instead agrees to a deal they propose to split the gold 50/50. Of course, this doesn’t really seem fair to us, but we get the sense that everyone knows the game, and what will happen if a deal isn’t struck. The film’s moral compass takes the men at their word, and only shifts when Stretch’s gang departs from the agreement, as honor and sticking to one’s word are here far more important than lucre. Stretch, being the moral center of the film, puts his own life in danger to defend Grandpa and Mike and protect his honor from greed. He’s a lot like a film noir detective and, as you can see below, the photography often resembles noir’s visual conventions. Following a fatal shoot-out (but just for the bad guys) and an implied marriage between Stretch and Mike, moral is restored so much that Stretch even returns the money from the robbery that first sent him into the salt flats.

One of the bad guys

Rye before robbery

Forbidden Planet

(1956)

This 1950s drive-in scifi classic tears out most of the plot out of The Tempest, replacing Alonso’s ship with a flying saucer full of horny sailors on a rescue mission to the distant planet of Altair, and Shakespeare’s resolution of gentlemanly revenge with a literalization of popular Freudian psychology that today seems only worthy of a better episode of Star Trek. (Granted, there is the idea of creation by way of the mind; as a playwright authors things into existence, Morbius’s id begets a monster to act on its malice, but it’s never really explored–perhaps commercial concerns pushed it out.) One can’t help but laugh when the film’s astronauts talk about such things as “space pay,” but things get interesting, both within the contexts of adaptation and science fiction, when the play’s magic is exchanged for a mysterious, even mythologized, technology 2000 centuries old. The ancient secrets set down in Prospero’s tomes are here older than the human race itself. It’s not just an alien gadgetry, like Gort’s power over earth’s electrical grid or The Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, but something of mythic scale and age and of metaphysical power. Of course, for narrative purposes, it’s reduced to a series of electrical gauges and a robot that replicates whiskey, but Forbidden Planet‘s conflation of metaphysics and technology, its incorporation of archaeological ideas of ancients into science fiction, is a prototype for 2001: A Space Odyssey .

Forbidden Planet still, machine

The mythic machine behind Altair's magic

Forbidden Planet still Robby the robot

Dr. Morbius' Ariel, Robby the Robot

The Tempest

(1979)

This dark, manic, claustrophobic, and highly sexualized British adaptation by Derek Jarman makes ample use of voice-overs (think Olivier’s Hamlet), heavy shadows, filters, and close shots. The language is there, but it’s heavily departed from. It’s notorious for a shot of Sycorax breast-feeding Caliban as Prospero narrates Caliban’s origins, as well as plenty of other nudity. Oh, and there are midgets too. Prospero’s magic is cleverly visualized with geometric diagrams drawn in the dilapidated manor/castle/barn that serves as his cell, but there’s just not a lot here. This is the most dated adaptation and its pornographic elements no longer have the artistic/shock value they might’ve once had.

Caliban

Miranda

Sycorax and Caliban

Tempest

(1982)

With John Cassavetes, Molly Ringwald, Gena Rowlands, and Susan Sarandon, we can be thankful this lengthy script didn’t call for the actors to speak the original dialogue, even if we do have to listen to Susan Sarandon sing. Cassavetes’ Prospero or “Phillip” escapes to a Greek isle with his teenage daughter (Ringwald) and a randy “Ariel” (Sarandon) to hide from Miranda’s mother (Rowlands) and his former employer. The film shifts the narrative backwards, dwelling on the midlife crisis that pushes Phillip away from his wife and cushy job as an architect in the entourage of a New York casino mogul, who may or may not have mob ties. The movie is much more interested in how he got on the island than than how he gets off it and the a-wedding-makes-everything-alright ending that’s central to the play is obviously withheld, since the film is set in an age of custody battles and unfulfilling professional lives, not one of Machiavellian power plays and exile. The source of Phillip’s meteorological prowess is never explained, as Phillip is more interested in the plans to a theater he’s building and the baseball trivia he’s missing than ancient books of sorcery. Caliban becomes Kalibanos, played with great pizzazz by Raul Julia, the idiosyncratic native who prefers to sell souvenirs to the island’s visitors, rather than enlist them in a plot to usurp his master. This Caliban, unlike Shakespeare’s, is an emotional focus and is quite possibly the film’s most redeeming character, if only for his comic simplicity.

Miranda and Ferdinand, talking about pizza

The Tempest Susan Sarandon 1982 still

Miranda and Prospero's unsatisfied Ariel

Caliban attempts to seduce Miranda with his hidden television

Prospero’s Books

(1991)

My favorite adaption, for its unique and highly artistic merger of film, dance, opera, and animation; gorgeous tracking shots, a fantastic pop-minimalist score by Michael Nyman, and elaborate mise-en-scène, Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books is actually less of an adaptation and more of a reading of the play, as nearly all the dialogue is narrated by John Gielgud as Prospero (which makes it difficult to follow without some familiarity with the text). Action is passed over for images accompanied by Gielgud’s narration. We watch Prospero writing out letters with a voice over–the camera paying a lot of attention to in the ink well, the pen against the paper–in lieu of speeches by characters. There’s a sense (partially due to the film’s spirit world being populated far beyond anything described by Shakespeare) that the whole thing is conjured up by the magic of storytelling. This, of course, sticks to the most popular critical line drawn from those famous words of Prospero’s towards the end of the play.

These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with sleep

The film is obsessed with the text, and actually text itself; writing, books, calligraphy, book binding, paper, language, and words. Greenaway wrote in fanciful descriptions of the books in Prospero’s library (such as “The Book of Universal Cosmography”) that are narrated and pictured in interludes that punctuate the story. The whole movie got a real going over with an editing machine in Japan; passages from the text often scroll across the screen, pages from Greenaway’s versions of Prospero’s books are superimposed or appear in picture-in-picture like frames.

Prospero

Miranda

Miranda, Ferdinand, and Prospero's spirits

What the fuck are we doing?: “Winnebago Man”

“What the fuck are we doing?” Jack Rebney impatiently asks director Ben Steinbauer in Winnebago Man, Steinbauer’s documentary about fame, personal meaning, and how one can be mistaken for the other. The question comes near the middle of the movie, as the two are sitting in the woods in northern California, and there’s a palpable feeling that Steinbauer is struggling to determine what form his film might ultimately take. To this point in the story, things have not gone as expected, for the viewer or, most likely, for Steinbauer.

Winnebago Man begins as a search for Rebney, one of those accidental stars of the internet thanks to outtakes from a sales video he made in 1989 for the Winnebago Corporation. The video was shot in Iowa, at the height of summer, and the cult classic outtakes reel features Rebney melting down repeatedly and profanely as he flubs his lines, flings sarcastic barbs at crew members, and angrily chases after the swarming flies, all while trying to extol the virtues of state-the-art mobile homes. In the days before the internet, VHS copies of the reel were handed around, one of those secret handshakes of ironic cool, and when YouTube arrived, Rebney quickly joined the pantheon of the Leave Britney Alone Kid, Brian Collins, Epic Beard Man, and the innumerable other strangers whose earnestness, in the infinite fragmentation of media, has been transformed into our entertainment.

But Steinbauer’s search for Rebney is a short one, resolved within the film’s first 25 minutes by, wait for it, a letter Steinbauer sent via snail mail to one of Rebney’s PO box addresses. Without much of a journey to his intended goal, Steinbauer found himself in the woods with Rebney making a movie about; what?

Rebney, now in his late 70s, is living in remote Manton, CA, working as the caretaker of a rustic mountain getaway when Steinbauer finds him, and he’s unaware of his internet fame. The obvious thing to do with Rebney once he’s discovered is to focus on him and the video; why was he so angry in that video? What has he been doing since the video was made? How did he find himself making the video to begin with? The problem is that Rebney isn’t interested in any of this, nor does he understand why anyone cares about the video. Indeed, he steadfastly and gruffly (though good-naturedly, for the most part) refuses to discuss biographical details; when Steinbauer asks about his childhood, he chuckles and shakes his head in wonderment. “You’re so transparent it boggles the mind,” he tells Steinbauer, and it’s hard to disagree.

Rebney is revealed to be a funny, intelligent and still-profane crank who’s chosen living alone in the woods over dealing with what he clearly sees as a hopelessly corrupt world. Steinbauer, desperate for direction, suggests Rebney use his fame to communicate his political ideas, and offers to buy him a video camera with which he can make regular YouTube-ready broadcasts. The idea seems natural to Steinbauer, a 20-something filmmaker for whom the value and relevance of the internet is unquestionable and unquestioned, but to the analog Rebney, it’s idiotic. Who would want to listen to my ramblings? he wants to know. For Steinbauer, Rebney’s notoriety as the angry man in the Winnebago reel is a currency he can use; you have a ready-made audience, he tells Rebney. But for Rebney, his fame is a fluke and an oddity, interesting but meaningless, and though he has plenty of opinions and is in the process of writing a book, he doesn’t have the younger generation’s unthinking eagerness to display himself at any cost. One of the few biographical details Rebney shares with Steinbauer is that he was once a CBS news producer, and he speaks with reverence of Conkrite, Murrow, and the other gods of journalism’s Golden Age, when only a chosen few had access to the soapbox and, he says, news simply delivered the objective facts. Though it’s never made explicit, it isn’t hard to understand why the internet, with its blogs and commentaries and endless democratization of information and opinion, fills Rebney with a rage no swarm of flies could ever hope to inspire.

If Winnebago Man wants to be anything besides a vague portrait of an eccentric man, it wants to be a lesson in how the internet brings us together. Indeed, there’s a puerile assumption here that knowing information about a person is the same thing as knowing the person. In Rebney’s initial skepticism and then, in the end, in his seeming understanding of the internet’s power, Steinbauer may be suggesting that, to quote that ubiquitous icon of internet togetherness, Facebook, the internet can help us all “connect and share with the people” in our lives.

But what goes unnoticed, or at least unremarked upon, is the irony that while the internet is what made Rebney famous, it’s also the obstacle to his being known in any real way. At the movie’s climax (such as it is), Steinbauer interviews people waiting in line at the Red Vic Theater in San Francisco (ground zero of West Coast ironic cool), where Rebney will appear and answer audience questions at the Found Footage Festival. One interviewee sums up the feeling when she says, “I’m hoping he’s gonna say the F-word a lot.” To the audience, this is what Rebney is: an angry, cursing trained bear. After the show, at which Rebney is sweet, thoughtful, clearly touched by the attention, and satisfyingly potty-mouthed, Steinbauer conducts follow-up interviews, and the prevailing sentiment is that the audience regrets assuming the man in the Winnebago reel was all there was to him. The fact that internet exposure was reductive, and that it was the face-to-face meeting that allowed Rebney to be truly understood with anything like complexity, seems lost on Steinbauer.

The film is mostly entertaining and occasionally gathers momentum, but struggles with its focus. It brushes against some big ideas, but Steinbauer is either uninterested in them or fails to notice they’ve arisen at all. The only person who seems to understand the contradictions on display is Rebney, many of whose ideas and opinions are plain old-fashioned. It’s easy to romanticize the old model of news dissemination, but Rebney overlooks its obvious shortcomings, and there’s no question he plays to the crowd and likes the attention. Who wouldn’t? But the essential emptiness of internet fame (or any fame, for that matter), the fact that people knowing who you are is different from them knowing you, is obvious to him. A great many people are rightly excited by the possibilities of the internet, which are enormous, but for most people its value lies videos of kittens dunking basketballs, skateboarders falling down stairs, and Winnebago salesmen having hissy fits. Rebney gets it, even if Steinbauer doesn’t.

Winnebago Man runs through the 29th @ Kendall Square Cinema.

Larry Fahey is a writer living in Boston. He has a wife, two children, a cat, and an orange rotary phone he’ll never surrender. He writes about film, cranks out copy for razors and sneakers, and chronicles the daily misery of parenthood on his blog, ThereIsNothingForYouHere.wordpress.com.

Chanel No. 2: “Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky”

Jan Kounen has provided the latest installment in the Coco Chanel mythology with Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, a 2009 French (though it’s something of a polyglot) film based on the 2002 heavily novelized account of Chanel and Stravinksy’s 1920 rumored affair. I say Coco mythology, because, let’s face it, Chanel gathers a lot more brand recognition than Stravinsky does and the genesis of Chanel No. 5 carries a lot more appeal, even with Cannes officials and judges, than, say, the riot at the premiere of The Rite of Spring (when the music still came with a ballet).

Mads Mikkelsen’s Stravinsky is a bit of doldrum and certainly not the Lothario some presume Stravinsky was. He’s surpassed in light years, aesthetically and thematically, by Anna Mouglalis’ Coco. In fact, one could even argue that the opening of The Rite of Spring, which makes frequent appearances in the film’s soundtrack, is a stronger character than than Stravinsky himself. It’s sort of a Theme de Camille. During the opening credits, which appear amidst a fantastic staging of the riot (it’s unbelievable to imagine that once, men would fight over ballet) we see Chanel fall for the music, long before Diaghilev even introduces her to Stravinsky. But, she could’ve just as easily decided to go after the bassoonist, because Stravinsky isn’t all that desirable here. We get no indication of his genius or talent. Instead we get Chanel mythologized in the epic and easily recognizable moments of her career that were better covered in the other 2009 Chanel movie, Coco Before Chanel, starring Audrey Tautou; choosing what would become Chanel No.5, sending the corset to the guillotine, and just plain being Chanel.

Mads Mikkelsen (as Stravinsky) & Anna Mouglalis (as Coco)

Stravinsky’s pick up artistry seems limited to that bassoon passage (though that seems to be enough) and for the rest of the film he, along with his exiled and poorly adjusted family, become little more than subjects to the seductive and regal power that is Chanel. Frankly, Stravinsky just seems out of his league and the movie works hard to set up a parallel between Coco’s submissive staff of seamstresses and shop girls and the Stravinskys (Igor, wife & four kids), staying at her lushly decorated country villa. Now, Coco does first offer herself to Igor, but with so much force and confidence that it’s impossible to even imagine her being denied. Her power plays are best represented in one crucial scene where she and the Stravinskys sit at the dinner table. They, with clasped hands, piously say grace in silence, while she sits, photogenically posed the head of the table, casually smoking. Once Coco’s guests dined at that same table without her, on borscht, saying grace confidently in Russian, happy to be removed from their dingy Paris apartment, more appropriate for a starving artist than a starving artist’s family. A few weeks in the shadow of Coco Chanel has left them basically shamed into silence and obedience until Mrs. Stravinsky finally makes a very Bergmanesque epistolary getaway.

Mouglalis’ Chanel is in striking contrast to Audrey Tautou’s. Perhaps it’s the biopic form of Coco Before Chanel that softens the character, but here, expressed through a fictionalized Summer-long episode, we get a particularly dark period of her life, where her foresight for fashion is surpassed by her unscrupulous power plays. In short, Chanel No. 2 is kind of a bitch. To be fair to old Igor, he does stand up to her once or twice, letting Coco know that he doesn’t think her art is of the same merit as his–something she’s convinced of. Where the film stands on this, I don’t know…but we do see Stravinsky toying with a metronome while Chanel picks out Chanel No. 5. His creativity seems stunted while she’s unimpeachably at the top of her game.

The movie doesn’t tie up its strings very well. It only degrades into a rather indulgent dream sequence cum flashback/flashforward that appears to validate their relationship. Perhaps there just wasn’t enough biographical rumor to complete the knot, but the ending is a poor finish to two hours of lush tracking shots, absolutely outstanding set and costume design, and internalized drama.

Catch it at the Coolidge.

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Anna Mouglalis (as Coco)

Coming Soon to the Brattle: Catherine Breillat’s “Bluebeard”

Watching Bluebeard, the new film by French provocateur Catherine Breillat, you get the feeling that she was born to adapt fairy tales. Her previous films (Romance and Fat Girl), with their power struggles and gender archetypes, their violence and sexual predation, are almost fairy tales themselves, usually meant more as cerebral, thematic explorations than engaging emotional experiences. And it’s hard to think of a fairytale more suited to her sensibilities than Bluebeard, Charles Perrault’s gory 17th century tale of a king whose wives keep disappearing, and the new wife with the curiosity problem.

At a mere 1,800 words, Perrault’s Bluebeard, like many fairy tales, leaves out more than it explains; there’s plenty of room for interpretation, and Breillat, in adapting it, happily fleshes out the story with Breillatian details and character choices. She makes it into two stories, in fact: First, the story of two sisters in the 1950s who sneak into their parents’ attic and begin poking around. The younger and bolder of the two (Marilou Lopes-Bennites) finds a copy of Bluebeard and delights in terrifying her older sister (Lola Giovanetti) by reading it aloud. As she does so we’re dropped into the Bluebeard story itself.

Breillat’s Bluebeard gives us the two sisters of Perrault’s story, Marie-Catherine (Lola Creton) and Anna (Daphne Baiwir), here being sent home from their Catholic boarding school when their father is killed and they’re left without the money to pay tuition. Without a dowry their mother worries what will become of them, until they’re summoned to the castle of Lord Bluebeard (Dominique Thomas), known as the man whose wives have a bad habit of disappearing. They find a party in progress, thrown by Bluebeard with the presumed intention of identifying a new wife. After so much worry and mourning (their mother has dyed all their clothes black, much to their consternation) the girls and their mother welcome the party (much of the village seems to have been invited). They’re more than open to enjoying the Lord’s largess, but they dismiss the idea of marrying him as preposterous.

But of course it isn’t. Marie-Catherine—willful, proud and ambitious–has vowed to one day rise above her family’s edge-of-poverty existence (when the debt collectors come to the family’s house to repossess everything, Marie-Catherine stands by the front door hissing “Vultures!” and “Jackals!” at them as they carry out the chairs, tables, and even the clavichord Anna is in the midst of playing). Coming across Bluebeard lounging mournfully in the grass by a pond during the party, far from the celebration, Marie-Catherine finds him much less than terrifying. In any event, it’s hard to imagine her being intimidated by anything. She agrees without hesitation to marry Bluebeard, with the understanding that she–who’s perhaps 12-years-old (hey, it was the Renaissance)—will sleep in a separate room until she’s of age.

Despite his fearsome reputation, Breillat creates in Bluebeard a sympathetic beast (echoes of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast are presumably intentional). We never do learn much of his back story, but Thomas radiates weariness in the role, and Breillat’s framing and costumes accentuate his size—particularly when he’s in the frame with the petite Creton, he seems a mountain of a man, almost cartoonishly large. But there is little menace in his physical presence. He seems vulnerable and sad—exhausted even, and never more so then in the fascinating scene when Marie-Catherine sneaks from her room at night and spies on him undressing. His body is a lumpy mass of almost shapeless flesh as he sits forlornly on the edge of his bed, in forced separation from his child-bride. He is, indeed, vulnerable and powerless in that moment, his softness and helplessness laid bare to his new bride and us.

Of course, this is Bluebeard, so he’s not liable to remain for long. Called away from his castle on business, he leaves Marie-Catherine with a set of keys, and tells her that she may open any door she wishes—except the one that is unlocked by the golden key. This must remain closed, he tells her, and if she opens it, she will have to die. She assures him that she will do as he says, but doesn’t hesitate for a moment to immediately investigate the room, where she learns the real fate of the past wives. Though literature and folklore are full of curious women who cause no end of trouble–from Eve to Pandora to Alice and her trip down the rabbit hole–here it comes across less as curiosity than entitlement.

Much of the film is spent bracing for the old Breillat shock tactics, which in the past have been more than simply shock tactics, of course, but nonetheless have been shocking. The most shocking thing here, despite the gruesome discovery in that room, is how shocking it all isn’t. (Maybe we should be getting used to it, as her last film, The Last Mistress, was also relatively underplayed.) There is no sex at all, and the overall tone of the film is somber, almost staid. Instead, Breillat focuses on the form of the film, specifically the dual storylines. The two little girls we meet at the beginning of the film are more than a framing device, and if there’s any doubt of it, consider that at the key moment of the film–when Marie-Catherine enters the forbidden chamber–we don’t see Creton entering the room, but Lopes-Bennites, who momentarily enters the story of Bluebeard. The two sets of sisters are meant as parallel characters, each commenting on the other.

So, what’s the moral of Bluebeard? Breillat has presented her own twist on the tale, but it’s no more conclusive than the original story itself. And, being a fairy tale, maybe it doesn’t need to be. Bluebeard is most often thought of as a monster, of course, for who else could murder so many people? But here, when he discovers Marie-Catherine’s betrayal, his pained resolution to cut her throat and add her to the list of spouses who couldn’t play by his rules is almost wrenching to watch. Breillat has created a real tenderness between the characters–Bluebeard, with his sadness and restraint, more sympathetic than we expect; Marie-Catherine, with the ease of her betrayal and her selfishness, less. Breillat has often been mistaken for a feminist, and then suffered the wrath of those expecting tales of female empowerment. Such was the case particularly in Fat Girl, when her apparent suggestion that rape could be a liberating experience landed her in hot water with those who expect her to castigate her male characters and celebrate her female ones. Here, the ending is more subtle but no less ambiguous. Marie-Catherine ultimately achieves the wealth and status she’s always wanted (she slides easily into the role of Lady of the manor), and Bluebeard dies for his trust. He’s a beast who needs, narratively speaking, to die, and probably even deserves it. But that doesn’t leave us liking Marie-Catherine very much.

Larry Fahey is a writer living in Boston. He has a wife, two children, a cat, and an orange rotary phone he’ll never surrender. He writes about film, cranks out copy for razors and sneakers, and chronicles the daily misery of parenthood on his blog, ThereIsNothingForYouHere.wordpress.com.

Bluebeard plays at the Brattle May 14 through the 19th.

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Geoff Edgers Becomes a Celluloid Hero in “Do It Again”

I love the Kinks. Before I lost my iPod, I couldn’t even board a train or plane without listening to This Time Tomorrow. I’ll always claim that they’re one of the most underrated famous bands in pop history and I used to even claim that they were better than The Beatles, but that was probably more affected cultivation or specification than anything else. The Beatles were ahead of their time, but what made The Kinks great is that they were perfectly of their time, in their youthfulness, simplicity, social literacy, and their ability to mesh utter sincerity with biting cynicism.

I was happy to finally be able to catch Do It Again, a documentary following Geoff Edgers’ (somewhat personal) quest to get The Kinks back together at the Boston Independent Film Festival, along with a packed theater of vociferously devout Edgers fans–but who isn’t after his subtly scathing article on Randy Weiner and the ART. I think everyone appreciates the fact he’s not a reporter whose bloated ego motivated him to direct a movie, but rather just a writer whose nigh quadragenarian ego pushed him to star and produce a production with the professional help of Robert Patton-Spruill, to whom he is generous with credit.

What’s ironic about an effort to re-unite the Kinks (rhetorical or not) is that they’re a band that stayed together far longer than they should have in the first place. And it’s not unreasonable to argue that if they had suffered some dramatic End, à la The Beatles, more of the pop philistine passers-by Edgers questions in Do It Again would have known who the hell they were. Here they seem to be a band’s band. They only disbanded in 1996, but the pop music reaper had had his sickle at their necks for 25 years as they suffered personnel changes, and fans suffered through concept albums, rock operas, and other arcana–nothing that approached the utter perfection of Waterloo Sunset or the social wit of Plastic Man and Well Respected Man. The music that Kinks fans, casual or devout, love was released between ’64 and ’72. You probably could even round that figure down to 1970.

Unlike, say, David Bowie or even Bob Dylan, brothers Ray and Dave Davies (Kinks founders and breakers-up) haven’t faired too well over the years. Even a committed fan like myself can’t help but see them as a little washed up and their music and performance better remembered than re-lived.

This film may begin with Edgers’ sincerely impractical quest to re-band The Kinks, but it deviates from this mission. Large portions of Do It Again are given over to Edgers’ personal problems (there’s one memorable rant on the salary and benefits cuts pressed upon Globe employees), his personal and work life, meta-commentary of getting this movie made, and for a good chunk we forget about The Kinks getting back together entirely, and instead are more interested in what celebrities (Kinks members or not) Edgers can reach and, even better, who he can get to jam with him on a Kinks number. Every so often Edgers is there to remind us that he really is trying to reunite the band. I don’t think I’m giving anything away by saying The Kinks don’t hook up again due to Edgers efforts, but they practically do on their own accord.

Indie It Girl Zooey Deschanel and Geoff Edgers

Towards the end of the film, Edgers flies to London to do what he can’t seem to get done Stateside. His prime stop is a Kinks reunion at a shabby pub called the Boston Arms. There, each year, on a small stage and to a small crowd of devoted fans, a group of former Kinks personnel perform under the name The Kast Off Kinks. And the musical genius behind The Kinks (as well as Edgers’ elusive golden fleeced wild goose) Ray Davies shows up for a brief set. Apparently he even came through last year. And Edgers didn’t even have anything to do with it, in fact, he couldn’t even film it. Instead, we get some shoddy footage lent to him by somebody with a nice cellphone. But, alas, Ray’s brother Dave doesn’t show. The Kast Offs plus Ray perform Days, which, although obviously written about a girl, becomes uncannily relevant here as a eulogy to whatever happiness and creative prosperity Ray and Dave may have once enjoyed.

The film suffers from some sloppy sound, bad lip syncing, and bouncy editing. The trailer below, in its editing, isn’t unlike portions of the film. But, if it’s ever released to a non-festival audience, I’m sure they’ll take another look at the few rough patches. What saves the movie is Edgers’ sincerity, openness, hipness (and geekiness), his self deprecating humor, complete commitment to music and this project, his rapport with musicians and celebrities, and how much work he must have put into practicing those Kinks songs. There’s a great cover of Strangers, one of my favorites, and he joins The Venus 3 in another great cover of Get Back in Line. A parody of Lola, that’s sort of spliced in at the end, where Edgers sings to a classroom of kids not about transsexuals but Yoda left a sour taste in my mouth, but that didn’t keep me from listening to nothing but The Kinks for two days after the screening.

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Ben Stiller is a dick in “Greenberg”

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is returning from New York to his native LA to housesit for his brother, Phillip (Chris Messina, who may be familiar from 2009’s Julie and Julia; here he doesn’t have enough scenes to settle, once and for all, the question of whether or not he’s capable of chewing with his mouth closed), who’s taking his family to Vietnam for a few weeks. Roger has just finished a stint in a mental hospital, and though his troubles are never detailed, the more time we spend with him the more his problems seem obvious: He’s simply overwhelmed by the demands of the world, essentially unable to take care of himself. In an early scene, Florence (Greta Gerwig), who’s Phillip’s personal assistant and has been put more or less at Roger’s disposal, asks him to write down anything he wants her to pick up at the grocery store, and he’s unable to think of anything but whiskey and ice cream sandwiches. In another scene, he decides to give the swimming pool a try, and makes it across exactly once, a desperate, flailing dog paddle that looks, at times, a lot like drowning. In just these two scenes, we get a clearer sense of Roger’s character than most films manage in their entirety.

As he reconnects with people from his past—ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who co-wrote the story with director Noah Baumbach) and best friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans, bringing effortless world-weariness and warmth to the role)—it becomes apparent that everyone has grown up but Roger, who’s hopelessly, helplessly stuck in the past. He offers Ivan a drink only to find that Ivan has traded booze for fatherhood and responsibility; he shows up at a party Beth is giving to find it overrun by kids. “Is this a children’s party?” he mutters to himself. It’s not, but the adult parties of 40-year-olds tend to look that way. Over coffee, Beth, now a mother of two, has no memory of the events from their relationship that have been preserved so clearly in Roger’s mind and which retain such meaning for him. Roger drifts through these early scenes, obsessively applying Chapstick and bumming rides (he doesn’t drive, he repeatedly tells people, and we don’t even have to ask why; Roger is such a twitchy, oblivious mess it’s impossible to imagine him behind the wheel). Even as he begins a halting romance with the equally, though differently, damaged Florence, he seems barely able to notice anyone but himself. Through it all he has the irritated expression and manner of a man who’s totally put out by the world.

Being put out, in fact, consumes a lot of Roger’s energy. One of his favorite pastimes is writing angry letters to people who displease him: The CEO of Starbucks, the customer service at American Airlines, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But it isn’t just the faceless bureaucrats who earn his ire. He’s put out that Ivan doesn’t drink, he’s put out that everyone seems to be a stranger, and he’s put out that no one ever calls him on his birthday. What Roger’s beginning to realize—well, not realize, exactly, but bump up against—is that when you don’t take time for people, they don’t take time for you. Of course, Roger perceives this only in self-pitying terms: It isn’t that he’s neglected his relationships, it’s that everyone has let him down. Everything about Roger, in fact, begins with the suffix “self-“: He is self-absorbed, self-consumed, and generally selfish.

In fact, it’s hard to bring another film character to mind who can compete with Roger for sheer callous inconsideration—and certainly it’s rare in a character by whom we’re supposed to be, in some way, charmed—and herein lies the main problem with the film. No movie I’ve seen this year has been so efficient or effective at creating a rich, complex, vivid character. But as a viewing experience it can be trying, because Roger is not just vivid, but vividly awful. He takes the patient, accommodating Ivan for granted, displaying no real interest in Ivan’s life beyond urging him to divorce his estranged wife (the subtleties and gray areas of a decade-long relationship with the mother of one’s child are lost on Roger, who sees romance, like everything else, strictly in terms of what it can offer him). Worse is his treatment of the sweet, lost Florence, a character I could only pity for her bad luck in finding Roger: she is selfless where he is a narcissist; she gives where all he does is take; she has a basic inability to stand up for herself, where he walks all over everyone he meets. Their relationship is, I suppose, meant to be sweet—two misfits finding each other—but at times it feels like an artful portrait of the beginning of a classically dysfunctional relationship, the answer to the question we’ve all asked at one time or another, of someone we know: “How on earth did two people who make each other so unhappy ever get together in the first place?”

Putting unpleasant characters on the screen is no crime, but Baumbach isn’t John Cassavetes or Neal Labute, and uncompromising unpleasantness isn’t his main goal. This is meant to be an endearing character study of a complicated man, but charmlessness is a big hurdle in this kind of film. By the end, Roger makes some subtle movement toward growth, tentative steps toward being able to recognize the needs of others, toward being able to step outside himself, however briefly. But it feels like too little, too late. By then, Baumbach and Stiller have done such an expert job of creating the tiresome Roger that it’s hard to root for him. Roger is, in a word, a dick. By the beginning of the film everyone has long since lost realized this, and by the end of the film, so did I.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark: “Terribly Happy”

Something is awfully wrong in Skarrild, a very small town with a very high water table far outside Copenhagen, though it’s hard to say just what. This is as true for the characters in Terribly Happy (trailer)—new Marshall Robert Hansen, town bully Jorgen Buhl, and Jorgen’s wife, Ingerlise—as it is for the audience. Robert is dropped off by his chief to begin his duty in the lonely, drab downtown (such as it is) of Skarrild and right away, things seem, well, off.

Robert has been banished to this lonely outpost from his regular beat in Copenhagen after making a “terrible mistake” that’s left him on the outs with his boss and family alike, and he’s here to pass the time, pop anti-depressants, and try to work his way back into everyone’s good graces. We see him placing repeated calls home, just to hear his daughter’s voice on the machine. But then the lonely, possibly unbalanced Ingerlise appears, insisting that her brutish husband beats her, and Robert begins to be drawn into affairs that the townspeople might rather he ignore.

There are many unexplained things in Skarrild. There’s the missing bicycle shop owner. There’s Dorthe, Jorgen and Ingerlise’s young daughter, who pushes her creepy, squeaky baby carriage through the streets at all hours. There’s the local grocer, who locks would-be shoplifters in a strange little closet in his office. And there are all the other subtle, pulsing undercurrents: looks exchanged in the local bar, suggestive references to the last Marshall (whose fate we don’t really know), and the ominous, repeated insistence that in Skarrild “we have our own way of doing things.” Indeed, Robert is constantly reminded of his outsider status, and scolded for the way he confronts shoplifters, drinks, and even hangs out his laundry. What Robert needs to learn most, the townspeople seem to suggest, is not to ask too many questions about things that seem out of place.

Skarrild is one of those self-contained movie places—like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or any place imagined by Tim Burton—and though it looks more or less like the normal world, it has its own rules and logic. You can always feel the potential encroachment of the outside world in this film, and yet the real world always feels removed and unthreatening to the way of life in Skarrild. And the more we learn about Roberts’ past—about the “terrible thing” he did—the more we understand his increasing comfort in this dull, flat place where there is only, as one character puts it, “mud and cows and rubber boots.” Once you stop asking questions and start going along with things, the people of Skarrild might be the best friends you ever had. Or, to put it another way, in Skarrild everything gets sucked down into the mud eventually.

The place seems so perfectly suited to Robert’s state of mind, in fact (not to mention his past sins) that you might wonder if the film will prove to be one of those fever dreams that’s taking place entirely in the troubled protagonist’s head (it isn’t). This is especially true when things take a dark turn and Robert—who for all his expressionless inscrutability, is, we assume, a basically good guy—is revealed to be, perhaps, something else, a man more troubled than we realized. There’s a lot of inversion going on in the movie—Jorgen has unexpected layers, as well, and even the title (both terrible and happy) suggests the sort of ambiguity of mood and feeling present in every frame of the film. The movie’s director and co-writer, Henrik Ruben Genz, obviously owes a great deal to the Coen brothers (and, by proxy, to all of the many directors to whom the Coens owe such a debt), but this is the good kind of imitation: the kind inspired by the superficial trappings of great work, but not afraid to be its own movie.

No matter what Robert’s flaws and mistakes, we’re rooting for him throughout, and that means rooting for him to get back to Copenhagen, something he wants even when he seems to be drawn in by the allure of a place where secrets can stay secret. When the time arrives for his departure, though, in the film’s next-to-last scene, things don’t go as expected and the tone of summing up quickly and quietly blossoms into an almost Twilight Zone kind of widening horror. Robert, it seems, won’t get his wish. So is this a vision of hell, a place where no one says what they mean, where there’s no overriding rule of law, where there’s always something just out of reach, a place of eternal grasping? Just when you think so, the final scene comes, and that feeling is flipped as playful, happy music rises up, there are signs of hope for Robert, and that feeling of awfulness quickly, strangely dissipates. Ultimately, the film seems to be saying, there’s a lot to like about a place like Skarrild, a place where everyone knows your business and nothing is what it seems, yes, but also a place where, once you learn to fit in, you’ll never be safer or more at home.

Terribly Happy is now playing at the Kendall Landmark.

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