Whether it's the next great American crime movie or simply this year's professional stunner will be determined over the next few months. For now, it's enough to say that the story of the rise and fall of an African American drug kingpin is relentlessly told by the English director Ridley Scott ("Gladiator," "Black Hawk Down"); it just keeps on coming.

Starring Denzel Washington as Frank Lucas, a beneath-the-radar Harlem heroin impresario who puts together an astonishing organization before anyone notices, and Russell Crowe as Richie Roberts, the Jersey detective who tracks him, the movie has the aspirations of a crime-and-punishment epic, a superb feel for time and milieu and an almost subliminal feel for myth.

"Is this the end of Rico?" "I ain't so tough." "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse." These iconic lines are from the tradition in which "American Gangster" hopes to find its way. "Either you're somebody or you ain't nobody" seems to be the line it dreams will live forever.

The movie begins by evoking the classic old gangster Bumpy Johnson (dead-eyed Clarence Williams III), the numbers king of Harlem who outlived Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano and by the mid-60s was the criminal Yoda of the rough terrain above 125th Street, a bitter old cynic who complained to his driver about the profligacy and the lack of dignity and self-discipline of today's generation of criminals. His driver, just up from North Carolina, was Frank Lucas, and he listened hard and well. When his turn came, he insisted that his organization's minions be low-key, steely-eyed, well-dressed, un-flamboyant. They may have carried .45s but they dressed Brooks Brothers. Frank himself could shoot a competitor in the head, then cross the street and eat breakfast, confident that his sedate coat and tie would shield him from the attention of police investigators who hassled guys with bling around their necks.

Frank had a gimmick. He had a cousin, a well-connected career NCO in Southeast Asia (the war haunts the movie, it should be noted), and via that connection was able to smuggle in pure Chinese-grown smack (Ric Young does a memorable job in brief scenes as an oleaginous Kuomintang generalissimo in the highlands of Thailand). His junk is better and cheaper than anything on the streets and soon enough, by the physics of the market, he controls the streets. The Mafia (repped by Armand Assante dressed in the fashion of Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) has to come to him ! And who opposes him? Hardly the New York Police Department, portrayed as so totally corrupt that the cops are only too eager to keep the drugs flowing as a way to subsidize summer homes in Florida, which dovetails neatly with other period films like "Serpico" and "Prince of the City."

Only one man rises to the challenge. That is Crowe's Richie, complete with Popeye Doyle's scrubby wardrobe and a Jersey accent that sounds like it came from Hoboken out of Perth Amboy. Richie is famously honest, and in Newark he marks himself off from all cops for all time by the simple act of turning in a million bucks he recovered from the back of a mob Cadillac. Big mistake, Richie: No cop in the Newark of the early '60s would work with a guy they knew was tainted by the disease of honesty. So when Richie calls for backup, guess who shows up: nobody. Like Serpico, he goes through the doors alone.

After years of isolation, Richie finally gets a chance to jump to the Feds -- in an early iteration of the Drug Enforcement Administration -- and heads a task force to take down the Harlem heroin lord. But first he has to get a serious enemy out of the way: the New York City Police Department.

Scott, working from a brilliant script by Steven Zaillian ("Schindler's List" among his many other A-list projects), plays the two stories off each other so adroitly that we don't notice that the two antagonists, though defined by the parallel cutting and equal screen time as well as the charisma of the stars, aren't even aware of each other until the movie's second half, and never eyeball each other until the last 20 minutes.

And yet that's not bad, that's good, that's even the heart of the movie's brilliance. Scott gets so much right that it's easy to ignore the singular brilliance of the movie, which is that it gets its star management right. By that I mean Scott and Zaillian are aware of (and dependent upon) the charisma of the stars as they build toward their fated collision. Yet they're also aware that, like so many a gangster movie before, we're secretly in awe of the nominal "bad guy" and that in any case, the rules of movie stardom far outweigh the rules of social morality, at least in the sepulcher of the theater. Thus, while we disapprove of Frank, we don't want to see him destroyed; we want to see him bond with Richie in a way that salvages his soul, destroys a true enemy and send us out on a high note. We want, within the world of chaos, greed and ambition that marks the gangster genre, a happy ending. This is what Scott and Zaillian and Washington and Crowe give us.

Washington is brilliant. He makes sense of a man who could move his mother into a mansion and love the joy on her face, and yet coldly place a Browning 9mm against a competitor's forehead and reply to the question "What are you going to do, Frank, shoot me in front of all these people?" by shooting him in front of all those people. Washington seems to have a secret mechanism by which he turns his face off; it goes from a vibrant, expressive projection of humanity and empathy to a stone-killer executioner's mask so fast it's scary. He makes you fear Frank.

Yet he also makes you love Frank. That's the key to the thing, the charisma of the man who triumphs over the system. And so identified with this theme is "American Gangster" that its other hero, Richie, is also defined as an outsider. The movie seems to be saying: When the inside is so corrupt, you must turn to outsiders.

Does it over-glamorize a man who, after all, sold people drugs for money and their souls, and lived high while they bottomed out in the gutter and were found in the thousands with needle tracks, scabs and hepatitis B in cold Harlem alleyways? In a word: yes.

But that is not its decision alone, it's also ours -- as a society, as a culture, as a civilization we're complicit in the promotion of deviance to heroism. That figure -- the dope dealer, the seller of the Sportin' Life with his powders and his escapes -- has moved from pariah to rock star over the years.

Wishing it weren't so isn't going to make it go away.
-------
The Current Cinema

The Current Cinema

Leaving It All Behind

THE DARJEELING LIMITED
The New Yorker; 10/16/07

Can you have a thriving movie culture in a country without enough trains? The decline of the American railroad neatly parallels that of the Hollywood studio system, and something about the train traveller and the moviegoer catches the eye: both are required to sit with their fellow-men, and to start their journey at a particular time, not of their own choosing. Both are left alone, yet their privacy—tinged with dreaminess—is of a very public kind. Set a movie on a train and you get the best of both worlds, for your audience will feel an instant kinship with the souls packed together onscreen. Preston Sturges knew this, as did the Billy Wilder of “Some Like It Hot”; these days, however, the thrill of the ride has shrivelled to a dull metropolitan commute.

So, if you are a movie director with a taste for the railroad but the misfortune to be living now, where do you turn? If you are Wes Anderson, you go to India. He could have picked Japan, I suppose, but his characters have to hop onto a rear carriage, like robbers in a Western, and you can’t really do that with a bullet train. In the opening scene of his new film, “The Darjeeling Limited,” we see an unnamed businessman in a porkpie hat (Bill Murray) rushing for an Indian train, and failing to catch it, while a younger man running beside him, Peter Whitman (Adrien Brody), just makes it. Time slows as he sprints, until we see the whites of his socks, and the soundtrack urges him on. If such daft awkwardness can be turned into a hiatus of grace, Anderson is asking, what other revelations might it portend?

There are more slow motions to come, gradually draining the haste and stress out of the characters, as if to prove that the quick are really the dead. Once on board, Peter finds his two brothers, Jack (Jason Schwartzman) and Francis (Owen Wilson), waiting for him; they have all joined up to refresh their brotherhood after the death of their father. This is easier said than done, for the trio is primed for discord. Peter is unhappily married, and he seems to have pilfered some of his father’s belongings; Jack is a morose Lothario, his pursuits affording only the barest pleasure; and Francis, his head still bandaged after a motorcycle crash, is the organizer of the trip, who insists on ordering food for his siblings as if they were his kids. The dialogue bristles with ill-concealed secrets: “Don’t tell him I told you.” “He doesn’t want you to know.”

Anderson’s fixation on families, like that of Henry James on the quandary of expatriates, will, I guess, never end. What makes the family inexhaustible, to the dramatic imagination, is that what may perplex and pain its members is likely to register as comic folly in the eye of the beholder. The Whitman boys are in a bad way, and there are times, as the camera swipes back and forth between them, rather than pausing to cut from one to the next, when they seem indissoluble in their unease. Yet the mood of the film is blithe, and its coloration peacock-bright. Occasionally, the brothers descend from the carriage, either to see the sights or because the ferocious steward (Waris Ahluwalia) has kicked them off for infantile behavior. During one such diversion, they rescue two country boys from drowning. Another boy dies, however (“I couldn’t save mine,” a stricken Peter says), and they are asked to stay and attend his funeral, yet even the mourning mood is startled and lifted by the aquamarine blue on the village walls.

Is this itself a diversion, as Anderson’s detractors would claim: a cheap doodle, masking the director’s inability to sustain a strong emotion? Or could it be that his greens and blues, like his other trademarks (the head-on shots of people bunched together, the bursts of song, the desires so acute that they beg to be deflected into gags), are the shadings of an ironist, who knows how easily movies can slide into the maudlin? “The Darjeeling Limited” works best when the level of artifice is at its highest and most overt—during a wondrous late tracking shot, for example, not through the brothers’ train but through an idealized, heavenly row of compartments, in which Bill Murray, who missed his chance in the beginning, is restored to a comfortable niche. The movie both mocks and fulfills the Whitmans’ plans for a spiritual quest. After all, they are little more than tourists, and many of their yearnings come to naught, yet Peter’s face, as he leaves the drowned boy’s village, bears a look of acceptance that was unimaginable at the start. The film deserves a subtitle: “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the East.”

=======
October 19, 2007; NY Times

[Ms. Kerr, together with co-star Burt Lancaster, participated in probably the most famous kiss in Hollywood history, in FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. Pic HERE]

Deborah Kerr Is Dead at 86

Deborah Kerr, a versatile actress who long projected the quintessential image of the proper, tea-sipping Englishwoman but who was also indelible in one of the most sexually provocative scenes of the 1950’s, with Burt Lancaster in “From Here to Eternity,” died on Tuesday in Suffolk, England. She was 86.

Her death was announced to The Associated Press by her agent, Anne Hutton. She had Parkinson’s disease.

Miss Kerr was nominated for six Academy awards, without winning any, over more than four decades as a major Hollywood movie star. She finally received an honorary Oscar for her lifetime of work in 1994. Mostly in retirement since the mid-1980’s, she lived for many years in Switzerland, with her husband, Peter Viertel, the novelist and screenwriter.

The lovemaking on the beach in Hawaii with Mr. Lancaster, viewed with both of them in wet swimsuits as the tide came in, was hardly what anyone expected of Deborah Kerr at that point in her career. Along with Greer Garson and Jean Simmons, she was one of three leading ladies Americans thought of as typically British, and decidedly refined and upper-class. More than once she was referred to by directors, producers and newspapers as the “British virgin.”

Time magazine, in a 1947 feature article, predicted she would be one of the great movie stars because “while she could act like Ingrid Bergman, she was really a kind of converted Greer Garson, womanly enough to show up nicely in those womanly roles.”

Throughout her career, Miss Kerr worked at being unpredictable. She was believable as a steadfast nun in Black Narcissus; as the love-hungry wife of an empty-headed army captain stationed at Pearl Harbor in “From Here to Eternity”; as a headmaster’s spouse who sleeps with an 18-year-old student to prove to him that he is a man in “Tea and Sympathy”; as a spunky schoolmarm not afraid to joust and dance with the King of Siam in “The King and I”; as a Salvation Army lass in “Major Barbara”; and even as Portia, the Roman matron married to Brutus, in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.”

She could be virginal, ethereal, gossamer and fragile, or earthy, spicy and suggestive, and sometimes she managed to display all her skills at the same time.

Miss Kerr made “From Here to Eternity” even though Harry Cohn, chief of Columbia Pictures in that era, had wanted Joan Crawford in the part and had to be persuaded to accept Miss Kerr. She regarded the role as the high point in her climb to stardom in the United States, and it yielded her second Academy Award nomination.

Another high point came in 1956, when she was given the film role that Gertrude Lawrence had played on the stage in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The King and I.” She played opposite Yul Brynner, who recreated his stage performance as the strutting king in the film.

Bosley Crowther, reviewing the movie version for The New York Times, praised “her beauty, her spirit and her English style.” Her singing for classics numbers like “Getting to Know You” was dubbed by the offscreen voice of many Hollywood stars of the time, Marni Nixon. But her acting needed no assistance; she was nominated for another Academy Award.

She also received Oscar nominations for “Edward, My Son” (released in 1949), “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957); “Separate Tables” (1958); and “The Sundowners” (1960). Other notable roles came in “Major Barbara” (1941, her first credited film role); “Julius Caesar” (1953); and “Tea and Sympathy” (1956), based on the Robert Anderson play.

Miss Kerr was applauded in the Broadway stage production of the play as well. After Brooks Atkinson of The Times saw the original production, he wrote that Miss Kerr had “the initial advantage of being extremely beautiful, but she adds to her beauty the luminous perception who is aware of everything that is happening all around her and expresses it in effortless style.”

Miss Kerr struggled against being pigeonholed by the public as somehow representing the British upper class, and was said to have instructed friends to tell anyone who asked that she preferred cold roast beef sandwiches and beer to champagne and caviar any day. But she is also quoted in a 1977 biography by Eric Braun as saying that “the camera always seems to find an innate gentility in me.”

Deborah Jane Kerr Trimmer was born in Helensburgh, Scotland, on Sept. 30, 1921, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Kerr Trimmer. Her father, who was called Jack, was an architect and civil engineer who had been wounded in World War I and who died when Deborah was in her early teens.

Her aunt, Phyllis Smale, had a school of drama and insisted that Deobrah and her younger brother take lessons in acting, ballet and singing. Deborah was attracted to the ballet but concluded that she was too tall, at 5 feet 6 inches. She began her acting career by playing small parts with a group that performed Shakespeare’s plays in the Open Air Theatre in Regents Park, London.

She got her first movie contract in 1939 after Gabriel Pascal, the producer and director, spotted her in a restaurant.

During the war, she read children’s stories on BBC radio. She made movies, too, among them “Penn of Pennsylvania,” “The Day Will Dawn,” and “The Avengers.”

By 1945, she was much sought after by British filmmakers and was cast opposite Robert Donat in “Perfect Strangers.” Her career was further enhanced when she appeared as a nun in “Black Narcissus” in 1947. However, after the movie was released in the United States, it was called “an affront to religion and religious life” by the National Legion of Decency.

Miss Kerr was married to Anthony Bartley, an Englishman who had been a decorated fighter pilot during World War II, for 13 years. They were separated in 1959 and their divorce became final the next year. They had two children, Melanie and Francesca. In 1969, she married Peter Viertel, who survives her, along with her daughters and three grandchildren, according to The Associated Press.

There was almost too much Billy Crystal to cover and not enough time to do it all last night at the Kennedy Center when Crystal was honored with the 10th Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

The short version of the man and the evening would run something like this: movie and TV star. Producer and director. Oscar and Grammy Awards host. Tony-winning one-man Broadway show guy. Stand-up comic. Creator of about a half-dozen memorable "Saturday Night Live" characters and a voice-over cartoon character or two. Philanthropist (co-host of nine "Comic Relief" benefits). Family man (married for 37 years! To the same woman!). "A mensch," summarized his old friend, Robin Williams.

But here's Little-Known Fact No. 1 about Crystal: He wrote one of the most memorable lines in movie history. Rob Reiner, another old friend (they met when Crystal was cast as Meathead's friend on "All in the Family") recalled last night that while directing Crystal and Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally," he fretted that Ryan's famous orgasm scene lacked a good closing line. Crystal provided it, and Reiner cast his own mother to speak it, forever certifying Estelle Reiner's place in the cinematic pantheon with "I'll have what she's having."

Little-Known Fact No. 2: Crystal may hold the record (assuming such records are kept) for getting his partner on "The $20,000 Pyramid" to the top of the pyramid faster than any other celebrity guest. Jimmy Fallon introduced a clip of Crystal's appearance on the show from the mid-1980s, as he provided the non-celebrity partner with such clues as "dead flowers" so that she might deduce "Things That Wilt." Clearly, the man has talent.

For most of the night, Crystal, 59, watched the proceeding from a balcony box, surrounded by his family. He accepted the award at the end of the evening, saying, "Whenever I think about Mark Twain, one thing comes to mind -- Cliffs Notes."

Crystal briefly recalled his early years, the inspiration of his extended family (who mostly spoke Yiddish, "a combination of German and phlegm") and his comic icon, Bill Cosby ("We were so alike. He played football at Temple; I belonged to a temple").

Crystal's sweetest words, however, were reserved for his wife, Janice Goldfinger, whom he met as a teenager. "Our marriage is like Mark Twain's big Mississippi," he said to his beaming wife. "You, with your steady flow of understanding and compassion, and me with my big mouth and sandy bottom."

There were, predictably, lots of jokes about Jews and lots more about baseball, Crystal's passion. Sportscaster Bob Costas managed to tie the two themes together, mentioning that he and Crystal grew up on Long Island around the same time, worshiping Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle. "For me, Mantle made me dream of being centerfielder for the Yankees," Costas said. "For him, Mantle made him dream of being a blond, blue-eyed gentile from Oklahoma."

This was followed by the appearance of a real Yankee (and possibly soon-to-be-former one), manager Joe Torre, who got the second-longest ovation of the night after Crystal. Torre said lifelong Yankees fan Crystal has been "like a 26th man on our ball club" and praised the Crystal-directed TV movie "61*" (about Mantle's and Roger Maris's pursuit of Babe Ruth's home run record) as one of the "true great baseball films."

Martin Short, echoing Crystal's musical performances as Oscar host, provided a succinct musical overview of Crystal's career with a medley that noted everything from Crystal's brilliant impressions of Sammy Davis Jr. and Muhammad Ali to his Tony Award-winning one-man show, "700 Sundays." Along the way, he remarked that Crystal played Jodie Dallas on "Soap," the first openly gay character on TV -- "unless you want to count Fred Mertz."

A warm and jovial spirit pervaded on the red carpet before the show. Fallon -- the youngest (by 20-plus years) and tallest (by several inches) of a crowd that included the diminutive Costas, Danny DeVito and Crystal -- said he called up Crystal for advice when he was hired to appear on "Saturday Night Live" in 1998. "He was the first person I wanted to meet when I got on the show," Fallon said. "I picked his brain. It was all solid advice: 'Keep working, keep writing.' "

Short, a frequent presenter at Twain award ceremonies, was asked if he might someday be in line for a Twain Prize himself. "I'm too Canadian," he demurred. "But I could win a Gordon Lightfoot Award."

Williams, looking very Bono-ish in thick-framed glasses, said he and Crystal were friends before they began their long run co-hosting (with Whoopi Goldberg, another presenter last night) the "Comic Relief" benefits in 1986. Crystal, he says, taught him about baseball, a game about which he knew nothing.

Nothing? How is it possible for a boy growing up in America not to know something about baseball?

'Clayton' creator breaks away from 'Bourne'

Tony Gilroy had the idea for "Michael Clayton" eight years ago, but right at the time he was starting to pitch it another project intervened. " 'I know I just set this thing up,' " he recalls telling a production executive, " 'but they're offering me six to eight weeks to do a teardown of this [Robert] Ludlum story, this Bourne thing, to tear the story apart and rethink it.'

That was just for the first Bourne film, "The Bourne Identity." Gilroy also wrote or co-wrote the other two, "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum." He describes the overall process as "an odyssey."

But "Michael Clayton," the story of a New York law firm fixer who rediscovers his soul, was never far from his mind. Gilroy had in mind a "parallel-universe thriller," with scenes of ethical uncertainty that are usually left out of conventional thrillers. The resulting script became a calling card.

There was a catch, however. Gilroy wanted to direct it himself, and he'd never directed a movie before. Moreover, "Michael Clayton" wasn't sure box-office gold. It's a film of rich, expressive dialogue and well-drawn characters, but in today's marketplace, that means "indie" -- unless you can get a major movie star to join the cast.

Gilroy had a few connections -- he'd been working with directors Sydney Pollack and Steven Soderbergh, who were supportive -- but even Soderbergh's producing partner, George Clooney, didn't want to sign on.

"George said, 'I love the script, and I'd really like to direct it maybe, but I don't want to work with a first-time director and I don't want to meet him.' So it was another two years before I got with him, and it was another two years of wandering in the wilderness," Gilroy recalls.

So Gilroy faced a dilemma. He couldn't get studio backing without a big-time star, and he couldn't get a big-time star if he wanted to hold on to the project himself.

Eventually, however, Clooney decided to take a chance. Like Gilroy (and Soderbergh), the actor has a passion for '70s filmmaking and saw some of that edginess in "Clayton." Which -- unlike some of the '70s films the group admires -- gives the story a happy ending.

"Michael Clayton," which came out in limited release October 5 and goes wide Friday, has earned mostly strong reviews, including kudos for Gilroy's directing. "Gilroy's touch is so subtle and glancing you might not even guess you're watching a thriller -- which is why, when the story begins to thrill, it earns every pulse pound," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman.

Gilroy would seem to be a natural at this writing business. His father is Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Frank D. Gilroy, a veteran of television's live-drama golden age and author of "The Subject Was Roses." Rod Serling was a family friend; Paddy Chayefsky visited the Gilroys' upstate New York town for weekend bowling excursions.

Tony Gilroy compares his father's influence to "living over the store," he says. "That seemed normal to me, to make money with your imagination."

But that's not what he wanted to do, he adds. First there was music, until he got burned out on the business. Then there was short fiction ("I was obsessed with Raymond Carver") and an attempt at a novel, followed by a shot at learning the screenwriting process.

All the time Gilroy was working "weird jobs," and he's thankful for the experience: "It turned out that all the things I had done ... they all seemed to be informative to this compost-y kind of [first screenwriting] job."

Gilroy had an early success with "The Cutting Edge," which gave him the opportunity to do "Dolores Claiborne," based on the Stephen King novel. He followed that with the Al Pacino film "The Devil's Advocate," with its aria-like Pacino speeches.

He participated in the free-for-all of the "Armageddon" script, which he remembers with impish fondness: "I remember being at the first story meeting, and they were bringing out the toys and we were going, 'Wow, we don't even have a script,' " he says. He helped organize the story and "got the hell out of there," he adds. (He does have kind words for oft-criticized "Armageddon" producer Jerry Bruckheimer, for whom he worked afterward: "[His production house is] very un-neurotic. To go to work there -- it's a very, very clean way to work.")

For "Clayton," part of Gilroy's problem -- outside of finding a backer -- was deciding what direction to take the idea. The research was easy, a matter of calling friends and chatting with attorneys. Indeed, one inspiration for "Clayton's" plot was a story he heard about a stray document that could have turned a major case upside-down.

"It wasn't like wandering around in Tangier on the rooftops or visiting emergency rooms in Moscow," he says, referring to the "Bourne" process.

With Pollack's backing and Clooney signing on, the rest of the cast was set: Tilda Swinton as an anxious corporate counsel, Ken Howard as a corporate chieftain, and Tom Wilkinson -- who gets some Chayefsky-esque monologues to perform -- as a high-wire litigator who suffers a breakdown.

It's the movie Gilroy wanted to make, and he doesn't plan to wait so long to do it again.

"I've been in my room for 20 years, so I'm very happy to get out," he says.
-------

They Call Him the Fixer in a World That’s a Mess

Dark in color, mood and outraged worldview, “Michael Clayton” is a film that speaks to the way we live now. Or at least, the way certain masters of the universe do, as they prowl the jungle in their sleek rides, armed with killer instincts and the will to power. It’s a story about ethics and their absence, a slow-to-boil requiem for American decency in which George Clooney, the ultimate in luxury brands and playboy of the Western world, raises the sword in the name of truth and justice and good. Well, someone’s got to do it.

And Mr. Clooney, who smartly moved away from star-making nonsense like “The Peacemaker” as soon as he could, has in recent years proved that it’s possible to play outwardly different, seemingly contradictory roles (glamorous, righteous) while hopscotching from Hollywood to Darfur and back. You have to be clever to pull this off, and you have to have clever friends like Steven Soderbergh, with whom Mr. Clooney created the production company Section Eight. Now defunct, Section Eight dropped bombs, uncorked bubbles, supported independent voices and mucked about in television (“K Street”). With “Syriana,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Good German” and now “Michael Clayton,” it also helped Mr. Clooney create a singularly contemporary screen identity as a man of unquiet conscience.

In “Michael Clayton,” written and directed by Tony Gilroy, that conscience seems to have gone M.I.A., lost amid the dirty wheeling and dealing of a powerful New York law firm. Michael (Mr. Clooney) is the firm’s designated fixer, though he likes to call himself its janitor. He works in that rarefied gray zone where the barely legal meets the almost criminal and takes lunch at the private club. Michael isn’t a member of that club; he just mops up its mess, soothes its Botoxed brow and slips a fat envelope of thank you to inconvenient witnesses. There’s a dirty kind of glamour to this world, with its rich trappings and its Ivy League smilers with their gutting knives. Its ugliness seduces as much as it repels and entertains.

Mr. Gilroy’s previous writing credits include the “Bourne” franchise and the goofily entertaining legal thriller “The Devil’s Advocate.” (Keanu Reeves is the advocate; Al Pacino, the other guy.) “Michael Clayton” marks his debut as a director, a gig that seems to have inspired him to watch (rewatch) old Sidney Lumet films. Though Michael is more upscale, smoother around the edges (he probably doesn’t own white tube socks), he’s a variation on those soulfully alone Lumet cops and lawyers who fight the system and struggle to do the right thing, though not necessarily because they want to. The world Michael wanders is so darkly sinister, as perilous as that in Mr. Lumet’s “Q & A,” that his black coat and suit melt into shadows as depthless as an abyss.

It is an abyss, Mr. Gilroy suggests, largely of our own making. There are a few obvious, almost too obvious villains in “Michael Clayton,” notably the chief counsel for an agrichemical giant, Karen Crowder, played with twitches and rolls of gut fat by a mesmerizing Tilda Swinton. A Lady Macbeth in pumps and discreet pearls, Karen has pledged her troth to her corporate masters instead of a murderous husband. She’s a cliché — brittle, sexless, friendless, cheerless and all the rest — but what makes her work is her unnerving banality, visible in the blank canvas of a face that looks untouched by gentleness or empathy. This is a pitiful creature, as unloved by her writer-director creator as by the genius actress who plays her.

Karen embodies evil, but Michael serves it. His law firm is helping the agrichemical company settle a multibillion-dollar suit. It seems the company with the smoothly reassuring television commercials (cue the green fields and smiling children) doesn’t bring good things to life but death by the hundreds. While working to settle the case, Michael’s friend, Arthur (Tom Wilkinson), the firm’s star litigator, has an epic meltdown. There’s blood on Arthur’s manicured hands, though not only his, as Michael discovers through a series of fairly predictable twists and turns. Mr. Gilroy hasn’t reinvented the legal thriller here, but I doubt that was his intention; at its best and most ambitious, the film plays less like a variation on a Hollywood standard than a reappraisal.

It’s a modest reappraisal, adult, sincere, intelligent, absorbing; it entertains without shame. Mr. Gilroy directs with a steady hand and a steady eye, too, with none of the visual frenzy that characterizes the “Bourne” thrillers. His movie moves rather than races. There’s a little narrative tricky business (a sizable portion of the story occurs in extended flashback) and an unexpectedly tender moment when Michael stares into a new morning in a country field without uttering a single word. Mr. Gilroy’s characters talk a lot (they’re lawyers, after all), but he knows when to shut them up, an exception being a disappointingly tidy climactic encounter that seems designed to give Mr. Clooney the last, rousing word, or maybe just a shot at an Oscar.

That’s too bad because the film feels truest when Michael is grappling with his contradictions. His struggle, as well as the film’s moody thoughtfulness, the Lumet touches and the agreeable presence of Sydney Pollack in a small role, overtly invokes 1970s American cinema. But Mr. Lumet and Mr. Pollack didn’t give Hollywood its social conscience, which comes and goes and depends on the audience to sustain it. In some ways, Michael is a grimmer, compromised version of Erin Brockovich, the freewheeling legal clerk in the short skirts who leads the charge against social injustice in Mr. Soderbergh’s populist 2000 drama. (Michael has to be dragged.) The main difference is that the earlier film’s optimism feels like a faded signal from a faraway land.

Recently, Mr. Clooney has served as a guide into a different country, one in which the media fail, capitalism kills and heroes stumble. His glamour and easy manner make these excursions feel less a matter of duty than of necessity; they provide the pleasure that softens the pain. He does some strong work here, especially when he’s nursing his character’s misery or gently squaring off against the young actor (Austin Williams), who plays his son. But he’s almost always good, and he’s a big enough star now that each new role feels as if he’s playing a version of himself. That’s O.K. We need George Clooney, just as we needed Warren Beatty — seducer of heavy hearts and troubled minds, the beautiful bearer of our very bad tidings.

“Michael Clayton” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Adult language, some violence.

September 20, 2007; NY Times

‘Thelma and Louise’ in the Rear-View Mirror
Judith Warner

I watched “Thelma and Louise” again this week.

Boy, how times have changed.

Remember, in 1991, how topical the movie seemed? How revolutionary, how thrilling, how cathartic?

It didn’t seem any of those things to me the other night, when I attended a screening of the film guest-hosted by Senator Susan Collins and Representative Jane Harman.

It simply seemed depressing, oppressive and hopeless. It seemed like a relic from the past, a buried memory. It was dark. It was disturbing. It was — it dawned on me, driving home and still sniveling over the sight of that blue Thunderbird plummeting into the void — a movie that could not be made today.

Thank goodness.

The “Thelma and Louise” screening was one of a series of events organized by The Week magazine, which periodically invites politicians to choose and introduce their favorite Washington-themed movies. Previous choices, by male lawmakers, have included “The Candidate,” “Dr. Strangelove” and “Dave.” But Collins and Harman, the cheery Maine Republican and tough-as-nails California Democrat, who have worked together on intelligence and homeland security legislation, broke the mold with their choice of the dystopic female buddy movie.

They wanted, they said, to showcase their against-the-odds, across-the-aisle friendship. Yet they weren’t, they warned those in attendance, planning on driving off any cliffs. They made clear that the Susan and Jane show isn’t a continuation of Thelma and Louise’s struggles. Rather, Collins said, it’s the “sequel.”

I found that a nice thought. But after watching the movie I realized that it isn’t really true.

It would be true if “Thelma and Louise” were really, as it has always been considered (except by its makers), a timeless meditation upon sexual politics and women’s general position in American society.

But it isn’t; “Thelma and Louise” is primarily a movie about sexual violence. It’s about all the myriad forms that sexual violence can take – from the psychic violence done to Thelma, who at 18 married her boyfriend of four long years, to the shattering physical violence of Louise’s long-buried rape, to the verbal and gestural violence done to both women by the endless stream of drive-by harassers who pollute their road trip. It’s about the long-term effects of such psychic and physical violence: the childlike Thelma, blindly drawn to men who victimize her again and again, the raging Louise, shut down on the surface but harboring a burning, ultimately self-immolating, rage.

It seems clear to me now that Thelma and Louise’s final act of hara-kiri was not meant to be symbolic of the alleged dead end reached by feminism in the early 1990s. Instead, their act of mutually assured self-destruction was just the end of the line for two abuse victims unwilling to be victimized further by an abusive system.

Yet in 1991 it was altogether understandable that a movie about sexual violence would be turned into a fable about women’s general social and political progress. It made perfect sense then to conflate sexual violence – in all its verbal, psychic, physical and political forms — with sexual politics. That year, the William Kennedy Smith rape case went to trial, belittling and publicly humiliating the victim; Anita Hill confronted Clarence Thomas and emerged besmirched while he reigned victorious; and Roe v. Wade seemed destined for extinction.

All the talk, nationally, was of sexual harassment, date rape and crimes against women generally. Violence against women spiked. “Fear,” wrote Ellen Goodman, had become most women’s “most deeply felt constriction on daily life,” and that fear, in the heart of a generation raised upon hope and a sense of entitlement, brought fury and outraged disbelief. “Now, women who have won equal access to the colleges of their choice are more resentful at the idea that they have to be wary at the fraternity door. Women who live comfortably in coed dorms are more outraged at those men who can’t be trusted. Women who work on the same terms with men are less accepting of inequity on the streets,” she wrote in The Boston Globe in the summer of 1991. “Will this go down in the records as the year that the greenhouse effect of violence is finally recognized?”

The memory of that fear and anger and outrage – the sense of its momentous, transformative power – might have lasted longer had the “Thelma and Louise” moment not been followed, soon after, by a repudiation of “victim feminism” that was widespread and totalizing and highly welcome in the larger culture. It’s easy to forget now how vital and urgent the new focus on date rape and sexual harassment seemed, for a brief moment, back then. And yet it was, truly, transformative; the world of “Thelma and Louise,” I think it’s fair now to say, is not the one that we inhabit psychologically or physically today.

Date rape is no longer a contentious concept; it’s a known reality. Rape victims are no longer so thoughtlessly named and shamed by the media as was William Kennedy Smith’s accuser. Rape itself is down – its incidence having dropped 75 percent since the early 1990s, according to the Department of Justice.

These are profound and meaningful changes, and we should celebrate them — and revel in “Thelma and Louise”’s passage into history.

=======
[Have you ever seen Trufaut in a film? No? Yes you have, in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND!]

September 23, 2007; NY Times

A Troublemaker Who Led a Revolution
By TERRENCE RAFFERTY

FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT’S “400 Blows” is now an official classic of French cinema, but when it had its premiere, at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, it didn’t much look like one. And that was the point. Mr. Truffaut, then just 27, had spent his youth as an extremely combative critic for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, in whose pages he regularly savaged the older, established French filmmakers who represented what was called the “tradition of quality.” (When he used the term, it didn’t sound like a compliment.)

So when, thanks to a prosperous father-in-law, he got the chance to direct a feature film, he undoubtedly felt some pressure to put his money where his big critical mouth had been: to show that a thoroughly French movie could be made without beautiful sets and costumes, exquisitely refined Comédie Française-style acting or a high-literary tone. “The 400 Blows” proved it, and in the best possible way. The film was so fluid, so graceful, so apparently natural, that it seemed not to have any agenda at all. It didn’t feel willful; it felt (as revolutions too rarely do) inevitable.

The movie has its historical significance as the first great popular success of the freer-form style of filmmaking that came to be identified with the French New Wave, but if you go to Film Forum in Manhattan, where, starting Wednesday, a nice fresh print of “The 400 Blows” will be showing, you probably won’t get the unpleasant sensation of having wandered into an old argument between spluttering, red-faced cinéastes.

Although a certain polemical ardor may have helped stoke Mr. Truffaut’s creative fires while he was making his debut film (he was very French), the smoke from those life-and-death aesthetic debates has long since cleared. What remains is a lyrical and surprisingly tough-minded little picture about a 12-year-old troublemaker named Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), as seen by a sympathetic and slightly more seasoned troublemaker named François Truffaut.

The originality of “The 400 Blows” lies in its willingness to trot along to the quotidian rhythms of a boy’s life. Antoine’s childhood (which bears some similarity to Mr. Truffaut’s own) is crummy, but in unexceptional ways. The Montmartre apartment where he lives with his self-absorbed mother and his buffoonish stepfather is, in the time-honored tradition of Paris living spaces, painfully cramped.

He’s bored with school, and his teachers are on to him. Whenever he lies — which he does no more or less often than any other boy trying to squeeze a bit more fun out of life than his elders think is good for him — he’s caught. Until near the end, when events take a more serious turn, Antoine, alone or in the company of his impish friend René, mostly just bounces from one dopey, tolerably amusing activity to another — ditching school to go to the movies, lying around smoking pilfered cigars — and, when he has to, deals with the minor crises that crop up too frequently in the classroom and at home.

He moves through the Paris streets (photographed with exhilarating clarity by Henri Decaë) confidently but a little anxiously, a trace of unease betrayed by an odd scurrying half-run he breaks into from time to time, as if he he’d suddenly remembered that someone was chasing him. It’s the gait he uses in the movie’s famous final sequence, when he escapes from the reform school he has wound up in and, his pursuers well behind him, makes his way across a bleak beach for his first-ever glimpse of the sea.

The camera travels with him, recording every jerky small step until he reaches the edge of the water, looks at the big-deal sea for all of about five seconds and then turns back, expressionless, to face us in what quickly becomes a freeze-frame: the last, powerfully ambiguous image of the film.

This sort of ending wasn’t common in 1959, and viewers were impressed. Mr. Truffaut, overcoming the considerable ill will he had earned as a Cahiers critic, won the prize for best director at Cannes; the movie was a hit in France and all over the world.

That freeze-frame stuck in people’s minds as if it were a sharp, nagging memory of their own. What looks most remarkable now, though, isn’t the blank still face that closes the film, but the daringly long run that brings us to it, that allows our emotions to gather and build with each short, stiff step until, without quite understanding why, we end up overwhelmed. It’s the movie in miniature, really.

Right from the start of his career Truffaut had the sly gift of holding our attention while appearing to be doing almost nothing, just moving at his own casual pace away from the traditions that dogged him and toward something that might have looked to him as huge and vague and daunting as the ocean.

In “The 400 Blows” he hit the ground running, along with his young alter ego Antoine, and they ran side by side a few more times in the next 20 years: in the charming short film “Antoine and Colette” (1962), which Film Forum has extracted from its original context in an anthology movie called “Love at 20” and has paired with “The 400 Blows”; and in the features “Stolen Kisses” (1968), “Bed & Board” (1970) and “Love on the Run” (1979).

All of them are, to one degree or another, romantic comedies with light overtones of melancholy. And while not one of them achieves anything like the emotional complexity of “The 400 Blows,” and some viewers may feel that Truffaut should have left the frame frozen, allowing little Antoine’s fate to remain tantalizingly in doubt, it’s good to have the later, lesser Doinel movies too. They tell us, in their way, that Antoine was right not to make such heavy weather of life’s irritations, and that his wary personality — the defense mechanism that in “The 400 Blows” is represented by a shot of him pulling his sweater up over his mouth and retreating like a turtle into its shell — has served him, somehow, has helped keep him on the move, where he needs to be.

And François Truffaut kept running, too, until 1984, when everything stopped for him, left him freeze-framed at 52. It’s what led up to there that counts, though, and it’s hard not to wish that the story, good, bad, or indifferent, had found a way to go on.

=======
September 23, 2007; NY Times

Marcel Marceau, Mime, Is Dead at 84

PARIS - Marcel Marceau, the world's best-known mime artist who for decades moved audiences across the globe without uttering a single word, has died aged 84.

The Frenchman's extensive tours and appearances on camera brought his silent art to people around the world. His comic and tragic sketches appealed on a universal level, with each audience interpreting his performance in its own way.

"Mime, like music, knows neither borders nor nationalities," he once said. "If laughter and tears are the characteristics of humanity, all cultures are steeped in our discipline."

On stage, he charmed with his deft silent movements, a white-faced figure with a striped jersey and battered top hat.

Off stage, with the costume and the pancake makeup removed, Marceau was a slim, agile man whose eloquent description and explanation complemented his mute mastery of mime.

In mime, Marceau said, gestures express the essence of the soul's most secret aspiration. "To mime the wind, one becomes a tempest. To mime a fish, you throw yourself into the sea."

He created the figure of Bip, the melancholy, engaging clown with a limp red flower in his hat, 60 years ago this year.

"The mime Marceau will forever be the character of Bip," Prime Minister Francois Fillon said in a statement confirming the performer's death.

"He became one of the best-known French artists in the world. His students and the showbusiness world will miss him."

Marceau traced his ancestry back through U.S. silent film greats Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to the clowns of the Commedia dell'Arte, a centuries-old European tradition, and to the stylised gestures of Chinese opera and Japan's Noh plays.

Marceau was born in the Alsatian town of Strasbourg on March 22, 1923. He was brought up in Lille, where his father was a butcher. When World War Two came, his father was taken hostage and later killed by the invading Nazis and in 1944 Marcel joined his elder brother in the Resistance.

He later joined the French Army and served with occupation forces in Germany at the end of the war.

He began to study acting in 1946 under Charles Dullin and the great mime teacher Etienne Decroux, who also taught Jean-Louis Barrault.

It was in Marcel Carne's famous 1947 film starring Barrault, "Les Enfants du Paradis," that Marceau, who played Arlequin, first became known as a mime artist.

He formed his own mime company in 1948, and the troupe was soon touring other European countries, presenting mime dramas. The company failed financially in 1959, but was revived as a school, the Ecole Internationale de Mimodrame, in 1984.

A veteran of dozens of films, one of his best remembered roles was a speaking cameo in "Silent Movie," made by American director Mel Brooks.

One of his most famous sketches was "The Cage," in which he struggled to escape through an invisible ring of barriers, only to find that one cage succeeds another and there is no escape.

In Czechoslovakia before the Soviet-led invasion of 1968, he recalled that audiences understood it as an allegory about capitalism. After the invasion, they saw in it an image of themselves under Russian domination.

"I am a progressive, a man who deals for peace, and who has struggled for enlightenment in the world. I am not just an entertainer," he said.

"I want to be a man who will represent as an active witness my time, and who wants to say, without words, my feelings about the world."