Metropolitan

In Metropolitan (1990), Tom Townsend, who's just finished his first semester at Princeton, unexpectedly enters into the inner-circle of a group of upper-class New York college students during debutante season. It's like a preppie Breakfast Club only everyone's too intellectual to wallow in self-pity. Most of the action takes place in one of the adolescent's homes, where the group stays up late into the night drinking, talking, and occasionally playing Bridge or some other game. They're socialites in training. It would be pretentious if it wasn't so funny and so earnest.

The writer-director Whit Stillman pulls off something impressive: he creates a believable, sympathetic, even inviting, world comprised of somewhat stuck-up, educated young people who are endearing in spite of themselves. They talk about philosophy and economics but they also gossip, and they're acutely aware of their social world. They're also naive, but in their precocious over-analyzing they manage to find at least some degree of acceptance that, though they think they know everything, they may also be wrong about some things.

The performances by the fresh-faced cast are mostly good. This is an extremely talky movie, one that almost plays like a filmed stage production. It's a movie about ideas and social relationships, and while Stillman isn't totally ignorant of or indifferent to the cinematic elements of his movie, he's far more attuned to the dialogic aspects. We're immersed in this inner-circle like a fly on the wall as the social dramas play out: the scathing remarks, the incisive criticisms, the hopeful longings for romance and success, the cynical worries of the future: it's all wrapped up in a peculiar fabric of conversation. You're never even sure how much these people like each other.

At times they seem to have cut each other to pieces, and then moments later it's as though nothing's happened, and they're chasing after some other thread of conversation. It's a fascinating movie; not perfect, but never boring, and totally unpredictable. I was charmed by it in a way I haven't been in a long time.

The cast includes: Edward Clements as Tom, the newcomer who has a lot of "big" ideas about economics, culture, and philosophy, but is also still a little gauche when it comes to girls; Carolyn Farina as Audrey, the bookish girl who's never really been in love before; Chris Eigeman (a stand-out performance), as Nick, the guy who pisses everyone off with his cynical honesty and harsh criticisms of one and all, but is also somehow likable in spite of himself; Taylor Nichols (who made me think of Crispin Glover) as Charlie, the nerdy ideologue who's in love with Audrey but can't get up the nerve to tell her, and resents Tom because Audrey has a crush on him; and Allison Parisi (who, with her raven-like hair and confident, imposing features resembles a young Kirstie Alley), the most "grown-up" acting of the girls; she exudes maternal qualities but is indifferent toward the other girls at the same time. Also starring: Isabel Gillies, Bryan Leder, Will Kempe, and Ellia Thompson. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. 98 min. ★★★½

The Deep Blue Sea

Originally, The Deep Blue Sea was a play by the English writer Terence Ratigan. It was first adapted to the screen in 1955, with Vivien Leigh in the lead role of Hester, the woman whose feelings about love and desire are too complex for her to put into words. Now Hester is played by Rachel Weisz, whose performance is heartfelt and passionate, even if the movie is a dismal affair. It's all very English, and very grimly heart-wrenching, yet there's a sort of subdued wistfulness about it that keeps it from being histrionic.

When Hester falls in love with a dashing war veteran (the movie is set in London in 1950), she leaves her well-to-do husband William (Simon Russell Beale), a successful judge who's still far too attached to his stultifyingly correct mother (Barbara Jefford). There's a deliciously acidic exchange between Hester and her mother-in-law early in the film, when they're having dinner together with William. The mother-in-law, intent on unmasking Hester's unfitness for her darling son, asks Hester if she plays sports. Hester replies that she's never been very passionate about sports, and then the mother, with sheer, venomous perfection, says, "Beware of passion. It always leads to something ugly...A guarded enthusiasm is much safer." What a wonderful line! And a wonderful exchange.

It would seem that Mum's words were indeed prophetic. Hester's relationship with her new lover, Freddie (he's played by Tom Hiddleston), dissolves almost as quickly as it begins. Strangely enough, her encounters with her husband, who was initially (and understandably) furious with her for having an affair, become more civilized. He seems genuinely concerned about her well-being. But it's never clear if this concern is merely a ruse to win her back. The scandal of an unfaithful wife is bad enough, let alone the shame of a divorce.

This is the kind of film that would have been a lot more earth-shattering in the 1950s. And indeed, the play was, upon its initial debut in 1952, considered an important commentary on the state of relationships between people, post-war. We like to imagine that things (society, people, relationships) had become far more complex. (Were they ever not?) And this piece of British domestic discord is a sort of civilized descent into a private British hell: the hell reserved for the overly passionate. (Perhaps this is the ultimate English fear. I think the mother must have seen it all coming well before even the girl did.)

The movie left me feeling numb. There's nothing new here, nothing being said that hasn't been said before. The question lingers: why did the director, Terence Davies (who adapted the play, presumably so that it would be less stagy), feel so compelled to make this movie now? Perhaps it's a reminder that sixty years of time and progress and technological achievement haven't ceased to clarify much of anything. And perhaps nothing new needs to be said, as the old problems continue to require reflection. The Deep Blue Sea reminds us of the limits of language, and the seemingly inexhaustible depths to which humans will go to hold onto something--or someone--they love, even in the midst of great pain and turmoil. 

Probably the most memorable sequence is Hester's flashback of London during the war. Her mind drifts back to that powerful, frightening memory: hiding inside the relative safety of the train station during the London air raids. A man's voice sings the Irish folk song "Molly Malone." It's a lovely, heartbreaking moment. As I reflect on this film, it strikes me that we don't have movies of this kind often enough. The Deep Blue Sea will likely be ignored by the big awards-purveyors because it's not commercial. It doesn't have the slickness we've come to expect in movies today. That's probably why I felt a little bored during it. But we need to applaud filmmakers and actors who take on projects like this: projects that seek to explore the things for which we fail to explain in words; the things which often defy logic. ★★★

Out of Sight

Out of Sight (1998) is a crime comedy that's intermittently clever and dumb. It's got George Clooney, though, as a bank robber who's tired of prison and ready to retire, if he can make a final score that's large enough to sustain him. Director Steven Soderbergh demonstrates his ability to make fun movies here: it's sort of a breezier, less show-offy version of a Tarantino movie, with an interest in developing a relatively straightforward --but layered-- story, rather than twisting it like a pretzel. I'm not so much criticizing Tarantino's movies as noting the difference between this film and say, Jackie Brown (both movies, incidentally, come from novels by Elmore Leonard). Out of Sight is content to be entertaining without being overly clever. Soderbergh is a more conventional director than Tarantino, you might say. He knows how to transcend conventional movies and turn them into something fun and unique, and that's largely what he does with Out of Sight. It has so many funny, quirky moments that are fresh and interesting, and yet it never feels like something so disdainfully self-aware as a Tarantino film.

There are moments when you wonder if the screenwriter, Scott Frank, wasn't paying attention to his material closely enough. He lets characters do things that seem illogical, even stupid, for the sake of advancing the plot in a certain direction. The movie is almost gleefully disinterested in being realistic. You admire its casualness. Clooney has that sort of casual charm to him, and he's perfect for this movie. Jennifer Lopez, as the marshal who falls in love with him, isn't a great actress, but she does have a sense of comic timing, and she's a great beauty too. Her character downplays her obsession with "bad guys," even though she must know she's lying to herself the way the movie is lying to itself, playfully. This heist-farce was made purely for entertainment. But it has enough smarts not to be totally mindless, too.

The supporting cast is a dream: Ving Rhames as Clooney's partner in crime, a tough, weathered criminal who nevertheless confesses his crimes--sometimes prior to committing them--to his ultra-religious sister, a bookkeeper for a televangelist; Don Cheadle as a fellow criminal, who agrees to join forces with Clooney and Rhames to break into the safe of a Detroit millionaire, played by Albert Brooks, who did time with them in Florida (presumably for embezzlement); Dennis Farina as Lopez's father, also in the business; Catherine Keener as one of Clooney's friends in the outside world: a former magician's assistant. She figures in a very amusing scene in which an escaped criminal, played by Luis Guzman, comes to her door to kill her, unaware that Lopez is already there questioning her about Clooney's whereabouts. Keener is another actress with a remarkable comic sensibility: she's subtle, too, never forcing herself on the camera or the audience. She lets her character's intelligence sink in gradually; Steve Zahn plays a moronic stoner who comes to Clooney's assistance (sort of), half-heartedly, and gives away more than he realizes whenever he encounters Lopez, who knows how to work him; Viola Davis as Cheadle's girlfriend; Michael Keaton as Lopez's married lover, an FBI agent who has a great scene with Farina in which he sneakily calls him out on his behavior; Nancy Allen, as Brooks' girlfriend; and, in a cameo appearance at the end, Samuel L. Jackson, as another convict.