Avalon (1990, Barry Levinson)

Avalon is not a success.

It very frustratingly waits until the very end of the picture to clearly not succeed. After trying real hard, there’s just nothing to it. Writer and director Levinson makes a whole bunch of big swings in how he directs the narrative, which is an attempt at doing lyrical structure–just one based on sort of protagonist Elijah Wood’s experience over three momentous years in his childhood—while still keeping some big epical trappings. There’s a rising action but only to get certain kinds of drama. Levinson also drops Wood as the even pseudo-protagonist like a hot potato in the third act, as his relationship with grandpa Armin Mueller-Stahl makes way for Aidan Quinn (as Wood’s dad and Mueller-Stahl’s son), but only barely. The film’s strength was Levinson’s way of orbiting these characters and finding imaginative ways into the scenes, particularly with Joan Plowright (who gives the film’s best performance as the matriarch of the family), and then he completely fumbles it for the hurried conclusion.

Avalon is really good throughout. The remembrance stuff Levinson gets away with is great. He’s got this ode to television tracking shot; he stops the story to do it, showing the way life was for these people before they’d be glued to the tube, and it’s beautifully melancholic. Levinson is sentimental about everything, he picks no favorites—but he does choose very carefully what he’ll showcase. The coming of television sequence has no bearing on the story—Quinn and cousin Kevin Pollak start their eventual discount department store with a TV-only storefront, but it’s a detail along the way in the story, not an ongoing theme, even though it’s a recurring detail. Very weird.

Instead the tracking sequence is just what Levinson did with this particular footage, what he very intentionally did with it, begging for attention. The sequence would seem a lot less intentional if the first act weren’t full of visualized flashbacks. The film opens with Mueller-Stahl telling the story of how he came to the United States, Fourth of July, 1914, Baltimore. Levinson, cinematographer Allen Daviau, editor Stu Linder, and composer Randy Newman create this distinct style for the flashbacks. You can feel the silent movie influence more than you can see it, though Daviau never loves color anywhere else near as much in those sequences. The vividness of memory.

The flashbacks are an indulgence, then a shortcut as Quinn has one to set up a couple other scenes later on, but then they’re nothing in the finale. Levinson gives up on them, but still tries to leverage them. It’s such a rushed finish. Levinson runs screaming from the narrative promises, all of a sudden desperate to make them vignettes. Avalon is a vignettes movie in its third act, but not in the first and second acts. The flashback sequences don’t work with the vignettes. Conceptually. Basically it’s just got a bad third act and it’s bad enough it’s kind of disrespectful to the cast. Levinson shafts every actor in the movie, leaving it all for a tepid stunt cast.

In just a few minutes, Levinson pulls the rug out from under Mueller-Stahl and Plowright, demoting them in what’s been equal share their film. In their place… he puts in filler, taking advantage of the lovely wistful techniques they discover earlier, using them to skip along. Levinson doesn’t want there to be any voice in Avalon except Mueller-Stahl’s, but he goes so extreme he doesn’t just end up silencing Mueller-Stahl, he straggles the narrative distance. Avalon has a point of view from jump, an unspeaking narrator guiding us through the experience; Levinson can’t make it work in the finish and doesn’t even try. It’s an incomplete.

Albeit one with some beautiful filmmaking and great performances. Even Quinn—whose Baltimore accent comes and goes. But it’s Plowright and Mueller-Stahl’s show. Elizabeth Perkins and Eve Gordon are good as Quinn and Pollak’s wives, respectively, but they don’t get anything to do themselves. Wood’s good. He gets a good arc and then gets chucked just like everyone else.

Wood’s absence is actually the most notable, because as Avalon has just become his story, Levinson immediately wrestles it back from him.

Gorgeous editing from Linder, just wonderful cuts. He and Levinson do nostalgia well.

Avalon’s almost kind of great. Excellent pieces. Real bad ending.

This post is part of the American Experience on Film Blogathon hosted by Debbie of Moon in Gemini.

The Thirteenth Floor (1999, Josef Rusnak)

It’d be hard to call The Thirteenth Floor a missed opportunity because that statement suggests there was some promise to it. There’s no promise anywhere near Thirteenth Floor. But it does have some gorgeous set decoration and, presumably, production design from Kirk M. Petruccelli. The presumably qualifier because even though Petruccelli does excellent work on the 1930s and 1990s (the present day has some of the same art deco themes), there’s terrible second unit stuff of modern day L.A. and it just breaks the tone. If that decision was Petruccelli’s and not director Rusnak’s, it’s on him. It’s terrible and breaks the visual tone of the film every time there’s an establishing shot of the city. There’s nothing to enjoy in the film, save the occasionally interesting bit of design. Even if Rusnak and cinematographer Wedigo von Schultzendorff usually screw it up.

The film’s got a lousy script–real, real lousy–by director Rusnak and Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez. Rusnak can’t direct the actors either. They’re all bad, though Vincent D’Onofrio does betray having some ability at one point or another. No one else does. Not even poor Dennis Haysbert, who I was hoping would be a surprisingly great performance. He’s not; he’s really bad, just like most everyone else. Craig Bierko’s the lead. He’s awful. Gretchen Mol’s his love interest. She’s just bad, not awful. Armin Mueller-Stahl is a little better than Mol, only because the plotting. It’s bad plotting, but it still sames Mueller-Stahl some face. No one else gets anywhere near as lucky.

It’s a dumb movie with dumb ideas in a bad script. It’s a poorly acted, poorly directed dumb movie. Any competency is rare–basically just the score’s not bad. If it were a different movie, Harald Kloser would be doing a perfectly acceptable score. It just can’t do what Floor needs its score to do, which is cover plot holes or performance holes. Worse, Kloser seems to get it–only he can improve the film’s quality; it’s impossible. Rusnak is just too bad at his job of directing this film. The Thirteenth Floor is terrible.

ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Josef Rusnak; screenplay by Rusnak and Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez, based on a novel by Daniel F. Galouye; director of photography, Wedigo von Schultzendorff; edited by Henry Richardson; music by Harald Kloser; production designer, Kirk M. Petruccelli; produced by Roland Emmerich, Ute Emmerich and Marco Weber; released by Columbia Pictures.

Starring Craig Bierko (Douglas Hall), Armin Mueller-Stahl (Hannon Fuller), Gretchen Mol (Jane Fuller), Vincent D’Onofrio (Jason Whitney), Dennis Haysbert (Detective Larry McBain), Steven Schub (Detective Zev Bernstein) and Jeremy Roberts (Tom Jones).


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OTHER 1999 RELEASES

Mission to Mars (2000, Brian De Palma)

If it had been made earlier–even with the same flawed script–Mission to Mars would probably have been more successful. Many of its failings relate to the CG special effects. Stephen H. Burum is incompetent at lighting them, but they also bring an artificiality to the film’s tensest sequences. So, while Ennio Morricone might have a fantastic piece of music for a suspense sequence and De Palma might be directing it fine, it doesn’t work out right because of the CG and Burum’s ineptness.

Mars has a lot more problems–Connie Nielsen being one of the bigger ones, the plot, De Palma’s inability to create a transcendent scene (it’s more literal than a grade school documentary about helium balloons), some other terrible supporting performances–but there are a lot of strengths. At the center of the picture are Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins and Don Cheadle as three NASA buddies. All of them are fantastic. Even with Sinise inexplicably wearing eyeliner. His hairpiece, while awful looking, is more understandable.

And the film does have a certain amount of earnestness and general wonderment. It takes De Palma about a half hour before he lets the film have that wonderment, which is a poor choice since he’s already taken it to Mars once without any grandeur. It’s a gee whiz adventure picture from someone who doesn’t know how to feel gee whiz.

Jerry O’Connell is good; otherwise, the supporting cast is lousy.

Mars fails, but does so very unfortunately and very interestingly.

Kafka (1991, Steven Soderbergh)

I wonder how the producers sold Jeremy Irons on the film. It was his first major role after his Oscar and it immediately followed, so he probably hadn’t won when he started filming Kafka… however, imagine if they’d advertised the film as “Academy Award Winner Jeremy Irons running through the empty streets of Prague.”

Kafka’s Soderbergh’s first film after Sex, Lies, and Videotape and it’s an exceptional disappointment. All Soderbergh has to do in Kafka is set-up German impressionist shots to match the script’s built-in references–there’s a doctor named Murnau, a town called Orloc (from Murnau’s Nosferatu) and I think I saw a Metropolis poster. Soderbergh is a filmmaker concerned with the human condition and it’s entirely absent from Kafka. Kafka is a gimmick within a gimmick… There’s a certain cuteness–wink-wink–of Kafka in a Kafkaesque adventure, but the adventure is so incredibly lame–and derivative–watching the film is a chore. I suppose it did lead to Dark City–writer Lem Dobbs took whole ideas from Kafka and put them in that one–but it’s a lot like The Element of Crime.

Kafka did remind me–in its aloof and blatant humanity–a lot of Soderbergh’s Traffic. There’s a visible disconnect in some of Soderbergh’s films, when it’s obvious the material isn’t engaging him, so he just busies himself with the camera. Kafka has a lot of such busying. It does have some nice performances–Jeroen Krabbé is excellent, Joel Grey is mildly amusing, it’s one of Armin Mueller-Stahl’s good performances. Jeremy Irons is fine too (he doesn’t have to do an accent). Still, I knew there was major trouble from the beginning… Theresa Russell is the female lead and she’s terrible from her first scene.

I wonder if Kafka would have gotten a better critical response if it had come out before Barton Fink instead of after it. Lem Dobbs’s script–with its goofy characters and particular humor–is an obvious Coen mimic. It’s just a useless film… and, while I realize it’s not supposed to be a historically accurate portrayal of Kafka’s life, apparently, in the film’s world, the First World War never happened. That historical omission is much more interesting than anything else going on and it really shouldn’t be.

The Game (1997, David Fincher)

I don’t know what possessed me to watch The Game again, probably my access to the DVD, but even so, I don’t know what possessed me to finish watching it. It’s fairly atrocious early on, once it becomes obvious that no reasonable human being could identify with Michael Douglas’s character. He’s playing a lonely, depressed multimillionaire who lives in a big house and is good for absolutely nothing. He doesn’t even have fun. I was opined–and still do–that the rich cannot produce good art because there’s no real conflict in their lives. Similarly, the rich make difficult subjects for fiction. Something like Sabrina notwithstanding….

But, really, I was trying to figure out–as The Game went from mediocre to bad to mediocre again to worse than ever (the only good moment comes in the last few scenes, not surprisingly, it’s all Sean Penn)–I was trying to figure out why I used to love David Fincher. I saw The Game in the theater and I can’t believe it didn’t cure me. Fincher is shockingly incapable of recognizing good material and not just the script. I mean, Douglas turns in what must be his worst performance, since all it does is rehash his previous stuff (Wall Street and maybe Disclosure specifically). When Douglas does show some humanity, it comes across like someone else wrote the scene and Fincher stuck it in.

The Game also–and I hate to gripe about this one, because I usually advise against it–has logic holes the size of the Grand Canyon. I advise against surveying such holes because they aren’t the piece’s point and when you interact with a work, you have to give it some leeway. There’s nothing to interact with in The Game, so all that’s left is to point out how incredibly stupid it is. Still, Fincher’s composition isn’t bad–though it’s poorly edited and the cinematography begs for someone better–and a lot of the supporting cast is fun… James Rebhorn in particular, love the Rebhorn.

For some reason, I thought I had something else to say about this film, some other way to close it–besides that it’s a piece of horrendous shit. Oh, I remember: Howard Shore’s score is good.