The DVD Report #51

It’s Philip Seymour Hoffman week at the DVD store. The actor, who won an Oscar for Capote two years ago, starred in three of 2008’s major films, all newly released on DVD.

Once you get over the sight of Hoffman in the altogether that opens Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, you discover that the film is 83-year-old director Sidney Lumet’s most accomplished work in years. He directs with a vigor and pace that directors half his age would find exhausting. The film itself is a lurid melodrama about a robbery that goes terribly wrong, but Lumet’s veteran Broadway stars play it as though their actions were perfectly within the bounds of ordinary everyday life, and what actors they are. Hoffman as the drug-addicted, white collar thief; Ethan Hawke as his ne’er-do-well brother; Albert Finney and Rosemary Harris as their parents; Brian F. O’Byrne and Michael Shannon as low-level criminals; Amy Ryan as Hawke’s bitter ex-wife; and Marisa Tomei as Hoffman’s wife and Hawke’s lover. All turn in exceptional performances.

Hoffman does a complete about-face as a struggling academic in Tamara Jenkins’ The Savages in which he and Laura Linney, as an unpublished playwright, play siblings who put their lives on hold to spend time with their dying father, Philip Bosco, a cantankerous old man suffering from dementia. Jenkins’ script, which captures all the nuances of family dynamics as well as the look and feel of life in such differing places as Sun City, Arizona, New York City and Buffalo, New York, won numerous awards including an Oscar nomination. Linney was also nominated for her performance, which deftly walks a fine line between comedy and drama. She and Hoffman are so in tune as brother and sister it would have been nice to see them both nominated, but his was a more crowded field, forcing him to take a consolation prize as Best Supporting Actor in another film.

That film was Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War, based on the true story of the playboy Texas congressman no one took seriously, who nevertheless was able to push through funding for a covert war in Afghanistan that brought down the Russians and led to the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, the film moves uneasily from comedy to drama, from alcohol- and cocaine-fueled Las Vegas jaunts to visits with children whose hands have been blown off in Afghanistan. Tom Hanks seems to lack the gravitas that a Tommy Lee Jones would have easily brought to the role. Julia Roberts, as a Texas matron descended from George Washington’s sister, seems to be acting in another film, if not another universe. Hoffman in his Oscar-nominated role as a CIA operative and Amy Adams as Hanks’ administrative assistant are much better.

An unexpected delight, the oddly marketed Lars and the Real Girl, directed by veteran TV commercial director Craig Gillespie, is not the leering comedy the trailer would lead you to believe. Instead, it’s a sweet fable about a mentally ill young man whose illness is embraced by his family, friends, co-workers and ultimately the whole town in which he lives. Ryan Gosling, who is fast becoming the young actor to go to for quirky, yet sensitive and ultimately moving lead characters, won a well deserved Satellite Award as well as Golden Globe and SAG nominations for his portrayal of the shy young man who falls in love with a life-size mail order doll. Nancy Oliver’s screenplay was nominated for numerous awards including an Oscar. The entire cast is perfect, especially Emily Mortimer as Gosling’s caring sister-in-law and Patricia Clarkson as his gentle shrink.

A huge box office success, Jason Reitman’s Oscar-nominated Juno is no less a fable than Lars , yet one that audiences embraced much more enthusiastically. The Oscar-winning script by Diablo Cody starts out with its teenage protagonist, played by Oscar-nominated Ellen Page, spouting rapid fire New Speak dialogue that is difficult to follow. Once it settles down into its narrative, though, it becomes a sweet little movie about a nice young girl who just happens to be pregnant and in need of finding a nice couple to adopt her baby. Michael Cera is her nice boyfriend, Allison Janney and J.K. Simmons are her nice parents, and Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are the nice childless couple who might just be perfect to raise the baby. The soundtrack by the Moldy Peaches became an unexpected hit as well.

A character study about an aging writer and the graduate student who seeks him out as the subject of her thesis, Andrew Wagner’s Starting Out in the Evening provides Frank Langella with an actor’s showcase. He plays the writer. Lili Taylor plays his daughter going through a mid-life crisis, Adrian Lester plays the man who loves her but doesn’t want to marry her, and Lauren Ambrose plays the callow grad student. Each seems more like literary contrivances than real people do. Curiously, there seems to be a deliberate attempt on the part of the director to flesh out Langella’s character by using his matinee idol era pictures the same way that Henry Fonda’s old movie photographs were used to provide audience sympathy with his geezer characterin On Golden Pond. Perhaps what he was really doing was paying tribute to his uncle, Mark Rydell, who directed Pond.

Another film that is primarily an actor’s showcase is Terry George’s Reservation Road, which provides meaty characters for both Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Ruffalo to sink their teeth into. Ruffalo plays a small town attorney who kills Phoenix’s son in a hit-and-run accident and spends the rest of the film suffering pangs of conscience while Phoenix tries to discover who did it. Both actors are fine, but the plot relies too heavily on coincidence to bring the characters to their inevitable showdown. Both men’s sons were in the same class at school and Ruffalo’s ex-wife, played by Mira Sorvino, is Phoenix’s daughter’s, played by Elle Fanning, piano teacher. On top of that, Phoenix picks Ruffalo’s firm to represent him from the local telephone directory. The women, including Sorvino and Jennifer Connelly as Phoenix’s wife, are treated as peripheral characters.

So much for new releases of new films. Universal, which is slow to release its library of Universal and pre-1950 Paramount films, has released four classic comedies with introductions by TCM host Robert Osborne. The films are 1933’s She Done Him Wrong, 1937’s Easy Living, 1939’s Midnight and 1942’s The Major and the Minor.

The film version of Diamond Lil, Mae West’s notorious Broadway play, re-titled She Done Him Wrong, replaced the coarse one-liners of the play with double entendres and innuendos that made it a stronger script, but one that still infuriated the censors and led to the 1934 imposition of the Production Code. The film, directed by Lowell Sherman, made enough money to stave off bankruptcy for Paramount Studios who produced it, and AMPAS, ignoring the blue noses, nominated it for a Best Picture Oscar. This was West’s second film, and her first of many starring roles. It also advanced the career of her handpicked leading man, Cary Grant.

With a script by Preston Sturges and knowing direction by Mitchell Leisen, Easy Living is one of the fastest and funniest of the great screwball comedies of the 1930s. Jean Arthur stars as a young working woman who, through a series of misadventures, is thought to be the mistress of tycoon Edward Arnold to the consternation of many, including his son and Arthur’s eventual true love, Ray Milland. It’s great fun all the way with at least two of the most hilarious sequences ever captured on film.

Leisen also directed the equally hilarious Midnight from a script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett. Claudette Colbert stars as a showgirl stranded in Paris. Don Ameche is the poor taxi driver who loves her while John Barrymore chews up the scenery as the aristocrat who enlists Colbert to pretend to be a baroness in order to get wife Mary Astor away from gigolo Francis Lederer. It’s sparkling light comedy at its best.

Billy Wilder’s first directorial effort, The Major and the Minor, is one of the last of the screwball comedies, with Ginger Rogers pretending to be a twelve-year-old in order to pay a lower fare on a transcontinental train ride home. Complications ensue when the train is stalled and military cadet school commandant, Ray Milland, whom she has met on the train, brings her home.

Columbia previously postponed its special editions of The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia in order to coincide with the release of the special edition of A Passage to India to celebrate director David Lean’s centenary. Now Passage has been released while Bridge and Lawencehave been postponed to June. No matter, taking in all three films at one sitting would have been too much anyway.

The film version of E.M. Forster’s most famous novel, 1984’s A Passage to India was Lean’s first film in fourteen years and his last. It is a sumptuous feast of a film about how East is East, West is West and never the twain shall mix in colonial India despite the best intentions of some of the parties. Judy Davis stars as the well-bred young English lady who may or may not have been raped in a suffocating cave by Indian doctor Victor Banerjee. Davis’ intended mother-in-law, the saintly Mrs. Moore is the one person who can solve the mystery, or can she? She’s played by the marvelous Peggy Ashcroft who won a much-deserved Oscar for her performance.

The special edition includes a commentary and numerous documentaries, including one fascinating one on the design of the film. Though filmed in India, most of the film’s sets were constructed on the grounds of an elaborate estate in order to minimize street noise. Even the entrance to the cave is a facade on the face of a mountain that had no cave, as Lean deemed the real caves not cinematic enough.

Finally of interest to collectors of old movies on DVD, Warner Bros. has put into general release a pair of films previously available only through Critics’ Choice Video.

One of the most charming of the MGM musicals of the late 1940s, Richard Thorpe’s A Date With Judy stars Jane Powell at her delightful best as a small town girl attempting to spread her wings. Wallace Beery, Carmen Miranda, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert Stack and Scotty Beckett all figure in the merriment. The score includes the infectious “It’s a Most Unusual Day” sung by the entire cast.

Best known as Jeff Chandler’s last film, Samuel Fuller’s Merrill’s Marauders is actually a pretty good psychological war movie about the effects of lack of food and sleep on solders fighting in the jungles of Burma. Chandler’s death from blood poisoning following routine slipped disc surgery on July 17, 1962, four days after release of the film, put a damper on its box office potential. The film has since become a cult classic.

-Peter J. Patrick (April 22, 2008)