Continuing the Conversations...

Though I had a won-der-ful time on vacation, I do love the movie conversations. Some recent comments I wanted to respond to (for the patient and/or longwinded-like-me among you).

Clint totally approves of the Jodie Foster casting of God of Carnage (I agree that it's interesting and I hope she pulls it off) but I'm sure he'll be relieved to hear that Matt Dillon is no longer with the film. Not me.

Er... okay, I don't know which husband is which.

I was actually just discussing this with friends recently who had all seen the play and were kind of annoyed that John C Reilly will be playing Kate Winslet Jodie Foster's husband. He's not... handsome. Hollywood loves to pair anything from average to ugly men with ridiculously beautiful women, but it's clearly audience pandering to feed male ego fantasies: i.e. I can have / deserve to have a supermodel in my bed, no matter what I look like. It's okay once in awhile of course but all the time? Not realistic. Reilly is a very good actor but it's kind of silly when you stop to think of his screen conquests; he's already had (implied) movie sex with Julianne Moore, Renée Zellweger, Marisa Tomei, Jenna Fischer, Melora Walters, and Jennifer Aniston! Has he ever been paired with a homely woman? He's like a less cocky/noisy version of the Philip Seymour Hoffman phenomenon.

But mostly I'm just annoyed that...

...Matt Dillon never got a prestige gig or a meaty role as reward for that Oscar nomination. Most people do. And I'm also still slightly weirded out that even this play -- that was mounted with name stars -- got a complete cast overhaul. Usually when they replace a stage cast, it's because the stage cast are largely unknown to the public outside of theater fandom. You knew, for example, that Cherry Jones wasn't going to get her Doubt role on the screen or that the August: Osage County originals weren't going to transfer but Marcia Gay Harden (Oscar winner), Hope Davis and Jeff Daniels (longtime film regulars) and James Gandolfini ("Tony Soprano" himself)? These aren't unknowns.

Moving on...

I liked the comment conversation in the Silkwood post (thanks Tim) though I don't remember the bumper stickers that Deborah does from the 70s "Who Killed Karen Silkwood?" -- I was completely unaware of the politics surrounding that movie and first saw it only by way of combined Meryl/Cher fever 'round about '87/88, the next time they were both nominated. (I still find it odd that Silkwood missed a Best Picture nomination in 1983). Another controversy-friendly post from Erich ("Chicks of the Assimilated Animus") also provoked some interesting reaction and I liked Erich's defense of his own amusing/provocative list-making

Even the old and sexist templates of Freud and Jung have value as stepping off points, especially when dealing with the way our love of film icons intersects with unconscious archetypes...  dreams lag notoriously behind reality when it comes to updated social mores..

True that.

Manuel, who must have been searching that Cate Blanchett label, wonders when the great actress will try directing-- has she expressed an interest??? -- and  if we'll ever see a new film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire which Cate did on stage (I doubt anyone would dare. Oh god, please tell me no one would dare?) and he even free-form rhapsodizes thusly...

intelligent, gorgeous, respected, fashion icon, versatile, risky, husky voice, theater, loyal, quality, chameleon face, humble, dedicated

Though Cate is not really one of my favorites, I appreciate obsessive actressy devotions in all their diverse manifestations. If you love any actress this much, peace be with you!

DJ XRay loved Paprika Steen's performance in Applaus. You may remember I went wild for the Danish film earlier this year. UPDATE: Oscar qualifying run begins December 3rd. [thanks to Kyle for the info]. I hope it's opening in NYC in time to qualify for the Film Bitch Awards but I doubt it. Those Oscar qualifying runs usually only bother with LA. Pity that. But if you don't play in NYC -- the place for American cinephilia-- you are dead to The Film Experience.

Speaking of this site's awards. I'm all over everyone's suggestions (i.e. FYCs) for the forthcoming 11th annual Film Bitch Awards. I consider everything.

Whither Karen Silkwood?

Tim here again-

"On November 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood, an employee of a nuclear facility, left to meet with a reporter from the New York Times. She never got there."

And 34 years later, we still don't know exactly what happened to her, though anyone who has seen 1983's Silkwood probably has their suspicions. After all, the film brings the woman back to life in the form of Meryl Streep, at her most lifeforce-tastic, while depicting the manager whose lives she was making so difficult as a pasty, puffy, shifty sort of fellow, the kind who looks like he's constantly about to break into sweat. We don't have the slightest difficulty believing that he and his cronies are just the kind of people to take out a hit on a troublesome young activist, especially since Silkwood is always so engaging and easy to like, and darn it, just plain good, despite some troubling details about her personal life that keep creeping in, adding just enough ambiguity that we can't be absolutely sure that she wasn't maybe at fault for her supposed single-vehicle car crash.

I assume that everybody visiting this site knows why they, at the very least, ought to have seen Silkwood by now (I just finally did *cough* thismorning): Streep in one of the great performances of her early career (it netted her Oscar nomination #5), Cher's breakthrough as a "serious" actress, Kurt Russell's most nuanced dramatic performance ever. Certainly, the combined talents of those three actors, feeding off of each other and giving back so much intimacy, each member of the triangle driving the others to reach their peak, is enough to make Silkwood an excellent human-sized story; personal and observant in a way to make it far more than what the concept threatens to make it, another routine "social activist" picture in the Norma Rae mold.

Less obviously, but just as importantly, the film relies heavily on the careful handling by director Mike Nichols of Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen's fine script: Nichols was on his very best behavior here, opening up the characters through unstressed details and very delicate use of the camera frame to suggest the ongoing shift between the main characters, and their environment.

And it's that ending where Nichols does some of the best work of the film- nay, of his career. With the script rightfully refusing to conjecture what happened that night, Nichols finds an uncanny way to clearly indicate what he wants us to think, while steadfastly maintaining ambiguity. The tension-raising long shot of a car following Karen on a lonely road, which in one steady take shows the lights of that car slowly appear and then draw painfully near, suggests a lot, but it shows absolutely nothing, other than Karen's panic and paranoia. Or the quick insert of Cher's Dolly, Karen's best friend and possible betrayer (foreshadowed in another directorial coup on an airplane), silently crying: it tells the viewer nothing, but creates a feeling of intense foreboding.

Does Silkwood assume, for the sake of drama, that its heroine was murdered? Absolutely, and yet there's not a frame of the film that I can use to prove it. It's that same haunting ambiguity that made the circumstances of Karen Silkwood's death so compelling in the first place; and the filmmakers' ability to honor both her memory and the known facts at the same time is one of the surest reasons that this movie is one of the great true-story thrillers of its decade.