jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I’m behind the curve on David Cronenberg’s Russian mobster tale of sin and redemption, so I’ll make this short. At any rate, I can’t discuss the narrative slights-of-hand I admired most without spoiling the film — so let’s just say that the acting by Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, and Armin Mueller-Stahl is top notch, the violence and spilled bodily fluids are uniquely Cronenbergian, and the script is a wonder of tightly wound efficiency. You can tattoo that on your kneecaps.

Eastern Promises. David Cronenberg, 2007. ****

• Eastern Promises on Rotten Tomatoes
• Jordan and Kerry on David Cronenberg
• The trailer

The first two acts of this W. Somerset Maugham adaptation are fantastic: Naomi Watts plays a woman who marries stodgy bacteriologist Ed Norton out of desperation and cheats on him with Liev Schreiber as soon as they arrive at his home in Shanghai. To punish her and himself, Norton takes her into the interior, to a village ravaged by cholera. The way the two steer their wrecked relationship through the lush landscape stalked by death is terrific–it’s sort of a grown-up version of Battle Royale, in which the stakes of love are ratcheted up to 11: if you leave me, you’ll die a grisly death. Toby Jones (Truman in Infamous) provides the cynical but helpful foreigner, and there are nuns.

I was less fond of the third act, in which Chekhov’s Law is adhered to much too slavishly: if there’s cholera around, somebody’s gonna get it! Still, The Painted Veil is big classic Hollywood cinema, splendidly engaging, marvelously acted and shot, sumptuous and emotional. The real mystery is why this film, far better than The Departed and most of the other nominees, didn’t get any kind of attention at Oscar time. In decades past, this would have been exactly the kind of thing the Academy would’ve gone gaga over. As a sign of how much times as changed, the The Painted Veil wasn’t even technically released by a major studio but by their “indie” distributor Warner Independent. It was drowned out in December’s mad movie rush, and now the official site is hocking the DVD as “just in time for mother’s day!”

The Painted Veil. John Curran, 2006. ***

• Rotten Tomatoes: 75%

Had to watch this a few times after Inland Empire, just to regain a certain amount of sanity: it still makes a heck of a lot more sense than the latest three-hour freakout, especially if you take a look at some of the theories. Allen B Ruch’s “No Hay Banda” does a good job at teasing out some of what’s going on, and if that’s not enough, there’s an entire site dedicated to the film. I always thought that dreamlogic should stay dreamlogic, and while some of these theories go a long way toward making sense of Diane/Betty/Camilla/Rita (and even the Blue Box), Lynch included too many loose ends that will stick in your craw no matter how you try to resolve them. An astonishing movie that gets ever more astonishing the harder you try to unravel it. There’s a wholeness to it that I couldn’t see in Inland Empire after one viewing, and it looks stunning: it’d be a damn shame if Lynch really gave up film for DV.

Mulholland Dr., David Lynch, 2001. *****

[tags]mulholland drive, naomi watts, david lynch, hollywood, films, 5 stars, surreal, dreamlogic[/tags]