|
 Road
movies are pure Hollywood and that is not bad. Horses, wagons,
buggies, stagecoaches, trains, cars, buses, bikes, you name it, are
America on the move. Many movies use the road as the way to unlock
the three walls under the proscenium arch in live theater. Once on
the road, you can go anywhere and do almost anything. You can also
show pretty pictures or ugly pictures, however you are inclined.
Picture this scene. I am standing at a blackboard in a large
auditorium. Light flickers through the lens of a DVD projector. I am
in front of the screen where the movie is about to play. I step back
from it so a few scenes of three films can start playing. I hold off
starting the projector for a moment to set up my premise. The films
are Sideways, Broken Flowers and Everything is Illuminated. These
are three diverse movies and you might well wonder what they have in
common. I might assume that each of the films was partly a TV
commercial for a car company. But I know better.
Your immediate response might be that I am disrespecting the
integrity of these films, each in their way a work of personal
vision by a committed artist. I do not doubt for a moment the care
and integrity of those who created each of these films. One night
recently when I could not sleep, a common thread about each film
flashed through my mind which I thought I would put to paper.
I found, despite its final note of hope, that Sideways was a very
sad film. Also not a significant hymn to man, and I really mean men
in this case, but rather a film that takes a jaundiced approach to
the human condition. Understand that I enjoyed the movie. It repeats
what many of us know. That many men never really grow up or move on
beyond the immediate visceral moments of empty lives. In this case,
the emptiness is filled with the search for a perfect merlot.
 Argue that all you like. Despite the film’s message, the actors are
wonderful. The juxtaposition of Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden
Church is perfect. Brilliantly directed by Alexander Payne and
written by Payne and Jim Taylor, filmed beautifully with tender care
by Phedon Papamichael, some of its most memorable moments come when
the red Saab courses its way through California’s incredible wine
country. I do not know if this was intentional or not, but these are
glorious scenes. We have the requisite high shots, wide shots, and
close-ups in bright sun. We usually see the car moving, a red speck
among the green grape bowers, the brown earth and the lovely winery
buildings. It is as if the car is a sentient being with a purpose
well beyond the director’s purported meaning of the film itself.
Remember how at the end they crash the car to give reason to the
broken nose of Thomas Haden Church’s character, Jack? The car also
had to have its nose – its front end – broken. Did the director do
it on purpose to tie like to like? Note, too, Mile’s car remains
broken, as he tools between his teaching job and home, unlike Jack’s
nose which he probably fixed after his wedding. I wonder if the
marriage survived. Certainly for me, the marvelous images in wine
country etched through the moving car survive in my mind.
 Broken Flowers has Bill Murray spending much time in a rented cars
as he tools around the country looking for the mother of a child he
may or may not have helped conceive. Let me get one thing out of the
way quickly. I did not think this was much of a film. I thought the
story – written by Jim Jarmusch – weak and that Jim Jarmusch, as the
director, fell asleep during most of the film. Frederick Elmes, the
director of photography, did very well with the moving shots and
only a decent job with everything else. The character Bill Murray
portrayed had no life from the neck up. The set of his jaw and the
emptiness in his eyes supposedly conveyed Murray’s wasted,
meaningless existence. I disagree with the many critics who thought
he did a great acting job by being mostly motionless and conveying
his inner self through his eyes and only the slightest of movements
of his head and body. To many of the critics this showed his
emotional bankruptcy. Murray in other films is often deadpan, but
with a wry smile. Here he is emotionless, verging on being
catatonic.
There is nothing in the brief telling of his life to make me feel
any sympathy for him. A womanizer? Yes. His inability to settle
down? Yes. That and other bits and pieces of who he is describe many
people. There is nothing unique about the character except that he
is a multi-millionaire with an empty life.
 Soon, however, very soon, the car and the road dominate this film.
Murray’s friend played by Jeffrey Wright plans his search and for
all we know, he may have created it and so set up the whole basis
for the movie. Murray takes planes to each destination, and then
drives and drives through different parts of the country. He has
money, maps, addresses and an itinerary. With all the money he has,
he could have had any car he wanted. He complains about the cars he
has to drive but to no avail. He visits one ex-girlfriend in a
lower-middle class community. Another former lover lives in an
upscale suburb. In one sequence, trying to visit an old girl friend,
Murray lands in redneck country. He runs into this woman’s close
male friends, one of whom is probably her lover or husband. They
knock him down with a mighty blow. Cut to a disheveled Murray the
next morning waking up in a muddy field next to the car, its doors
open, and the car a mess, as much a casualty as he is.
Broken Flowers, as a road movie, works better than a study in potted
metaphysics. At least the cars and the roads they travel have more
animation than Bill Murray and have more meaning than his fruitless
search.
However, Everything is Illuminated is vastly different from these
other films. Liev Schrieber, the first time director and
screenwriter cannot seem to make up his mind if he is a fabulist, a
magic realist, or a realist with a twist. At times, I thought parts
of the movie were really a dream that we gained entrance to through
special dispensation. In converting the novel to film, difficult at
best because of its odd structure, something got lost along the way,
and that is a story that makes sense. It is a sprawling mess because
Schrieber seemed unsure what he wanted his film to be. From
beginning to end, the story plays with our minds in the manner of a
strange puzzle.
 Except for Wood whose technique baffled me, the acting is very good,
especially Eugene Hutz as the young Russian hipster wannabe and his
grandfather Boris Leskin, a man filled with a secret past. Toward
the end of the film, the acting of Laryssa Laurent further adds to
the quality of the movie and in its way, but barely, helps define
the story. As I indicated, Elijah Wood never comes alive for me.
And, yes, it did bother me that he wore the same suit, shirt and tie
through the many days of the journey that he takes in search of the
woman he believes saved his grandfather from death at the hands of
the Nazis in World War II Ukraine. Importantly, it is here that
Mathew Libatique, the director of photography, shines with his work.
He creates a lush and glorious look to the film which helps carry it
along better than the story it tries to tell.
It was pure inspiration to put three men and a sometimes mad, but
loveable dog in the confines of a tiny and nearly extinct East
German made Trabant automobile. The car is kindly referred to as a
2x2, meaning two in the front seats and two in back but really
barely big enough for two people at all. We then go with them as
they cruise the lush countryside of Ukraine. It is this journey with
the three men and the dog in the small car in search of a Jewish
village destroyed more than fifty years before that makes this a
road movie unlike any other you are likely to see. Despite this
difference, it is perhaps just another road movie in the tradition
of all road movies. The three men are on a mission. Each man is
vastly different from the other. They drive in that derelict of a
car as if compelled by unsettling demons. The journey takes them
through the beautiful, glorious countryside in the hopes that Elijah
Wood’s character will find answers to his questions. In the end, a
dissatisfying end, by the way, the questions have only limited
answers.
Of the three kinds of cars used in these movies, the foreign made,
upscale Saab driven mostly by Paul Giamatti, the almost non-descript
mid-size pedestrian cars driven by Bill Murray, and the barely
functioning, tiny and ludicrous East German Trabant, the Trabant
gets my vote for its gusty, retro style and uniqueness. I would not
want to drive one, unless necessary. However, despite its extremely
low quality and barely workable engineering, it managed to take us
on a journey through the wonderful, magnificent, lush fields of
Ukraine, It became a trip worth the movie.
.........................................................................................................................
At NBC News for 35 years, Ron Steinman was bureau chief
in Saigon, Hong Kong and London, was a senior producer on Today and wrote
and produced for Sunday Today. At ABC News Productions, he produced
and wrote documentaries for A&E, TLC, Discovery, Lifetime and the
History Channel. He has a Peabody, a National Headliner award, a
National Press Club award, a International Documentary Festival Gold
Camera Award, two American Women in Radio & Television awards and
has been nominated for five Emmy's. He is a partner in
Douglas/Steinman Productions, whose latest documentary, "Luboml: My
Heart Remembers," aired on PBS' WLIW/21 and the History Channel in
Israel, April 29, 2003. He is the author of, "The Soldiers 'Story",
"Women in Vietnam," and most recently, "Inside Television's First
War: A Saigon Journal," University of Missouri Press, 2002. |
