I just saw it today.
Wow! An extraordinary film.
I’m surprised that so few of my friends who are fans of the Woodman have compared it to Crimes and Misdemeanors–this was basically a remake of that movie, but with a much better looking pair of adulterers and the funny second storyline with Woody Allen and Alan Alda removed.
So I guess I should have seen everything coming–hell, I recently read an interview in which Woody lamented putting the funny subplot he starred in into C&M, so once I saw what the subject of this movie was I should have put two and two together and guessed where it was going to end up. But man, the second I realized what Chris was going to do, I was STUNNED! My heart pounded for the duration of the film. That entire final third of the film was exquisitely paced and acted, enough to distinguish it from Crimes no matter how similar they were. (Chris’s speech to the “ghosts” was at one point almost word for word the same speech Martin Landau gave to Woody Allen at the end of C&M).
It was also a very subtle film in a lot of ways. The expensive washer and dryer that show up for a half-second shot in Chris’s shitty apartment, obviously bought and paid for by his future in-laws…the fact that almost everyone is always drinking, but it’s really only the lower-class Nola and her mother who are ever seen as being worse people for it…Chris alternating between reading Dostoevsky and reading a book on how to read Dostoevsky…I was really impressed with the way we WEREN’T beaten over the head with certain points, considering how potentially heavy-handed the themes being explored here could have been. Even the most capital-S Serious part, the dream sequence with its references to Sophocles and feel of something out of a Shakespearean tragedy, worked beautifully–it was shot so well and performed so chillingly. The notion that we can commit acts that can never be forgiven, made up for, undone–the notion that we might have to live with something like that for the rest of our lives–that is so frightening to me. There’s nothing MORE frightening to me than that. That’s why I liked Crimes & Misdemeanors so much, and that’s why I liked this so much as well.
I also want to point out that in many ways it was paced like a graphic novel. Generally when people compare films to graphic novels, they’re using the latter as a synonym for anything from stylized visuals to graphic violence to male-audience targeting to god knows what else, usually stuff they don’t like, which just kind of goes to show how few people (and I implicate fans, critics, and filmmakers equally in this) understand what graphic novels are or can be. But the way (particularly early on) Woody would quietly but rapidly edit together several discrete, short scenes through jump cuts, quickly painting a complete portrait of Chris’s life–it was like something out of Dan Clowes or Gilbert Hernandez or middle-period Chester Brown. It was so smart and elegant, without being showy or demonstrative.
And I couldn’t be happier that Jonathan Rhys Meyers, so compelling in my beloved Velvet Goldmine, is finding work, especially work of this caliber. I hope he becomes a big movie star. He’s got a face that can more than support this film’s and any film’s long, tight close-ups–it’s as though everything’s going on just below the surface, and as though he can get away with it because the surface is so lovely. And Scarlett Johansson was very good, too; “What I am is sexy,” as opposed to beautiful, was the perfect way to encapsulate both what was appealing about her character and what was ultimately off-putting about her. Nola was a fascinating failure, and the fact that people can be failures is horrifying to Chris and to us. Even scarier is that people can be failures, moral failures, and still succeed.