holdie Reviews

Snow Falling on Cedars (1999)

A Snow-job Falling on Cedars

[3/10 · 26 April 2007]

It is a pity that one of the very few Hollywood films that deal with the plight of Japanese- Americans during WWII should, though based on a fairly good novel, descend to such extraordinary lengths to "prove" that the incarceration of innocent people is a national disgrace. You would think that an intelligent audience might be trusted to know this without having it explained to death, and that it would need none of the self-indulgent, frequently manipulative "pathos" that mars this extremely kitschy film. Some of it is good. Much of it is so mistrustful of its audience that nothing--not even the deportation of the Japanese to concentration camps--can be depicted without a heavy-handed, editorializing musical score that owes more to Karl Orff than it contributes to the dramatic situation. Some of the performances, particularly that of Sam Sheperd, are excellent. The direction, the editing, are embarrassingly derivative. Characters are either impossibly noble and likable or so unambiguously dreadful that you wonder their neighbors allowed them to go on living. There is no middle ground. Shades of gray, absent from the director's mind, are nowhere to be found in his film. Ultimately there is nothing here but a second-rate film director exhibiting his unwillingness to let the material speak for itself. The movie should be awarded a prize for the most intrusively manipulative musical score in recent film history.

The Human Factor (1979)

The Human Factor

[4/10 · 10 February 2007]

Greene's novel is reduced to a commonplace, wooden, largely flatly acted anecdote. Morley's sinister performance is an exception, but even Morley is unable to impart a little life and leaven to a film that is, yes, intended to take away some of the meretricious glamour of most films in this genre, but the fact that life in the spying business must be a bit of a bore, and the people in it largely pathological, does not excuse making a boring film about it. Iman's performance is wooden and uncomprehending almost to the point of comedy. The pathos intrinsic to the material as conceived by Greene is utterly absent from this film; as you reflect on it after the film grinds to a thoroughly awkward halt, you see how much might have been done with it, and how little actually was. Critics are reluctant to trash a movie whose director, writer, actors, etc. have done brilliant work in the past, but this is a film saved from being thoroughly bad by a few striking moments. Read the book instead.

Savior (1998)

Savior

[9/10 · 9 February 2007]

I was surprised amidst all of the praise for Quaid's acting, all of it richly deserved, to see at the same time so little for that of Natasa Ninkovic, equally brilliant, disciplined, and deeply moving. The bitterness, pain, and grief that she communicates wordlessly, the utterly credible movement of the heart as she begins to relinquish it, her heroism in the end, I found so devastating that it would be very hard indeed to find anything comparable in the films of the past few years. (It seems worth adding that she is also incredibly beautiful, one of the most haunted and haunting faces I've ever seen.) The tension between Quaid's character, for whose emergent humanity she feels as an intrusion on her grief, and this ravaged soul who struggles against her own decency, strength, and capacity for hope, are striking for the sparenesss of the way it's enacted, and are sufficiently memorable that even in the midst of the carnage, hate, and cruelty of a war that seems to originate in a collective pathology, the goodness of the these two people are what I will remember from this tragic, beautiful, honest movie.

Oci ciornie (1987)

A Tragi-comic Tour de Force

[8/10 · 5 September 2005]

Based (loosely) on Chekhov's story "The Lady With The Little Dog," Oci Ciornie (Dark Eyes) features some of the most sumptuous photography of recent years. Set in Yalta, a sultry Black Sea spa for stylish Russian idlers, Dark eyes features a memorable tragic-comic performance by Marcello Mastroianni as Romano, foolish, gallant, ultimately trivial, and a superbly innocent, deeply moving performance by Yelena Safonova as the woman whom he utterly, shamefully fails. Mikhalkov's script departs from the Chekhov story in ways that some Chiekhov-loving viewers might balk at. But Chekhov's ending is perhaps too subtle and introspective for cinematic realization, and Mikhalkov's alternative, seems justified, if only as a vehicle for Matroianni's extraordinary performance.