An English Saint Gets The Story He Deserves

Amazing Grace

The New York Sun, February 22, 2007

"The Lives of Others," the compelling new movie about East Germany currently in contention for an Oscar, is the story of two flawed individuals' quest for moral redemption, but Michael Apted's "Amazing Grace" raises the bar far higher. It tells the tale of William Wilberforce, an unquestionably good man who set out to redeem the honor of an empire and, in so doing, saved millions of lives.

Born in England in the middle of the 18th century to a wealthy merchant family, Wilberforce (ably played here by Ioan Gruffudd) rose to prominence in a nation that had discovered the virtue of reason and the rewards of science but had lost some of its conscience along the way.

A little more than 200 years before, an appalled Queen Elizabeth I had reacted to the news of an early slaving expedition with the observation that it would bring the "vengeance of Heaven" in its wake. As usual, Heaven remained indifferent. The slave trade flourished and Elizabeth's successors were quick to take their share.

If God appeared unconcerned and most Englishmen were prepared to either avert their eyes from the evils of the Middle Passage or to profit from it, Wilberforce was undaunted, working tirelessly for two decades to secure the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Satisfyingly, he lived long enough to see Parliament strike down slavery itself in 1833.

With an exception or two, the filmmakers are honest enough about Wilberforce's rejection of slavery to make clear that the roots of his disdain for the trade lay not only in inherent goodness, but also in his deep-rooted Christianity. Unfortunately, this honesty does not extend to trusting moviegoers with a sufficiently rounded portrayal of that faith. The real Wilberforce was a man of immense charm, but many of his fellow Clapham "Saints" were a joyless bunch, and so opposed, for example, to the idea of a good night out at the theater that they might even have objected to a film as uplifting as this one.

Taking Lives in Stasiland

The Lives of Others

The New York Sun, February 9, 2007

If there is nothing else to East Germany's credit (and, frankly, there isn't), that grim, gray dictatorship did succeed in provoking two of the finest films to come out of a reunited fatherland in recent years.

The first, Wolfgang Becker's sweet, enchanting "Good Bye Lenin!" (2003) used one family's crisis to examine both the year that Erich Honecker's then largely unlamented republic simply faded away and the way that layers of self-deception, "internal emigration," and illusion had helped its citizens to weather those penned-in decades of repression, futility, and waste. Nevertheless, as moving and wonderfully perceptive as that film was, it's impossible to watch it without detecting occasional traces of Ostalgie, the nauseating, sugarcoated nostalgia that some Germans (of East and West) claim to feel for a kinder, gentler Volksrepublik, which never, in fact, existed.

The second of these films, the novice director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's "The Lives of Others," shows no signs of falling into that trap. From its concreted landscapes to its muted colors to its clammy betrayals to the black Volvos of the party bosses prowling the streets of their wretched blind alley of a capital, this wrenching, stirring, magnificent movie portrays East Berlin as it was. In this, it undoubtedly helped that Mr. von Donnersmarck was brought up in the western half of the city and was a frequent visitor to the mysterious, unsettling land on the other side of the wall.

Adding further to the film's credibility, a number of the cast began their careers in an East German state that, nearly 20 years after its demise, retains the power to haunt their lives. During an interview last week, Mr. von Donnersmarck told me that Ulrich Mühe, the film's star, had spent more than he was paid for "The Lives of Others" in legal costs incurred after the actor's ex-wife sued to stop publication of a book linked to the film in which it was to be revealed that she had "allegedly" (as, I suppose, lawyers would insist we must say) informed on him to the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Meanwhile, the father of another cast member was unmasked as a former Stasi officer following publication of the photographs of him that appeared in the press after he attended the film's premiere.

But then that's really not so surprising. East Germany was the most spied-upon society in history. Neither prisons, nor torture, nor executions, nor even that wall were enough to keep it all together. To supervise a population of 17 million, the Stasi, with some 100,000 officers, grew to be more than twice the size of the Third Reich's Gestapo, and, just to be sure, it recruited at least another 200,000 informers, probably many more. In her 2003 book on East Germany, the Australian author Anna Funder dubbed this police state that was more police than state as "Stasiland." She was right to do so.

It's as a model citizen of Stasiland, a skilled interrogator doing his brutal business, that we first encounter Mr. Mühe's Captain Wiesler. He is Stasi, a member of the elect, a true believer, and, yet, even in the movie's early stages, there are hints that all is not well. He is hunched, buttoned-up, withdrawn, his demeanor as much captive as guard. Contrasted with the deprivation that was the lot of most East Germans, Wiesler's bleak, spotless apartment might be a token of his privileged position, but it is little more than a cell. The only sign that anything remains of the captain's emotional life is a brief request to an appallingly unattractive prostitute (assigned to him, we must assume, by his employers) to stay with him a little longer. He knows enough to know that he is lonely.

"The Lives of Others" tells the story of what happens when, at the request of a government minister, Captain Wiesler puts famous playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) under close surveillance as someone who may be disloyal to the republic. Intellectuals, you know. Eventually, Wiesler discovers that the politician's real motive is sexual rather than ideological. He has his eyes on Dreyman's girlfriend (nicely played by Martina Gedeck) and wants Dreyman out of the way. And that's not the most important thing that our Stasi officer discovers. As (courtesy of bugs installed in the playwright's apartment) he sits listening day after day to the minutiae of Dreyman's life, the captain begins to find out some truths both about the evil of the regime he has served so loyally and, ultimately, about his own capacity for good.

Mr. Mühe's subtle, deadpan, and compelling portrayal of a bad man possibly stumbling toward redemption is one of the most profoundly moving performances I have ever been privileged to witness on-screen. He's ably supported by a cast that never seems to put a foot wrong. In particular, it's worth singling out Mr. Koch's Dreyman, a plaything of the regime as well as its playwright, a man who comes to realize that his carefully preserved detachment is no longer enough. Look too for the clever way that Dreyman's milieu is depicted as a licensed, micromanaged Bohemia that, like so many aspects of the German Democratic Republic, is at best a feeble facsimile of what was available in the West and, at worse, a dangerously comforting delusion.

"The Lives of Others" comes to America garlanded with the prizes it has won in Europe. It has now been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Win or lose (and it deserves to win), it's already achieved something far more significant than that little statuette.

Sometimes a movie or, even, for that matter, a TV show, can transcend its entertainment value and become a device that compels a nation to reconsider its history. When NBC's "Holocaust" was first shown in West Germany (roughly half the adult population caught at least one episode), it shattered that country's long-standing taboo on open discussion of Nazi genocide. Now "The Lives of Others" has forced large numbers of Germans to start facing the truth about what former dissident Wolf Biermann has referred to as their "second dictatorship."

Battered Kingdom

Margaret Gaskin: Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

The New York Sun: January 3, 2007

If, in 1932, nearly 15 years after the catastrophe of the "war to end all wars" had finally drawn to a close, any Britons were still foolish, complacent, or naïve enough to cling to their island nation's traditional sense of inviolability, Stanley Baldwin, the country's once-and-future prime minister, wanted to smash that illusion beyond repair. Speaking to the House of Commons in November of that year, he warned that the "man in the street [had] to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through."

And so, less than a decade later, the bomber did. Impatient with Germany's defeat (or, more accurately, failure to prevail) in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to turn its attention from the few to the many. The duels in the sky during that lonely, legendary, dangerous summer of 1940, almost archaic in their occasional chivalry, were to be replaced by the more typically 20th-century spectacle of fire, ruin, and indiscriminate slaughter. The systematic assault on Britain's cities, then described and now remembered as "the Blitz," began in early September 1940. By the time the worst of it was over, roughly nine months later, nearly 45,000 were dead, with, perhaps, an additional 70,000 seriously injured. The horrors of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on an exhausted England (close to 10,000 killed) toward the end of the war were, of course, yet to come.

In writing "Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940" (Harcourt, 448 pages, $27), Margaret Gaskin has essentially attempted to tell the story of the Blitz through the events of a single night that saw the largest air raid on London up to that point. It was a 100-bomber onslaught that set off a firestorm designed to reduce the British capital's historic core, the City, to nothing more than rubble. Sadly, despite a careful, and often striking, selection of reminiscences and contemporary accounts (so far as it goes, the book is very well researched) that are often as moving as they are vivid, Ms. Gaskin's overall narrative fails to convince. To use a possibly unfortunate word, her "Blitz" is something of a dud.

In part that's due to a prose style that is sometimes orotund ("A lifetime in the hurly-burly of the public presses had honed the robust tongue in which [Winston Churchill rallied] his London tribe, his British tribe, his tribe of ‘English-speaking peoples'") or shopworn (Hitler's Berchtesgaden is, wait for it, a "spectacular mountain fastness"). But more troubling still is that the author simultaneously manages to cram in and leave out too much information. Readers will have to wade through (a surely unnecessary) World War II 101 ("As Hitler's master manipulator of truth, Goebbels took considerable personal pride in what his Führer saw when he looked at his beloved maps at the end of 1940"), but are deprived of many more directly relevant details surrounding the Blitz that could have put the events Ms. Gaskin is trying to relate into better context.

We are, for example, told remarkably little about the planning, events, and principal personalities on the German side and not much more about those organizing the defense of Churchill's battered kingdom. Nor is there a great deal of discussion about what the decision by Hitler to shift to a mass bombing offensive really meant. Destructive as the Blitz was undoubtedly to prove (oddly, Ms. Gaskin neglects to provide a full accounting of the toll) it was a sign that Berlin's hopes of a quick victory in the west had evaporated. Instead they were replaced by a strategy of attrition (according to Goebbels, some of the pilots involved saw it as an "aerial Verdun," a damning and telling phrase).

The chances that this would succeed, as the German leadership fully understood, were highly dependent on America's assistance to England being kept to a minimum (to be fair, Ms. Gaskin handles the increasing desperation of Britain's pleas to America very well). By leaving the aftermath of December 29 largely out of her book, however, Ms Gaskin makes it impossible to work out where that particular raid fitted into the broader history of the Blitz. Instead, she cuts to Winston Churchill's funeral a quarter of a century later, an epilogue to a drama seemingly without third, fourth, or fifth acts.

Indeed, with a death toll of roughly 200, the bombings of December 29 were far from being the most lethal of the Blitz. Far worse was to come the following year, culminating in the last great attack on May 10 that killed nearly 1,500. That said, the significance of the night Ms. Gaskin describes is that its blazing warehouses, doomed alleys, and tumbling buildings represented the death throes of the old City, the ancient, cluttered, rabbit-warren mercantile and commercial heart of the empire, the stamping ground of Dickens, Pepys, and Johnson. When, some 40 years later, I worked in that same area, the street names — Basinghall, Aldermanbury, Cheapside, Paternoster — may have been freighted with history, but all too often they were lined with nothing more than the drab concrete of utilitarian postwar construction.

And it's difficult not to think that alongside that old City there perished much of the moral restraint holding the British back from the idea — and the, possibly necessary, barbarism — of total war. Grasping this change, is, one would think, an essential element in understanding the meaning, and the consequences, of those months of destruction. Yet the only reference to this issue in Ms. Gaskin's text is a brief remark by Arthur Harris, the deputy chief of air staff. The Germans, he said, had "sown the wind." Indeed they had. Harris subsequently rose to head Britain's Bomber Command and, less than three years later, the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah had already devastated Hamburg. By the time the war ended, some 600,000 Germans had perished in Allied raids over the Reich.

Hitler had sown the wind and his people had reaped the whirlwind.

A Character Sketch Gone Crazy

Stranger Than Fiction

The New York Sun, November, 10, 2006

There are some desserts, just a few, that are perfection itself. There are plenty more, glutinous, sticky, cloying, annoying, that tip over into a sickly sweetness and simply disgust. Then, trickiest of all, there are those that teeter uncertainly along the edge, promising delight on one side, threatening nausea on the other. They generally end up delivering both. In this respect they resemble nothing so much as Marc Forster's sharp, saccharine, original, clichéd "Stranger Than Fiction," a film that infuriates and enchants, and is, without doubt, the best date movie I've seen this year.

So far as saccharine is concerned, a quick glance at the advance publicity materials turned up danger signs by the sachet load. The movie was not just funny, but "sweetly funny." It was also "heartfelt," "deeply moving," and "deeply emotional. "When, to top it all off, I read that Ana the love interest (Maggie Gyllenhaal) was billed as a "free-spirited," "anarchist" baker, there was nothing to do but be apprehensive about the prospect that lay ahead. Deeply.

Sure enough, if it's syrup you're looking for, "Stranger Than Fiction" is a movie splattered with gobs of the stuff, above all in a final sequence that equals, and may even exceed, the repulsive aspartame-saturated conclusion of "Love Actually." The producer of "Stranger Than Fiction" has claimed that the last moments of his film are "a beautiful tribute to the little things in life that are, in the end, our salvation" — a grim boast that tells you all you need to know.

As for clichéd, let's just say we've all been down the boring-corporate-stiff-transformed by-love-for-free-spirited-girl route many times before, even if making the free-spirited girl an anarchist baker is something of a novelty. But if the core love story itself is not particularly original, the same cannot be said of the context within which it is set. Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) is not just a boring corporate stiff (IRS actually, but you get the point), he's also the hero of the latest novel ("Death and Taxes") by reclusive author Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson), something he only discovers after hearing the disembodied voice of the novelist narrating exactly what the unfortunate taxman is up to. This would be disconcerting at the best of times, but these are not the best of times. As Crick comes to discover, Karen is busily working out how she can kill him off in the final chapter. Somehow Crick, fictional, yet real, has to contact his creator and persuade her to end "Death and Taxes" on a less lethal note.

The script may not be quite as clever as writer Zach Helm likes to think ("From Pirandello, to Brecht, to Wilder, to Stoppard, to Woody Allen, to Wes Anderson," he writes in the press material,"we an see the progression of a contemporary, self-aware, reality-bending and audience-involving wave in dramatic literature … ‘Stranger than Fiction' is simply my abstraction of it."), and the logic of the plot falls apart from time to time, but the premise is so interesting that it cannot fail to intrigue. This is less because of the collision of author and character — an old conceit that is not by itself enough to carry a movie ("Monkeybone," anyone?) — than for what the film has to say (or, just as often, imply) about the way we all have to struggle with the uncertainty of life and the inevitability of death.

As if that weren't substance enough, "Stranger than Fiction" also addresses the question of what exactly the big man upstairs (if He exists) thinks He is doing. The clue that this somewhat meaty topic is part of the movie's agenda comes in a brief aside from Karen, barely audible, and over in a second or two, in which she tells a TV interviewer that she doesn't believe in God. It's a moment that is easy to overlook (perhaps deliberately so), but it's surely a hint that this film's meditations on the nature and responsibilities of creation are intended to take its audience into a more provocative place than the self-indulgence of most Hollywood musings on the creative process.

Karen, unlike certain other creators I could mention, is finally forced to dispense with the dishonest alibi of free will and come to terms both with her creation — her Harold — and with the actual human cost of the destiny she has sketched out for him. She might look at what she has written and see that it is good, but will that be enough for her to live with Harold's tragic, but artistically pleasing, death?

If all this sounds, you know, a little heavy for a date movie, don't worry. Like the far better "Groundhog Day," it's perfectly possible to enjoy popcorn, hormones, and "Stranger Than Fiction" without being bothered too much by the deeper issues lurking just below the sheen of its romantic comedy surface. Besides, like "Groundhog Day," this film offers audiences the engrossing spectacle of a comedy icon (then Bill Murray, now Mr. Ferrell) delivering a performance of unexpected delicacy, subtlety, and depth. Mr. Ferrell disdains the lazy cliché of the solitary, dried-up, and obsessively compulsive tax drone in favor of a far richer, sometimes even tragic portrait. As a result, Harold's growth and transformation (bolstered by terrific set design and clever cinematography) is all the more convincing and, yes, touching.

The former Ron Burgundy is not let down by the supporting cast. Ms. Gyllenhaal's Ana (the anarchist baker) may come across, initially at least, as being as smug, self-righteous, and preachy as all the other anarchist bakers you've ever met, but her warmth, smile, and not-quite-explicable sexiness make it easy to understand just why Harold is so smitten. Ms. Thompson, meanwhile, is splendid as usual, even if, as usual, it's impossible to avoid the impression that her acting is Acting with a capital "A," acting that is trying just that little bit too hard. By contrast, as Jules Hilbert, the professor of English who helps Harold work his way through this most unusual of literary conundrums, Dustin Hoffman's seemingly effortless performance purrs along like the smoothest and most expensive of engines. Even if it's fueled by occasional pieces of ham, it's so entertaining that it would be churlish to complain.

In fact, on balance much the same could be said for "Stranger than Fiction" as a whole, so go and see it, but if you — or your date — are diabetic, cynical, or just lacking a sweet tooth, it might be just as well to leave before the sugary excess of that final scene.

Eat, Drink, and Wait for the Revolution

Marie Antoinette 

The New York Sun, October 20, 2006

There's a strangely wise conversation in 1971's "Harold and Maude," when ancient, youthful Maude explains her radical past to youthful, ancient Harold: "Big issues. Liberty. Rights. Justice. Kings died, kingdoms fell.I don't regret the kingdoms, but I miss the kings."

Sofia Coppola, I suspect, feels much the same way. Her bewitching, delirious, pastels-and-candy "Marie Antoinette" combines a sardonic critique of the Versailles system with a wry, understanding portrait of those kings, queens, and courtiers who were supported, ensnared and, ultimately, doomed by it.

We catch our first glimpse of the great palace as Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) arrives from Austria to take up residence as bride to Louis (Jason Schwartzman), the dauphin of France. The architectural wonders (lovingly, lavishly photographed, this movie is a treat for the eyes, and flatters a court that was far grubbier than anything Ms. Coppola permits us to see) are an illusion, however, nothing more than camouflage for a complex instrument of social control, carefully sustained by baroque protocol, ornate coercion, and elaborately manipulated human nature. This idea of the court as a mechanism is one that Ms. Coppola underpins with frequent long distance shots of its massive architecture and immense gardens. They dwarf the few humans visible, reducing them all, even that lovely, bewildered queen, to dots, tiny, insignificant, nothing more than cogs in a machine.

But it's a machine that is unable to adapt. Like the fountains we see dancing their perfect dance in deserted gardens deep into the Versailles dusk, the passing of time has reduced the court's immaculate choreography to a wasteful irrelevance. Louis XIV had designed this system as a way of harnessing the pre-modern appeal of monarchy, an institution as old as the apes, to the construction of a recognizably modern, centralized French state, but after 100 years, modernity itself has become the enemy. In an enormously more developed society l'état could no longer be Louis, any Louis. Louis XVI may have been an awkward, amiable dunderhead (Mr. Schwartzman's performance, channeling Robert Morley from the 1938 version of this tale, is sympathetic, touching, and, ultimately heart-breaking), but even the Sun King would have struggled to shine in the France of the 1780s.

If Ms. Coppola's depiction of the consequences is something of a caricature (it is), there's more than a touch of truth in the way she depicts these ill-fated, oblivious aristocrats as up-market, somewhat bitchy Eloi playing their games amid the relics of a civilization that has long since had its day. Their rituals and rules have descended into self-parody and farce, something beautifully illustrated by a (historically accurate) scene in which a naked Marie Antoinette stands shivering as various ladies-in-waiting work out among themselves who has the right to hand the queen her shift. Likewise, while the director exaggerates the extent to which the queen's set lived apart from the rest of the world, she only does so to emphasize just how dangerously isolated they had become from what was going on outside their self-absorbed, parasitical, magical court.

A sequence filmed at the chateau that played host to Marie Antoinette's rural idylls makes this point perfectly: Surrounded by golden greenery, golden friends, and golden sunlight, the golden queen, gorgeous in white muslin, sits happily reading Rousseau's paeans to the simple life, the glories of nature, and, for all I know, the general niceness of mankind. The idea that the writings of that same Jean-Jacques might inspire the revolutionaries who were later to execute her, her husband, and, for that matter, tear one of those golden friends quite literally apart did not, could not, occur to her.

Of course, it's important to understand that this film is not, as Ms. Dunst has admitted, "a ‘Masterpiece Theatre,' educational Marie Antoinette biopic." It is, the actress said, "kind of like a history of feelings rather than a history of facts," a description which is kind of like nauseating, but is also kind of like right.

If anything, Ms. Dunst is too modest. By Hollywood standards, this movie is well researched, its sins mainly those of omission (although not entirely: Contrary to what's shown in the movie, the real queen drank very little), not that those are trivial. This is a Marie Antoinette without the necklace (that scandal is never mentioned), but who keeps her neck. The last three to four years of her life, years in which she finally achieved a certain tragic dignity, don't feature at all, but perhaps they don't need to.After all, we witness her refusal to abandon Louis as the revolution grew, and we see the bravery with which she faced the mob that had stormed Versailles.The rest is history.

This movie is best seen as a wild, inventive and inspired riff, stylized and stylish, on the life and legend of Marie Antoinette. At times it's playful: There's enough cake in this film to reduce even Monty Python's Mr. Creosote to jelly; but purists should relax — it's made clear that she never said, you know, that. At times it's moving, as Ms. Coppola depicts the plight of a young girl (14 when she married), lost in translation (sound familiar?), wrenched from her home and dumped into a strange and sporadically hostile land, a future queen maybe, but a pawn in Europe's dynastic game, and a queen who would have to wait seven years to mate with a king who just didn't know how (his Habsburg brother-in-law, played by Danny Huston, eventually explains). And at times, often involving appearances by the splendid Asia Argento as Madame Du Barry, that most rococo of royal mistresses, it's very funny indeed.

And yes, Ms. Coppola's maligned decision to add 1980s rock music to the soundtrack works surprisingly well. We remember the 1980s, if not always accurately, as an age of abandon, extravagance, reaction, and revolution, impressions conjured by hearing those old tunes again, impressions that do rather well for the 1780s, too. But for all this film's cleverness, it would have not succeeded without the extraordinary, almost hypnotic, performance by Ms. Dunst (her best since, well, Ms. Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides") as the fabulously indulged, fabulously abused Marie Antoinette of Ms. Coppola's vision, driven quite literally to distraction by the weird predicament in which she found herself.

Oh, don't worry that this film was booed at Cannes earlier this year. It means nothing. The French aren't the French unless they have Marie Antoinette to kick around.

Reign Storm

The Queen

The New York Sun, September, 29, 2006

Within a few weeks, American moviegoers will be given the chance to wallow in the glitz, glamour, and guillotines of Sofia Coppola's "Marie Antoinette." For now they will have to make do with a dowdier, more discreet queen, the one who has been reigning in England for more than half a century now, a monarch who shows every sign of hanging on to her crown and, thankfully, the head on which it sits.

In all the decades of Elizabeth II's painstakingly (and sometimes painfully) dutiful, conscientious, and, yes, tenacious reign, there has only really been one brief, bizarre period, of just about a week, when there was the slightest danger that the Windsors might, like so many of their less fortunate relatives in so many less fortunate countries, be asked to pack their bags. It's that interlude, the disturbing, absurd and even slightly frightening days that followed the death of Princess Diana that is the focus of "The Queen," a compelling new docudrama by British director Stephen Frears that opens the 44th New York Film Festival on Saturday. It's easily the best film I've seen this year.

From that tunnel in Paris to Earl Spencer in Westminster Abbey, these events are still so familiar that Mr. Frears is left free to concentrate on the most interesting aspect of the story: the plight of a monarch at bay, puzzled, hurt, and confused by the behavior of a nation, her nation, that appeared to have changed, almost overnight, beyond all recognition. The quiet, disciplined, loyal, stoical Brits of the Queen's youth, of the Blitz, of so much more, had vanished, to be replaced by a volatile, hysterical, and vindictive mob caught up in a self-indulgent bacchanalia of grief for a princess they never really knew. Suddenly Elizabeth's virtues — restraint, self-control, that famous sense of duty — had come to be seen as vices by a population baying for her to show that she "cared" by faking tears over the death of the more "genuine" Diana.

The movie itself begins about four months earlier, setting the scene with Tony Blair's 1997 landslide election victory and then the first audience between the novice prime minister (a puppyish Michael Sheen) and the veteran queen (Helen Mirren), coolly charming, intimidating, and on top of her game. It's beautifully observed and very funny (Peter Morgan's script is a consistent delight, meticulously researched and, I suspect, largely accurate), but Dame Helen really comes into her own (Oscar! Oscar!) as events begin to engulf the embattled monarch.

Helped by the hairdo that launched a million stamps, her own surprisingly strong facial resemblance to the Queen and, dare I say it, more than a little padding (there goes my knighthood), the former Inspector Tennison turns out to make an uncannily realistic Elizabeth II. More precisely, Dame Helen plays a woman playing the Queen, an approach that goes a long way to explaining why she is so remarkably convincing. Monarchy is a performance. The Queen's tragedy is that it's a role she almost certainly never wanted. The Queen's genius is that she does it so well.

Nevertheless, watch Her Majesty carefully enough (as many of us English tend to do) and it's just possible to detect that the smile, the wave, the small talk, and all the rest of it are acts of will, the work of an actress, a pro, trapped in a role that will last a lifetime. And in her performance, Dame Helen catches this perfectly. Every now and then she lets glimpses of the real Elizabeth, that long-vanished Lilibet, peep through, and then, abruptly, deliberately, the face freezes, the mask is put back on, and safe, comfortable distance returns.

When, in the middle of the crisis, she lets her guard drop just enough to ask her mother (Sylvia Syms, who rather surprisingly chooses to portray the Queen Mum as a sitcom gran) for advice, that advice is, like that of her husband (James Cromwell playing Prince Philip as a caricature of himself, which of course, he really is) absolutely hopeless. An agonized, nervous Prince Charles (Alex Jennings, splendidly twitchy) and her principal adviser have the right instincts, but are too intimidated by her to do much good. The old pro is, she discovers, isolated, alone, adrift. The script no longer works, and the audience is out of control.

Eventually, help, and a new scriptwriter, shows up in the shape of an increasingly assured Tony Blair, a master politician with an instinctive understanding of the new Britain and, critically, what the royals would have to do to win back public favor. He's the self-proclaimed modernizer on a mission to transform what was left of the Queen's old England, but he's also astute enough to want the monarchy to survive, and, despite the gibes of his colleagues and his wife, fair enough to appreciate all that the Queen had done for her realm.

As for the woman whose death triggered the whole crisis, her image flits and flickers through the movie in clip after clip of archive footage, the only one of the film's protagonists not to be played by an actor. It's a clever device: It adds to the sense of authenticity and serves also as a pointed reminder of just how much that lost princess was fantasy, creation, accomplice, and victim. The texture of that footage — faded, grainy, herky-jerky, recognizably different from the rest of the film, almost ghostlike in impact — only serves to underline that Diana had gone, never to return.

In the end, as we all know, the fever broke. The film concludes as it began with Mr. Blair visiting Buckingham Palace. No longer the novice, he is confident, too confident, perhaps, a politician at the peak of his popularity, and angling, maybe, for a word of thanks for all his help. What he gets instead is a warning on the fickleness of our age. "One day," the Queen says, "quite suddenly and without warning, the same thing will happen to you." And now, of course, it has. Meanwhile, the monarchy itself endures and Diana's memory fades. On the fifth anniversary of her death, one writer noted that the gardens of Althorp (the Spencer family home) and Kensington Palace were "deserted."

"The public," he wrote, "had moved on. They were now too busy 'never forgetting' other people."

Look but Don't Touch

David Thomson: Nicole Kidman

The New York Sun, September 5, 2006

Right at the beginning of this mad, maddening, provocative, and sometimes beautifully written book, "Nicole Kidman" (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $24.95), David Thomson admits that he "loves" Nicole Kidman, a confession that is both essential and superfluous. Skeptical as we all should be about long-distance psychoanalysis, Mr. Thomson's book is more love letter than biography, both a meditation on obsession and a monument to it. He writes:

There she is in profile, her right shoulder raised, her chin lowered … with just a flap of brown cloth covering her breasts and a considerable expanse of white skin … a white that has a streak of icy blue in it, a rare milky hue. ... It is the quality of flesh you find in Ireland still, and in religious paintings of the Renaissance, and it is a mysterious fusion of the spiritual and the erotic — as pale as Cranach.

To read those words is to feel a twinge of sympathy for poor Mrs. Thomson, a frisson of anxiety for pretty Nicole, and a moment of worry for President Bush — 25 years after John Hinckley, we all know that love letters to actresses can sometimes have alarming consequences. But it's too soon to call the FBI or issue a restraining order: Mr. Thomson stresses that his love for Ms. Kidman will endure only so long as they don't meet.

That may be just as well. When eventually they do make contact (mercifully, only by phone), Ms. Kidman comes across as "a languid, superior, but amused prefect who had called a naughty boy to her study to see what he had been up to," an image that conjures up a mixture of repression, guilt, and vaguely masochistic peculiarity that may strike some (if not me — I am, like Mr. Thomson, British-born) as very English. It is an image that is, he supposes, deliberate: "[S]he tries to be what you want her to be."

Mr. Thomson is simply (so to speak) projecting, but in doing so, he nicely illustrates one of his book's wider themes. Movies are collective fantasy, their stars empty vessels into which audiences pour their dreams, longings, and delusions, a role far more demanding than any performed up on that beguiling, gorgeous screen. When Mr. Thomson claims that his love would not survive a face-to-face with his "fragrant," "ripe," "sexy," "elegant," "hot," "glorious," "ravishing" heroine, we almost trust him: He understands the danger of letting reality collide with fantasy, and he believes that cinema celebrity turns its creatures into people incapable of normal interaction.

If you think all this might be way, way too much of a stretch, you may have a point. Sometimes a trip to the cinema is just popcorn and 90 minutes in the dark, sometimes stardom is just a job. Regardless, don't let that you put you off buying this book, which is a wild, berserk ride, swerving here, careering there, and narrowly missing the ditch on more occasions than I can count. But as with "The Whole Equation," Mr. Thomson's garrulous, insistent, and unashamedly eccentric history of Hollywood, it's well worth hanging on until the end. Author of the wonderful, essential, and captivating "Biographical Dictionary of Film," Mr. Thomson has a profound knowledge of the movies and a love for them that exceeds even his adoration of the goddess from Down Under. It's impossible to read " Nicole Kidman" (how he must revel in the fact that the two of them will be linked forever, if only bibliographically) without learning far more about film, and looking at film, than the notion of a work dedicated to the life and times of a "sexy beanpole" with "commas for breasts" would suggest.

With its odd mix of biography, sharp cultural commentary, acute film criticism, and not so concealed longing, " Nicole Kidman," as should be evident by now, is neither conventional showbiz bio, nor tabloid exposé. With the exception of one deliciously prurient detail about the filming of "Eyes Wide Shut," gossip-hounds will be disappointed. If its writer is occasionally pretentious (he is), immodest (all those pages where he suggests how scripts could have been improved), and too prone to drool over Nicole's "very lovely, supple body," it only adds to this book's ramshackle, discursive, opinionated, and besotted charm. Besides, even when spouting nonsense, Mr. Thomson is more informative and entertaining than most writers. Far removed from the arid monotony of film-school Bauhaus, the sparkling rococo of his prose is a joy to read.

Above all, don't miss his sly, clever summaries of Ms. Kidman's oeuvre, particularly of those shockers he believes to be unworthy of his muse's talents, such as "Malice," a fiasco he describes as ending up shipwrecked "on the wilder shores of denouement." That's a phrase so neat that I can even forgive Mr. Thomson for disclosing his dream of Nicole as Belle de Jour being toyed with by a Gestapo officer and an "elderly Chinaman."

But can Mrs. Thomson?

The Descent

The New York Sun, August 4, 2006

If you're taking a horror buff, psychopath, or someone who is too sedated to care, "The Descent" is an ideal date movie. The work of Neil Marshall, a British director best known for 2002's "Dog Soldiers," "The Descent" (a UK hit last year) is a cut, slash, and a gouge above Mr. Marshall's earlier effort — a dank, dreadful, and weirdly popular werewolf movie that, tellingly, seems to have a found a regular berth on the Sci-Fi channel. A savage drama of spelunking gone awry, Mr. Marshall's new film covers some of the same underground as 2005's "The Cave," but with far more style, chills, thrills, panache, and gore. Admittedly that's no great challenge, but there are times, notably in its tense and claustrophobic first half, when "The Descent" ascends to the level of classic horror.

There's nothing particularly unusual about the story line. Six yuppie women — spunky but too headstrong to learn very much from "Deliverance," "Wrong Turn," "Pumpkinhead," or any number of other cautionary tales set in Appalachia — decide to bond with a caving trip to that peculiarly dangerous part of the world. Making matters worse, the not-so divine Juno (nicely played by Natalie Mendoza), the rather problematic leader of the group, secretly decides to change the destination to a remote cave complex that has never been explored before. Or so she thinks.

The descent itself, deep into the caves and deeper into trouble, is brilliantly and grippingly filmed. You'll feel that you're there. You'll wish you didn't. Then it gets even worse for our six luckless ladies as they discover that uncooperative geology and one really nastily broken leg are the least of their problems. They have company down there, bad company, a tribe of feral Golems, descendants of cavemen too idle to leave the cave, who have evolved in a thoroughly violent direction.

Eventually so does the movie, as it swaps suspense for splatter, slaughter, cannibal snacking, and some of the most satisfying images of human-on-monster combat since that bus ride in the remake of "Dawn of the Dead." Adding to the merriment, Mr. Marshall throws in a few film geek moments with references to "Aliens," "Pitch Black," and, less predictably, "Carrie." For my part, I couldn't help thinking of the cave-dwelling Morlocks preying on the Eloi in George Pal's version of "The Time Machine." On this occasion, however, the Eloi are smart, in great shape, and have clearly studied "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." They know how to fight back.

Mann Overboard

Miami Vice

The New York Sun, July 28, 2006

It would be nice to believe that someone, somewhere, someday is going to do a good job translating a much-missed, much-loved television series of my youth onto the big screen, but it's proving a long, long wait. "Bewitched" failed to enchant, "Charlie's Angels" was the work of the devil, "Lost in Space" was adrift in self-importance, "Starsky and Hutch" turned a decent drama into a bad farce, and "The Dukes of Hazzard" transformed a likable hayseed comedy into, well, words fail me.

Despite this dispiriting track record of mediocrity, junk, and exhausted imaginations, it was impossible not be intrigued by the news that Michael Mann, the executive producer of the original "Miami Vice" and the man most responsible for that show's extraordinary panache, was teaming up again with Anthony Yerkovich, the series' creator, to bring Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett to the movies.With its groundbreaking visual imagery, use of music, and sheer sense of style, "Miami Vice" was television as it had never been seen before: It transformed the notions of what the medium could achieve, and, while it was at it, triggered a fashion revolution and helped define an era's idea of itself.

As if that wasn't enough, Mr. Mann has repeatedly demonstrated that there is more than one clip to his Uzi. "Miami Vice" was followed by the underappreciated "Crime Story,"and, with his effective and unsettling "Manhunter," he gave moviegoers their first taste, so to speak, of Hannibal Lecter.While not all the films he has directed have worked (the last of "The Last of the Mohicans" couldn't come too quickly for me), "Heat," "Collateral," and (despite its preachiness) "The Insider"all confirmed that Mr. Mann's distinctive aesthetic vision and narrative flair have made him one of the most interesting presences in contemporary American cinema.

Maybe it's yet another sign of Mr. Mann's willingness to innovate that this new "Miami Vice" bears so little resemblance to the original show. On the other hand, he may simply have felt that he had no choice: A retro movie set in the 1980s would have been pointless (what more was there to say?), while too literal an updating would have run the risk of turning Sonny Crockett into an Austin Powers in linen, pastel, and stubble. But why stick with the "Miami Vice" name at all? Sadly, that, at least, must have been an easy decision: It remains, deservedly, a powerful brand, and the entertainment industry is nothing if not a greedy business. Mr. Mann's new movie is thus being marketed as the "contemporization" of an old favorite, an ugly word for a worse idea, and something that will give audiences an utterly misleading impression of what they are about to see. It may, of course, make commercial sense, but reviving the old name distracts from what Mr. Mann has done (and detracts from what he could have done) with this film and is, artistically at least, a mistake.

Even more damagingly, Mr. Mann seems to have used the brand's revival as an excuse to revert to the original series' emphasis of style over content.Within the time constraints of an under-an-hour television show, that didn't matter: Style alone could be content enough. But during the course of more than two hours of movie, the absence of a compelling story line might be enough to drive some of the film's audience to the drugs that its heroes are trying so hard to impound.To be sure, when it comes to images of startling loveliness, this movie (helped by the inspired and, that word again — groundbreaking — use of high-definition cameras), does, typically for Mr. Mann, not disappoint, even if his highly romanticized paean to Havana (actually filmed in Uruguay) will probably jar with anyone familiar with the realities of life under Castro. But images, however gorgeous, are not enough, even when punctuated by the spectacularly choreographed gunplay that has long been another Mann trademark, to sustain a full-length film. And in "Miami Vice," they don't.

As for what plot there is, Mr. Mann doesn't go into details and nor will I, but suffice to say it involves drug smuggling, the Aryan Brotherhood, undercover sleuthing, corrupt governments, international criminals, portentous dialogue, speedboats, and a doomed affair. It's also painted on a far broader canvas than the Miami 'n Medellin of the old series, a gesture apparently intended to show that crime, like so much else, is globalizing rapidly, something that should be a revelation to only the slowest among us.

But the key theme of this movie, supposedly, is what going undercover can mean to the cops who choose to do so."You can go too deep," Mr. Mann has explained,"and you have to rely on your partner to pull you back from the edge. As Tubbs says to Crockett,‘There's undercover, and then there's which way is up?"' This could be an interesting enough, if not exactly novel, topic (it featured, incidentally, in the original TV series), but Mr. Mann never gives it the attention it deserves. Compared with the subtle examination of the personalities of the principal characters in "Heat" and "Collateral," Crockett's supposedly existential angst is treated cursorily and comes across as little more than a moment or two of indecision, irritation, and sadness.

Much of the fault for this lies with Colin Farrell's leaden Crockett (an impression reinforced both by his somewhat Neanderthal appearance and a most unfortunate moustache) and his amazing lack of chemistry with his love interest, the strikingly attractive Gong Li (the Chinese actress so remarkable in "Red Sorghum" and "Raise the Red Lantern"), who herself appears forlorn and confused throughout this film. For that matter, there's not much of a bond either between Crockett and Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), that much-vaunted partner of his, who is, remember, meant to care enough about his pal to be "pulling him back from the edge," despite the fact that a more natural response to some of Crockett's behavior would be to shove him over the nearest convenient precipice.

Equally — and it's an example of the way that memories of the old show detract from the new movie — Jamie Foxx, so good as the cabbie in "Collateral," essentially reprises much of that role in a fine performance as a straight-arrow detective that will still leave the nostalgic pining for Philip Michael Thomas and his quirky, more oddball Ricardo. Fans of the TV series will have to make do instead with another "Collateral" graduate, Barry Shabaka Henley, whose impressive (if underused) Lieutenant Castillo hints at the memorably daunting Edward James Olmos of two decades ago.

But if they are to make the most of this movie, those fans would do better to leave nostalgia to re-runs and DVD collections and just try to accept Mr. Mann's movie on its own merits — as a lesser, flawed, but reasonably entertaining and occasionally intriguing police procedural by a director who has shown that he can do far, far better than this.

And next time he probably will.