From the Sublime to the (Effectively) Ridiculous
Reviews by Ken Burke Napoleon
Abel
Gance’s 1927 silent (at times multi-screen) masterpiece biography of the early
years of the infamous French dictator, presented here as the popular conquering hero.
21 Jump Street
Maybe I could get into this one better if I had been a fan
of the original TV series but let’s just say that in this case nostalgia (and
narrative interest) is a limited pleasure.
Friends with Kids
Contemporary couples complicate their lives with children
and romantic missteps in a mildly amusing story that you’ve seen done by Woody
Allen and Nora Ephron.
If you take a quick glace at the photo on your left you might first think that I’m way overdue in writing a review of this year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, The Artist, assuming that this a shot of Best Actor Oscar winner Jean Dujardin and everyone’s new favorite dog, Uggie, but that’s wrong because I already posted that review here on January 4. Instead this is a portrait of French film master Abel Gance (and an unidentified pooch), the indulgent but rightfully celebrated auteur of one of the silent era’s masterpieces, the 1927 mini-biography of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. I say mini-biography ironically in regard to this maxi-film, now restored to 5 ½ hours, close to some versions of its full original length, because it deals with only a short amount of Napoleon’s life: a bit of his childhood, his early military days, his passion for the goals of the French Revolution, and his successful invasion of Italy. Gance makes ample screen events of these few years in the life of one of the great figures of history (the boys’ school snowball fight in 1783, then the early years of the revolution from 1789 to 1796) rather than exploring his later career and conquest of most of Europe because those topics were originally planned to be covered in five subsequent films, which never happened because Gance poured all of his resources into this first one, sealing his cinematic reputation but essentially ending the upward arc of his active career, although he continued making other works and restructuring versions of Napoleon for years thereafter.
Gance died in 1981 but not before seeing a substantial refurbishment of his triumph, overseen by British film historian, archivist, and preservationist Kevin Brownlow in 1979, which was then shortened into a “mere” 4 hours and toured the country with backing from Francis Ford Coppola and live music from a new score by Coppola’s father, Carmine, in 1980. Since then, though, it’s been impossible to see even this version in the U.S. (although you can buy a used VHS of it from Amazon if you have an extra $300 to invest) until now when Brownlow and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival have provided possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see as much of the original as can be located, shown in probably the closest approximation as can be imagined to the original Paris debut on a large screen with a live orchestra at Oakland, CA’s splendid art deco Paramount Theatre. The problem is that it’s only a 4-showing run—March 24-25, 31, April 1—with 2 already done so for the benefit of those who might even consider seeing this treasure after reading this review let me move on into the specifics.
After the initial sequence at the military academy (seemingly run by priests; now there’s a combination that Jon Stewart and other comic political commentators could have a field day with), where the boy general shows his “fiercely proud” skill at imperial attitude, courage, and battle maneuvers but is constantly taunted by his classmates because of his “coarse” Corsican heritage leading to an academic life of seclusion and true companionship only with his pet eagle, we jump into Napoleon’s early military career where he brings his sister back to Corsica for a visit, only to be run off the island in a daring escape (where he uses a French flag as a sail for his tiny boat) from locals who would prefer to cast their lot with the English, although Bonaparte stands up to them in a defiant manner even when outnumbered (in a manner that recalled to me Clint Eastwood’s William Munny in the equally-marvelous Unforgiven [Eastwood, 1992]). After being rescued he returns to Corsica to protect other members of his family, but then we shift into the French Revolution with its glorious ideals and over-zealous butchery of anyone suspected of being oppositional. After this backfires and brings about the deaths of former leaders Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, Napoleon has a mystical meeting with their ghosts in the empty hall of the Directory, the chamber of the new government, where he pledges to uphold their original ideals. In this portion of Gance’s cinematic biography Bonaparte then heads off to command the army which will subdue Italy and begin his long march to mastery of most of Europe. You certainly couldn’t ask for a more praiseworthy presentation of a glorified future monarch unless you don’t share Gance’s veneration of Napoleon, evident from the opening frames and rising to a massive crescendo several hours later. If this guy had taken himself any more seriously he would have had to start building his own statues when he was still in military school because he never seems to have a moment of self-doubt, only anger and frustration when others fail to share his unclouded vision.
Vision is something that Gance gleefully plays with throughout this film so that even a 21st century audience can appreciate this Artist precursor (which was first released in the actual year that our most recent Best Picture Oscar winner is set), even in its black and white “silent” reality—which is never silent thanks to the magnificent score created and conducted by Carl Davis leading the talented Oakland East Bay Symphony. In keeping with traditions that date back to the earliest narrative silent films (such as those of George Méliès, also recently celebrated in today’s cinema in Hugo [Martin Scorsese, 2011]) Gance enhances the fundamental dimensions of the old format film image with frequent use of soft-edge irising to change the squarish shape on screen to more of an oval and changes the monochrome of the older film stock with segments dyed in the colors of red, blue, and a golden-toned sepia. But you could see colorized film stock in the early turn-of-the-20th century fantasies of Méliès or Edwin S. Porter’s more naturalistic The Great Train Robbery (1903) and irising in many of the first-decade 1900s films of D.W. Griffith. Where Gance ups the ante considerably is in creating great energy within scenes through the occasional use of: (1) a subjective camera point of view as we see the world through the eyes of a character as the camera is carried through action or mounted on horseback, (2) a frantic editing pace where each shot is mere seconds (or less) in length, intensifying the movement already inherent within each frame, (3) superimpositions of two or sometimes many more images within a single frame that gives a sense of Cubistic multi-perspective but without the constant angle-changing cutaways used by Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian master contemporary with Gance, or (4) multiple images contained in their personal frames within the larger film frame, breaking the master image up into 4 or 9 quadrants (see example three photos below) as well as a few shots that divide the image into diptych-or-triptych-type juxtapositions within the traditional 1.33:1 frame.
Building upon this last visual strategy, Gance breaks the cinematic bank—especially for 1927—with his three-screen Polyvision process in the last 20 minutes of Napoleon where footage shot with 3 cameras is projected onto 3 side-by-side screens (with the wing screens covered by black curtains not revealed until their climatic moment in the Oakland presentation) to produce either reasonably synchronized panoramic vistas as with Napoleon surveying his troops prior to the Italian campaign as seen in this photo or intentional juxtapositions of separate images to provide simultaneous montage, either with mirror-image wing shots flanking a different subject in the center or a few instances of 3 completely different shots working in combination. (This type of multi-image artistry would go on to be used in magnificent World’s Fair pavilions and business presentations, as well as the spectacular multi-screen visual ballets of Josef Svoboda’s Laterna Magika theatre in Prague, from the 1950s into the present. I was privileged to travel the world and see thousands of the gorgeous descendants of Napoleon’s finale in my role as Head Judge and/or President of the Association for Multi-Image International, 1981-1996). While we’ve become conditioned to wide-screen single projector images in movie theatres since the 1950s, there are few current opportunities today outside of business meetings and expensive but exclusive car launches to see independent images interact on a long horizontal canvas so I encourage anyone who can to seek these out at the occasional World’s Fair or the even less occasional screening of an ancestor of these multiple-image beauties in Napoleon.
This brings me to the urgency in promoting the final two screenings of this spectacular event, on Saturday, March 31 and Sunday, April 1 (no foolin’) because after this coming weekend there aren’t any more options in the foreseeable future to see Gance’s ultimate accomplishment. Kevin Brownlow (to the left in the photo on the right, along with his longtime cinematic companion) effectively devoted decades of his life to this project and has only this rare opportunity to showcase his dedication and devotion to Gange’s triumph (along with the great pleasure for the audience to hear the great Carl Davis score performed with excellent gusto by wonderful musicians who never miss a beat throughout their multi-hour marathon). The only problems you might have with taking advantage of this opportunity are: (1) location, because if you’re not in the San Francisco Bay Area then travel here on short notice might be unlikely (obviously not a limitation for well-known critic Leonard Maltin whom I saw in the lobby last Saturday), (2) time, because the screenings start at 1:30 each day but with intermissions and dinner break you won’t be done until 9:40 (and just because the dinner break is generous—almost 2 hours, with lots of quality eateries within walking distance—doesn’t mean you can afford to lose track of time; I didn’t make a reservation anywhere so with the wait for a table I literally just got back to the theatre and sat down as Part 3 began because the screening is very precise in its schedule) plus whatever time it takes you to travel to 19th and Broadway in downtown Oakland, and (3) cost, with the rear balcony seats at $40 up through front orchestra at $120, purchased either at the Paramount box office if you can travel to it or through Ticketmaster with additional processing fee (and if you plan on doing Will Call for the tickets be sure to bring the credit card you bought them with because you have to put it into a machine that prints out your entry passes; hold on to those tickets because you’ll need to show them to re-enter after dinner).
One alternative would have been to attend a more affordable lecture by Brownlow at Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive at 7pm on Friday night, March 30, but I just found out that it’s now sold out. If by chance you already have a ticket for that event, he’s going to talk about his restoration process and show clips from the film accompanied by pianist extraordinaire Judy Rosenberg, who frequently provides music for silent film screenings in the SF Bay Area. Otherwise, you’re back to viewing the real film either now or at some other performance somewhere some other day, or there's the hope that this marvelous restoration will be available on DVD in the future although to get the proper impact of the triptych at the conclusion you’ll have to give up a lot of video screen display for the several previous hours of old format 4x3 ratio (like the analogue TV set that you likely replaced a few years ago). Bottom line: attend the film screening this weekend if you can. (If you can’t and still want a similar bombastic spectacle I guess you can pay about as much as you would for a balcony seat and watch WWE’s annual Wrestlemania and decide for yourself whether John Cena or The Rock [Dwayne Johnson in his movie credits] is more Napoleonic; that extravaganza starts at 4pm on Sunday if you’re interested so check your local pay-per-view options and pick up a keg or two of beer.)
As much as I’m praising this unique performance of Napoleon, though, I have to admit that as a film which you might see someday on DVD I can’t agree with Brownlow that it may be the greatest one ever made; it’s grandiose but not fully as grand as it might be, even in Gance's conception. Certainly it’s one of the longest and most spectacular of all films, but there are sections of it—about an hour’s worth, especially Napoleon’s siege of the French port of Toulon to reclaim it from English interlopers trying to take advantage of a country in disarray after its revolution, and the events leading up to Napoleon’s marriage to Joséphine de Beauharnais—that are there, in my opinion, more to present a complete restoration than to provide the best edited narrative of the events being depicted, especially when compared to the magnificent passion created by the scenes of the early days of the Revolution, the chaos that ensues during the Reign of Terror, the visit to Napoleon in the empty government chamber by the ghosts of the executed revolutionary leaders (including Gance himself playing the fierce guillotine-happy Louis Saint-Just), and the swelling final multi-image moments of the Italian campaign, when shots of the screaming eagle reappear to hasten the finale. Further, given the inspiration that Gance had in making this film from other monumental, multi-hour precedents (especially Griffith’s Intolerance [1916]—also with lots of tinted footage, active editing among its four historically-distinct stories [but no superimpositions or multi-image work; Gance truly is the master of this approach], and immense full-scale stagings [including Griffith’s reconstruction of the grand palaces of Babylon]—and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [1926] with its full-scale mammoth depictions of underground workers in a dystopian futuristic sci-fi setting that’s even grimmer than the social structure of The Hunger Games [Gary Ross—review will be posted next week]) and the frantic montage inspiration from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, I just can’t put Napoleon in my all-time Top 10 (below) because, despite its innovations and impact when seen as intended thanks to Brownlow and Davis, I just think it had too many almost-immediate direct antecedents compared to the others that I still—arguably, I admit—feel exceed it, if only by a small amount. (And I’d love to see Intolerance, Potemkin, and The Passion of Joan of Arc presented in such a grand-theatrical-live-orchestral environment [or Metropolis for that matter—even though all of them have excellent DVD versions, but if given the Napoleon-ic treatment I think I’d continue to rate them higher than Gance’s tour-de-force, as I note here with my 1 to 10:
My all-time #1 is Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941]; followed by Persona [Ingmar Bergman, 1966]; Rules of the Game [Jean Renoir, 1939]; Intolerance [D.W. Griffith, 1916]; Battleship Potemkin [Sergei Eisenstein, 1925]; Blow-Up [Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966]; The Bicycle Thief [Vittorio De Sica, 1948]; 2001 [Stanley Kubrick, 1968]; City Lights [Charlie Chaplin, 1931]; and The Passion of Joan of Arc [Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928], each chosen in regard to what it achieved when it was produced with the technology and influences available at those times.)
I have no trouble giving this rendition of Napoleon my rare 5-star rating, a designation that it deserves because the film is truly a singular classic and a treasure that has been happily restored to our contemporary awareness through the invaluable work of Brownlow, but for me it occupies a high place in cinematic heaven but just not in the uppermost regions of the pantheon. Dispute that as you like, but even with my minor reservations I still say that if you have a chance to see Napoleon in its final two days in Oakland please avail yourself of the opportunity because the experience is well worth your time and effort despite the seemingly-offputting age of the film; you'll likely be amazed at what a sense of contemporary cinematic attitudes it has in many of its parts.
Now I’ll jump to 21 Jump Street, even though the more likely connection would seem to be to the other history-making movie in current release, The Hunger Games, which now holds the record for the biggest opening weekend of a non-sequel film and the biggest opening of a non-summer blockbuster (which may seem like a bit of a back-handed compliment but when the cash drawer holds $155 million after just the first few days you can be blasé about the specifics of your recognition). Still, I decided to let my Hunger pangs growl for a little longer to see how Katniss and crew hold up over a second week and instead offer quick looks at complete alternatives to Napoleon. If you’re not in the aesthetic, financial, or geographic zones needed for the Gance epic but instead would prefer some forgettably amusing diversion then both 21 Jump Street and Friends with Kids could be good choices as long as you enter with low expectations and the realization that the trailers have already told you everything you need to know about either one of them. What I suppose I could have known more about regarding Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s retake on the late-‘80s Fox TV series that launched Johnny Depp’s career is whether there was a humorous side to the original version of 21 Jump Street before it was turned into a comic clumsy buddy-fest with newly-minted cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill, also co-story developer) and Jenko (Channing Tatum, whose name always gets reversed in my head, although I guess that Tatum would be as odd a first name as Channing). As best I’ve learned through some brief browsing (because the movie’s not so great as to require any more than that) is Depp and company were very serious about their high-school-infiltration tasks so that the current version is not just a cinematic remake as with the Mission: Impossible films but also a send-up of their previous somber attitudes with some contemporary commentary thrown in for good measure. As you likely know by now, these guys are not shaping up to be anyone’s best first line of defense, so they essentially get demoted to undercover action because they can marginally pass for teenagers even though they’re 7 years past their senior proms (they’re also conjuring up for me a “here we go again” response, linked to previous young adult bonding stories such as Superbad [Greg Mottola, 2007], also starring Hill, and not-by-the book cop tales such as Bad Boys [Michael Bay, 1995] and its sequels [Bad Boys II (Bay, 2003), with #3 supposedly in the works], but there’s more egregious behavior of this sort to be studied later in Friends with Kids so I won’t complain too much just yet).
The movie is rife with stereotype shout-outs, notably the angry black cop, Capt. Dickson (Ice Cube), whose operation is so low-priority that he has to run it out of the Aroma of Christ church, a rundown Korean Christian building that could have housed Alice’s Restaurant (Arthur Penn, 1969) for an even earlier generation than in the ‘80s. Cube intentionally never lightens up on his new assignees, nor does he have reason to given their blatant disregard of his orders on how to bust the supplier of a dangerous new drug making the rounds of Sagan High School. (I’m clueless about whether this is a reference to astronomer/cosmologist Carl or not, but I’m in good company because Schmidt and Jenko are clueless about what’s happening in high school today misunderstanding everything about what’s cool, from the right car [ecofriendly alternative fuel] to how to wear a backpack [both straps, not just one].) Our lead cops are set up as stereotypes as well: Schmidt the brainy geek who was a tormented outcast back in the day, Jenko as the buff-but-dumb-jock member of the adolescent aristocracy. Now, through an opening-day identity mix-up they have to play to their weaknesses with Schmidt attempting to be a party animal while Jenko masquerades as an AP chemistry nerd. Some raucous laughs come out of this situation as long as you don’t object to the huge illicit party that they throw for the underage kids at Schmidt’s unsuspecting parents’ house or the inappropriate attraction he nurtures with new classmate Molly (Brie Larson). You might also get a little tired of the screaming-wheels freeway chase the guys have trying to escape the wrath of a motorcycle gang (the “One Percenters,” in a nice twist on this term), where the running gag is about what doesn’t blow up along the way, but it’s all well staged and paced, fun to watch as long as you accept that it’s just an expensive filler showpiece that’s essentially a setup for a weak resolution gag.
21 Jump Street goes for a much bigger resolution in its finale where we progress from our heavily-armed prom guys’ final night as high schoolers to: (1) the revelation that the long-sought-after supplier is—somewhat surprisingly—the goofy PE teacher, Mr. Walters (Rob Riggle)—Hey, you try to survive on a teacher’s salary in this slash-and-burn economy!—(2) another confrontation with the motorcycle gang (with great cameos from Depp himself and Peter DeLuise, reprising their TV series roles as Tom Hansen and Doug Penhall, who are now undercover DEA agents with a death scene worthy of [a low-budget, misdirected version of] Hamlet), (3) yet another crazy car chase scene, and (4) closure brought about through Jenko’s new-found chemistry skills. It’s all damn silly but well received at the box office (about $70 million after just a couple of weeks) and well structured to appeal to an audience ready for the raunchy, R-rated laughs that we’ve come to accept in our post-Hangover/Bridesmaids movie landscape. There’s nothing memorable here, but if you’re up for some stupid comedy and occasional gross-out antics (the end shot of Mr. Walters gives new meaning to the phrase “Eat me!” but what can you expect from a movie whose poster clarifies that in regard to our protagonists, “The only thing getting blown tonight is their cover”?) this might be just what you need.
What one of three main couples doesn’t want in Friends with Kids is the responsibility of marriage and full-time parenthood (although technically they’re a share-all-secrets non-couple relative to other romantic entanglements within a gaggle of closely-knit young adult New Yorkers), which seems to be eroding the relationships of their inner circle, but they are willing to settle for him, Jason (Adam Scott), impregnating her, Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt), so that they can trade off parenting duties while still chasing other coupling options. Westfeldt also wrote and directed this romantic comedy (although if comedies are supposed to be genres of social integration, as explored by Tom Schatz in his book Hollywood Genres [I’ve mentioned it before; where movies like this are concerned it will probably come up again], this one makes some good arguments that coupling is not only more difficult than our romantic fantasies would like for us to believe but also that certain couples aren’t great contributors to the gene pool, at least in their present combinations), so she’s put herself at center stage throughout the process, with mixed results. Her writing’s very sharp and witty (with brief, clever touches throughout, such as a snippet of Willy Nelson’s “Turn out the lights, the party’s over” as quick soundtrack commentary on a dead-end plot point), but I’m likely thinking that because so much of what happens here is so reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), as well as Nora Ephron’s script for Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989) which I always felt was also derivative of Allen’s famous NYC romantic tales. So, take your choice of seeing yet another version of these stories or just have yourself a little mini-marathon from your DVD collection/streaming options and save some of that cash that you didn’t spend on Napoleon.
I’d have to say that the closest resemblances of Friends with Kids to the films noted above would be to specific aspects of When Harry Met Sally, especially with the situations of friends choosing to break the sexual boundaries to become lovers (Jason and Julie, Harry and Sally), then drifting apart again (although in Friends that’s supposed to be part of the plan, but Julie initially has a hard time with it then hardens toward Jason when he finally gets interested), a married couple of the primary friends having problems but pulling back together when they see what difficulties the main characters are having on the open market (Alex [Chris O’Dowd] and Leslie [Maya Rudolph] in Friends with Kids, Jess [Bruno Kirby] and Marie [Carrie Fisher] in When Harry Met Sally), and the guy’s last-minute decision and rush across town (Manhattan in Harry and Sally’s story [and, for that matter, Woody Allen’s Isaac in Manhattan, which seems to be the—better—genesis of both of the later films], all the way out to Brooklyn for our current Friends) so that the intended passion-fruits can be united in time for the final credits. But there are other aspects about the tone of the witty banter, the split-screen bedtime phone conversations between the primary pair (although when we first see this with Jason and Julie they actually have the gall to teletalk while in bed with other [sleeping] cross-offs from their lover-list options; at least Harry and Sally were alone when making their calls—and Woody Allen’s Alvie Singer even leaves his one-night stand, Pam [Shelly Duval], to answer Annie Hall’s [Diane Keaton] distress call to kill a “big as a Buick” spider in her bathroom), a brief musically-accompanied scene to a country getaway that’s seems to be lifted directly from Annie Hall, etc. Overall, it feels like Westfeldt decided to adapt Manhattan so that no central character was over 40 (as was Isaac in the “original”) in order to pitch this film to a target audience of the same age as the cast, but while she was typing she had a DVD of Reiner’s film going in the background and just unconsciously (at best) incorporated what probably seemed original as the keys kept clicking away. I even see similarities in the breakup between Ben (Jon Hamm, Mad Men’s center of the universe) and Leslie (Kristen Wiig, effective in a down-beat, non-comic role), after marriage and parenthood put a freeze on their initial 24/7 sex romps, to the breakup of Yale (Michael Murphy) and Emily (Anne Byrne Hoffman) in Manhattan, although in that case the problem was Yale’s affair with Mary (Keaton again) rather than the chilling factor of family responsibility.
In addition to the first poster I used from Friends with Kids (that one to show the large, recognizable cast, including new-but-not-quite right lovers for Jason—Mary Jane [Megan Fox]—and Julie—Kurt [Edward Burns]), I’ll finish with this one which says that at least in this crowd it seems that you have to pick no more than 2 options from love, happiness, and kids. By the end of the movie most of our characters have found a way to check all 3 boxes, although Leslie had to find a new partner to finish her form and we’ll never know if Ben was able to have it all or not. Julie and Jason confirmed what we assumed all along, that close friendship will eventually lead to romance (as was the previous case with Harry and Sally, but not with either of Woody Allen’s characters as his films probed depths of both relationships and storytelling that neither of these descendents are able to match), which this genre will tell us is necessary for social maintenance as long as the “right” couples (the ones we see together in one form or another the most on screen, rather than Allen’s Alvie and Isaac who wander off with others too long, later regretting their actions and trying to fix the past—Alvie’s play with a new, happier ending; Isaac’s attempt to convince Tracy [Mariel Hemingway] that she should overlook their 2-decades+ age difference and give it another try) find each other after rejecting other futile distractions. Throughout Friends with Kids Julie and Jason play this “which one?” game about death scenarios (a game that doesn’t resonate with otherwise-dreamboat Kurt, just as Alvie’s funny problems with live lobsters on a date with Annie are relived in an unsatisfying manner with another woman [demonstrating her unsuitability for him] in Annie Hall; I’m afraid the comparisons could go on all night), with the choices forcing each of them to reveal core values (or fears). If my choices were to watch Westfeldt’s movie again or rewatch some of my Woody Allen collection, I’d have to go with the latter. I gave this one 3 stars because the writing is very engaging and the large cast is handled well so that it’s a delight watching all of these talented people be put through the wringer and still come out sympathetic (even Hamm’s Ben, with the understanding that he’s the one most damaged by his own actions and most in need of redirection), but, as I’ll explore with The Hunger Games next week, when something is as derivative as Friends with Kids I just can’t get fully on board with it, even as much as I’d like to.
Time’s running out for Napoleon, but if that film’s just too old for you then drop back only 4 decades instead of 8 and watch Annie Hall again, but maybe if you want to see it in a manner akin to a modern Shakespeare adaptation (and don’t want the bloodbath that is a literal Bard updating as in Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus [2011]) that adds new wrinkles to the characters and dialogue then Friends with Kids might a good choice after all. Neither it nor 21 Jump Street has the heft of Gance’s masterwork, but if you need to just zone out with some good laughs rather than invest a big section of your weekend and your wallet you’d probably be happier with the silly stuff anyway.
If you’d like to know more about Napoleon here are some suggested links:
If you’d like to know more about 21 Jump Street here are some suggested links:
If you’d like to know more about Friends with Kids here are some suggested links:
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