Coriolanus and Pina (with just a bit of We Need to Talk about Kevin)

     “Wanna see Voldemort do Shakespeare?”  “Sure, but then I
      gotta dance with a chair!”  (But watch out for that Robin Hood
      wannabe over there in the gym.)
     

                    Reviews by Ken Burke           Coriolanus 

A lesser-known Shakespeare play comes to gruesome life, transposed to the modern world of political warfare but with ancient problems of treachery intact in the telling.

                                                                                     Pina
     
A documentary about German choreographer Pina Bausch, who died just as filming began so this is a tribute to her creativity from her very talented company of dancers.
     

            Time to put the romantic comedies and action-adventures on hold and delve into some higher art—as well as catching up on a couple of Oscar-nominated films that weren’t in local release prior to the ceremony—beginning with that old (well, Renaissance actually) English guy, William Shakespeare.  (And I warn you now that this review is going to be very heavy on parenthetical commentary.  What’s new about that, you say?  Well, this time it’s likely to be worse than usual because these films speak more to me about things they remind me of rather than things I know a lot about, so be prepared for frequent side trips into the ozone.)  To start with, for many of us when the names “Fiennes” and “Shakespeare” come up in the same sentence the quickest connection might be to Joseph Fiennes starring as The Bard in John Madden’s 1998 Shakespeare in Love.  (This was a big Oscar winner including for Gwyneth Paltrow as Best Actress as Willie’s brief romantic infatuation, Viola De Lesseps, and Best Picture, beating front-runner Saving Private Ryan [Steven Spielberg, who did win Best Director], resulting, some claim, from a very successful ad campaign by Harvey Weinstein, back when he was still running Miramax—a claim that might be repeating itself in this year’s GOP primaries where Mitt Romney seems to be making great inroads against more likely candidates among conservative voters by way of some brutally effective ads.  But, regarding Saving Private Ryan and the Oscar, let’s just say that if all it takes is a good ad campaign to make Hollywood voters not fully appreciate the sacrifices of the “Greatest Generation,” then to paraphrase Mr. Robinson in The Graduate [Mike Nichols, 1967], “Well, that doesn’t say very much for my father, does it?”  See, I told you we’re going to take some sideways excursions … but now back to our regularly scheduled programming.)  In Coriolanus, however, the Shakespeare connection is with older brother Ralph Fiennes—famous for being a despicable Nazi in Schlinder’s List (Spielberg again, 1993), a physically and emotionally damaged tragic lover in The English Patient (Anthony Minghella, 1996), and of course as the notorious facially-challenged evil wizard Voldemort in several Harry Potter and … movies (2005-2011).  Fiennes has not only taken on the powerful lead role in this military blood bath but also makes his directorial debut, quite a challenge with this lesser-known Elizabethan Era sociopolitical critique.
     

            OK, now we’re already to the part where I start admitting my ignorance of the source material, having never studied nor seen this play and only having read about it and skimmed through it once to see how well it’s correlated to the film (surprisingly well, given how Shakespeare’s originals are often modified drastically for the logistics of the commercial cinema).  So, these are impressions of Coriolanus are based mainly on what I encountered on screen, with the locale now “A place calling itself Rome” in contemporary times, where the vicious and vengeful events taken straight from the original play could easily imply the brutal border warfare in Kosovo and Serbia in the late 1990s or Chechnya and Russia into today.  In Coriolanus the struggle is between the Romans, with Fiennes as military-hero-turned-hailed-then-spurned-politician Caius Martius, and their neighbors the Volscians (also called the Volsces), whose leader is Tullus Aufidius, played with grim glee by Gerard Butler.  Our film begins with some tight closeups of Aufidius sharpening his knife and flexing his tattoos as he watches TV coverage of Rome in a state of emergency where crowds revolt against grain being kept locked away from the hungry populace for the benefit of the wealthy benefactors of Roman society (sound familiar?).  What emerges in this historically-dislocated film as a reflection of our “Occupy” movements against the powerful 1% is a near riot, put down by the brutal enforcement of Fiennes who counters the “Better to die than famish” sentiments of the angry mob (“curs” in his opinion) with his own leadership philosophy of “Who deserves greatness deserves your hate.”  (And considering how the WWE is building up their April 1 Wrestlemania spectacular with warring diatribes from grappler-turned-movie-star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson vs. the love/hate kid of our new century, John Cena [“Let’s go, Cena!/Cena sucks!”], they might want to ask Fiennes to buy some ad time in order to keep his poorly-seen film alive at the box office as well as to play into WWE’s calculated grudge-match mentality with both TV and film viewers.)  Everyone seems to harbor a grudge in Coriolanus too, where half the cast is in green fatigues (hard to tell the armies apart) and everyone is in a combative mood, leaving no character as particularly sympathetic nor motivated by anything much beyond anger and fear (and for today’s Republicans in California there’s the extra fear factor of a bald and older Fiennes looking a lot like Governor Jerry Brown, considered by many on the far right of the Left Coast to be an equally unloved head of state—hmm, now the asides are really beginning to ramble, but you were forewarned so read on if you dare).
     

            I’ll compress the narrative (given that it wasn’t always that easy to follow anyway because of the eloquent but unfamiliar language patterns) to simply these facts:  Border warfare leads Caius Martius into Volscian territory where the battle scenes are violent (Hurt Locker [Kathryn Bigelow, 2008] level) and he and Aufidius fight mano a mano with no resolution (just like the WWE again, setting up tensions for the big payoff later); Caius Martius comes home a war hero after vicious slaughtering of the enemy, then through the machinations of influential family friend Menenius Agrippa (Brian Cox) is given the honorary surname Coriolanus; his fortunes quickly reverse as he is first appointed Consul (the highest office of government under the Republic, which I take this to be given that there is no Emperor present and the Senate seems to have decisive authority, at least at times [another parallel to our current dysfunctional governmental actions]) and praised by the crowds, then driven into exile by traitorous Tribunes Sicinius (James Nesbitt) and Brutus (Paul Jesson); whereupon he makes a pact with the Volscians in order to take his revenge on Rome, allowing him to now be a butcher of his former countrymen (thus this photo above of Coriolanus in his “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” pose); but his advance on the capitol is halted after a passionate plea to his lingering patriotism by his government-invested mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave, who, along with his wife, Virgilia [Jessica Chastain, possibly the most seen screen actress of 2011], and son show their loyalty is to the state rather than to Coriolanus as family patriarch, whom Mom fawned over when he was Rome’s hero much to Chastain’s distain); leading a heartbroken Coriolanus to sign a peace treaty; which results in his return to the Volscians where he’s assassinated by a knife-wielding gang of soldiers and his old enemy (“Et tu, Aufidius?” so to speak) who finally gets to use that sharp blade from the opening shots.  Now that’s how to run a press-worthy political campaign, if not a military one!

          In actions that are all too familiar to anyone who watches current news reports, in this film the citizens of Rome are insulted by their arrogant leader, their uninformed loyalty is easily swayed by conniving strategists, a once-revered military protector takes arms against his own people in cooperation with his once-sworn enemy, a son/husband/father is abandoned by his mother, wife, and child who all retain their loyalty to the same state that banished the epicenter of their family, and old wounds are not forgiven when the spoils of war are spoiled by a peace that comes too soon for the vengefully recalcitrant pseudo-allied Volscians.  Everyone loses except for the powerful king-makers who run the Roman society, just as little gets accomplished in our political capitol except decisions that protect the capital of the elite who replace one icon with another as needed but don’t open the grain stores for the starving “rabble” of our society.  Yet, all of this, sadly also just like today, is wrapped in valor and the nobility of fighting for what the elite define as a just cause—or as Coriolanus puts it, “If any think brave death outweighs bad life and that his country is dearer than himself, let him alone”—so that the easily-led public will follow this warped line of thinking where nobility of action is the rationalization for every heinous act imagined.
      

            Like mother, like son in Coriolanus in the sense that Volumnia praises valorous sons who would die for their country, a choice seemingly more valuable than her own son whom she defends upon his banishment but opposes when he comes back leading the Volscian army, not willing to grasp why he’s turned so bitterly against kin and country.  Her persuasive speech is Redgrave’s crowning moment in this film, the likely reason for her Best Supporting Actress nomination (although neither she nor any of the competition had much of a chance against Octavia Spencer’s Minnie the maid from The Help [Tate Taylor], including Help-mate Jessica Chastain as white-trash outcast Celia Foote).  Some might complain that Redgrave’s nomination shouldn’t ride on just one powerfully-delivered speech, in that she’s not that prominent in the rest of the film, but reaching back again to Shakespeare in Love we find Judi Dench getting the Supporting Actress Oscar as Queen Elizabeth with only about 8 minutes of screen time (and Beatrice Straight needed only 6 minutes to get hers as the angry, jilted wife of TV news executive William Holden in Network [Sidney Lumet, 1976]), so the considerations rest with quality, not quantity (but we surely couldn’t have done with any less of Minnie and her chocolate pie in The Help where her active screen presence was an anchor throughout the film, including her scenes as Celia Foote’s maid after being fired by the queen of mean, Miss Hilly Holbrook [Bryce Dallas Howard]).  Like a compressed version of Octavia Spencer, Redgrave has a commanding presence in her limited screen time in Coriolanus and, unlike some of her co-stars, doesn’t need to be victorious on the battlefield to make an impact, although she does look equally commanding when she also shows up in uniform, giving us a sense of where the iron will of her son originated, although he proves to be a less-than-irresistible force when confronted with her as an immovable object.  If Coriolanus in its entirety had the intensity of this one mother-son encounter I’d probably find it more satisfying overall, but as is it’s just too much relentless antagonism to shine as brightly for me as Shakespeare’s more well-known works, which just shows that even an artistic genius doesn’t always fully succeed with every offering although there’s nothing inherently inferior about this cautionary tale, just a sense that the constant bloodlust produces too heavy of a regular drumbeat.  At one point Coriolanus is described with the words “There is no more mercy in him than there is milk in a male tiger”; this could be said of the play and the film as well.
          

            All this talk of Oscar winners and also-rans brings me to the final major parenthetical aside in this review and the chance to slip in one more look at a 2011 film while supposedly exploring Coriolanus, but I will work in some reasonably rationalized connections to Fiennes' film while I’m rambling.  (Maybe I’m channeling Hunter S. Thompson stream-of-consciousness here [Hunter may be dead but is not gone in our memory, although some would say he was gone in his own self-consciousness long before he died.]  But before presenting that diversion, here’s another one in which I must admit that Coriolanus is a gruesomely powerful tragedy of the more oppressive aspects of human nature but doesn’t resonate with me as much as some other, more nuanced cinematic Shakespearian dissections of our flawed nature such as Richard Longcraine’s 1995 Richard III, with Ian McKellen as the devious king, or the 1996 Hamlet where Kenneth Branagh [another Oscar contender this year in Simon Curtis’ My Week with Marilyn as Laurence Olivier—who, of course must be noted for his own stately 1948 Hamlet] directs himself as the indecisive prince.  OK, that said, here’s the intended diversion, which brings us to another film entirely.

          (The other character, along with Redgrave’s Volumnia, I’d like to note from the final cluster of 2011 successes just now making it into theatres in most markets, with a performance from Tilda Swinton that should have led her to Best Actress contention but somehow didn’t [sorry, Rooney Mara, but good as you were as Lisbeth Salander in David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, you should have to wait until you’ve at least played with fire before you take a nomination away from Swinton], is the beleaguered mom, Eva Khatchadourian, in Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk about Kevin [and while Ezra Miller is homicidally scary as the teenage Kevin, I just hope that what I saw from Jasper Newell as the 6-8 year-old version is accomplished acting, because if this kid is that scary I’d never want to run into him on a dark playground.]  Like Coriolanus, Eva faces a hostile threat to her stability in her withdrawn, mean-tempered son [who manages to almost destroy everything sane about her previously successful life, just as our Roman soldier is almost destroyed by his own society, before his earlier enemy finally completes the circle] and finds little solace from her chief family connection, her husband Franklin [John C. Reilly, in another successful role as a clueless dad, as with his work in Roman Polanski’s Carnage, reviewed earlier in this blog]), just as Coriolanus ultimately finds himself in unanticipated conflict with his mother, which changes the course of his life, just as Eva’s life collapses around her due to unavailable support from Franklin [who enjoys a functional relationship with Kevin so he provides no comfort to Eva because he can’t believe what she tells him about their son’s hostility toward her] even as the hostile boy twists every good thing his mother tried to give him into a horrible rampage later in high school, reminiscent of Coriolanus at his worst. 

          (In retrospect, We Need to Talk about Kevin, with a lot of powerful performances and constant beautifully-composed ethereal images, will have to push Midnight in Paris off of my 2011 Top 10, with 4 of my 5 stars [5 being the highest pinnacle to attain using my pentagrams; we're talking Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) or Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) here] so 4 equates to tops in most other ratings systems [apologies also to Woody for dumping Midnight in Paris, but he’s now gotten another Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his literary time-travel story—as if he even cares—so that will have to comfort him for now, even though I know how much he hangs on my every word].)  OK, enough on this superhighway-sized aside and enough commentary on the remaining, unexamined films of last year … except just one more that’s far too good to omit.
          

            As with Tilda Swinton not getting a deserved Oscar nomination, I have to wonder if Pina didn’t get a deserved Oscar win as Best Feature Documentary, although I haven’t seen Daniel Lindsay, T. J. Martin, and Richard Middlemas’ Undefeated, about an inner-city high school football team in North Memphis, TN.  I’ve read that it’s a very powerful story of overcoming social and personal adversity (one glowing review is at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-et-undefeated-20120217,0,4992367.story; although another one notes that it raises problematical comparisons to John Lee Hancock’s 2009 The Blind Side’s fictionalization of another football story, see http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117944826/), but I have to wonder if it holds together as well as Pina does as a pure cinematic experience.  Unlike my ramblings on Coriolanus, I’ll have to be more to the point on Pina because it’s such a compelling audiovisual experience that really doesn’t translate too well into words, at least words that I can articulate, possibly because this is a film about dance and choreography, rather than literature or theatre, brought into a cinematic structure.  So much of what makes Coriolanus work as well as it does is the reality that it’s based on an eloquent construction of otherwise ordinary elements of the English language—words—which are then spoken and accompanied by bodily gestures that can rather easily be conveyed, or at least mimicked, by other words in the attempt to translate one communicative form into another, from film to review.  With dance, the translation from pure bodily movement, often accompanied by music, into the verbal mode is much more distanced, more abstracted from what needs to be seen to even begin to be appreciated.  (This is further complicated for me by my self-chosen lack of exposure to contemporary dance, despite having ample opportunities at Mills College and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area [films have been my priority, with a good bit of theatre in second place, and then there are Oakland A’s baseball games, so until retirement finally frees me up a bit, my dance attendance will likely continue to suffer].  About all I can offer here is seeing Merce Cunningham and his troupe in Austin, TX in the early 1970s—Holy Toledo! What an experience; however, for me not much since then.)  But what German New Wave master Wim Wenders (foreign-film fans might have followed his career since the 1970s but to others he’s likely best known for Paris, Texas, 1984, Wings of Desire, 1987, and/or Buena Vista Social Club, 1999 [another performance-based documentary]) has created here is a collaboration with his subject, so that he’s not just giving us a cinematic account of the works of another artist but he’s structuring a unique collage of her dance work into another form of dance entirely, one that takes what is captured by the camera but then orchestrates it into a film that stands on its own as a series of choreographed movements that take on a new life beyond the individual pieces taken from the company repertoire for this remembrance of their creator.
           

            Pina Bausch (1940-2009) was an acclaimed contemporary dancer and choreographer, most known for her ongoing work with the German Wuppertal Dance Theater, but Wenders’ intention to celebrate her life’s work took an unexpected turn when she died just before filming was to begin.  Therefore, while we see her in some archival footage this tribute isn’t so much a biography as an homage to her vision, with longer presentations of some of her more famous pieces interspersed with new works by her company in styles they felt were conducive to her unique vision for the fluid aesthetics of bodies in motion.  The first of the long dances is Pina’s version of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, The Rite of Spring (Le sacre du printemps), a passionate piece, controversial in its Paris premiere on May 29, 1913 as performed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, led by Vaslav Nijinsky (and sanitized of its sexual implications in Disney’s 1940 Fantasia, with a version of the music set to erupting volcanoes and battling dinosaurs).  In Pina’s production the stage is first covered with soil, so as the dancers go through the process of implying the sensual sacrifice of the lead woman in a red dress they all end up essentially covered in dirt or mud as a result of their violent movements, making this into an organic, if not orgasmic, experience for all concerned.  The next longer piece is Café Müller presented on a large stage that implies a room empty of everything except a large number of chairs which become interactive elements as various dancers enter and leave the space, interacting as well in some manner with each other or being completely alone along the back walls or on the floor in union with the walls.  Odd as both of these larger works may sound, they are relatively stable and conventional compared to the many short pieces, usually with just a few performers at a time, that are interwoven throughout the film; these are the tribute pieces, where Bausch’s dancers devised their own expressions, done in a manner resonant with her sensibilities.
          

            Neither the long pieces nor the interludes are necessary shown in full, so that we go back and forth among many of them throughout Wender’s composition, which is what makes this film so much more than a documentary to me; instead it’s as if he’s constructing a cinematic collage of related elements that only feel fulfilled upon viewing the complete film, with each long or short segment adding to the rhythm and identity of the whole.  At times the dancers are in city street traffic islands with cars driving by them as random elements of the motions on screen; however, as an elevated train goes by these street dancers we may suddenly find ourselves in a coach of that train, with another piece involving a woman stomping on a large pillow while a man wearing cardboard donkey ears looks on.  Other unlikely encounters take place in nature with a glass table at the edge of a river, or in a river with a large mechanical hippo, or in an abandoned subway, or in the yard of a factory, or on the edge of a quarry, or simply on an escalator, at times with vivid red or yellow dresses on the female dancers.  It’s all a bit confusing upon first viewing, with no clarification that these were not pieces intended to be seen by a live audience but only by us in a movie theatre (Ah, the wonderful insights to be gleaned from an online press kit!), but after awhile you just sit in awed amazement at both the grace of movement no matter where the setting and the utter audacity of the original choices made in celebration of the inspiring master, Pina.

            As Pina continues to evolve we find our spacious stage again in Kontakthof, but now the chairs are against the back and side walls (as with Café Müller, emphasizing the traditionally-missing “fourth wall” through which we view the action) with formally dressed people sitting in them while at first individual soloists move to center stage, then over time there are large numbers of people in interaction as if this is a very abstracted version of a high school dance in the gym.  As best I understand it, the original work alternated large groups of much younger and much older performers in the space, but through the ease of film editing Wenders can cut back and forth between these separated generations in a manner that reminds us that while this film may be about Pina and her ensemble it is still a film made by someone else who has his own vision of how to compose and present all of this stunning flow of motion.  The last of the major pieces to emerge within this cinematic composition is Vollmond (Full Moon) which begins with a few dancers in concert with a large rock, then grows to a larger group and increasingly more water rained onto the stage which somehow collects in depth in some areas allowing it to be flung around the performance space in a truly “fluid” manner.  Pina Bausch’s mantra was “Dance, dance, or you will be lost.”  You may be a bit lost if you try to make too much sense of what you get scene by scene in this marvelously created, engagingly edited film, but if you just let yourself flow with its graceful pace, its constantly surprising locales, its successful use of non-flamboyant 3-D that properly enhances the integration of the dancers into their varied environments, and its loving embrace of the artistry of the departed center of this life-on-stage story I think you’ll be well rewarded with this Oscar contender (just as you’d be impressed with Redgrave’s Oscar-nominated contribution to Fiennes’ estimable adaptation and Swinton’s sadly-overlooked depiction of household trauma that escalates into community tragedy when Kevin's archery skills turn homicidal).

          The finer arts have rewarded us well with these varying levels of spectacular showcases, but soon it will be time to return to more pressing commercial matters so start saving up your oxygen for a trip to Mars with John Carter next week.

          If you want to know more about Coriolanus here are some suggested links:

http://weinsteinco.com/sites/coriolanus/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsYrGIQnmxo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUYu8hULfZA

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/coriolanus_2010/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/coriolanus

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/coriolanus_2011/

          If you’d like to know more about Pina here are some suggested links:

http://www.wim-wenders.com/movies/movies_spec/pina/pina.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNuQVS7q7-A

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqpFcFveHRE  (This is one of several sites that offer you opportunities to watch the entire film either whole or in segments; I’ll leave that choice to you to explore how you might want to do that.)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/pina_3d/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/pina

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/pina/

          I didn’t talk much about We Need to Talk about Kevin but if you’d like to delve in more here are some suggested links:

http://www.oscilloscope.net/films/film/56/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin  (From this site you can download the full press kit.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGjjK5SMbJA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNfx8rh0SPc

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/we_need_to_talk_about_kevin/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/we_need_to_talk_about_kevin/

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Chico & Rita and Wanderlust

          Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

     

                    Review by Ken Burke                      Chico & Rita
      
Feature-length animation is rarely so adult and sensual but this story of love begun in Cuba then interrupted by politics is a musical delight if a bit of a melodramatic story.

                                                                    Wanderlust
      
An urban couple stumbles upon a rural hippie colony attempting to rethink their personal and romantic lifestyles only to realize that for them traditional love conquers all.

            Now that the Academy Awards have been given out for 2011 films we know that the one chosen for Best Animated Feature was Rango (Gore Verbinski)—a plea for community bravery in support of ecological balance against the evils of personal and corporate greed, all done with an entertaining combination of Johnny Depp’s vocal work, a cast of reptiles, amphibians, and birds, an old-west-across-the-highway-from-the-new-west-of-Las-Vegas setting, a lot of action and well-timed comedy, and even a guest appearance by a character meant to evoke Clint Eastwood’s westerns persona—we’ll likely soon forget about the other nominees, including the franchise installments of Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, now the box-office champ of all female directors with her two installments of Jack Black voicing a martial-arts mammal) and Puss in Boots (Chris Miller), although their producers won’t forget anytime soon how profitable they were (#15 and #16 respectively for 2011 US returns, with the former at over $165,000,000 [plus over $500,000,000 overseas] and the later at over $149,000,000 [plus almost $384,000,000 from foreign markets]) increasing their chances of another go-round in the future (Rango was no slouch either, coming in at #22 with over $123,000,000 domestically and almost $122,000,000 internationally), and we may have little chance of even seeing the French-made A Cat in Paris (Une vie de chat, Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, produced in 2010 despite being an Oscar contender for 2011 [understanding those eligibility rules has never been my strong suit]).

            But the other nominee, from Spain (the first animated feature from there to be nominated for an Oscar and this year’s winner of the Spanish Goya Award for Best Animated Film), Tono Errando, Javier Mariscal, and Fernando Trueba’s Chico & Rita is available in some theatres and well worth your time for the excellent Cuban music and the pleasing flow of the visuals if not for the rather common love-lost-and-regained storyline typical of traditional musicals (and the warning that even with an animated film there are viewers who don’t care for subtitles—the film is in Spanish, for those of us who aren’t bilingual).  Chico & Rita has a Las Vegas connection, just like Rango, as well as a narrative that spans many decades from 1948 to present.  I can see why you’d enjoy watching the fluid, stripped-down animation style of this film as an active accompaniment to the constant flow of the music, but I can also say that you could probably get almost as much pleasure by just listening to the soundtrack on a CD, so decide for yourself if you’d prefer Chico & Rita in aural or multi-sensory mode.

            Maybe I should say “multi-sensual” mode because this is clearly a cartoon for adults, with lovemaking, bare bodies (even full-frontal female nudity), and the real passions and problems that confront humans rather than the abundance of anthropomorphized animals in the other Oscar nominees.  Chico and Rita are Afro-Cuban musicians—he a fabulous pianist and band leader (voiced by Eman Xor Oña), her a mesmerizing singer (dialogue performed by Limara Meneses, songs by Idania Valdés)—who meet in Havana, join forces (and bodies) in pre-revolutionary Cuba to international acclaim, find themselves separated twice as their careers are rising through a combination of jealous misunderstandings, Chico’s deportation on false drug charges, and the U.S. embargo on Cuba, but then they finally reunite in old age at the dumpy Vegas motel where Rita has languished for years after her career came to an end, seemingly along with their troubled but all-consuming love.

            But we know that love must conquer all here, because this is a musical essentially of the old-time constant-performances-by-multiple-artists Revue variety with modern trappings of the plot that would have to look back to pre-Code musicals of the early 1930s such as Gold Diggers of 1933 (Mervyn LeRoy) to find parallels with the honest depiction of adult foibles on screen found in Chico & Rita.  Certainly other musicals have also shown the harsh side of life such as big Oscar winners Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) and Chicago (Rob Marshall, 2002), but these are a different sub-genre, the Modern musical, where the sweetly sappy taste of The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) has been replaced by a more acrid flavor, even as the tunes are still compelling.  Revues began as just overwhelming audiovisual collections of little more than one number after the next as early sound films needed to showcase something else besides poor dialogue recording and delivery (parodied marvelously in Singin’ in the Rain [Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1952]) and continue to find life occasionally as biographies in more recent works like Ray (Taylor Hackford, 2004) and Walk the Line (James Mangold, 2005)—films again with Oscar connections for acting by Jamie Foxx in the former and Reese Witherspoon in the latter—but Chico & Rita enlivens the Revue form with a fictional structure based in cultural reality that incorporates the music and animated likenesses of such mid-20^th century jazz stars as Chucho Valdés, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Chano Pozo, Tito Puente, Ben Webster, Theolonious Monk, and Nat King Cole, with Chico’s music performed by contemporary Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés and the later revival of Chico’s artistic life done by real-life flamenco singer Estrella Morente.  The music is almost constant here, but when the voices quieten down there’s lots of action imported from other genres to keep your adrenalin up with throw-away car chases, shootings, montages of performances in New York and Paris, and romantic intrusions from Chico’s former girlfriend Juanita and Rita’s new manager/lover Jon.

            Chico & Rita has an animation style characteristic of its mostly 1950s setting, with simpler line drawings and more abstraction (made even more flat and cartoon-like in the opening credits to set them off from the film proper) than the lush three-dimensionality of the 1940s-50s Disney classics and the more visually complex films of today such as Rango or Pixar’s Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010).  This fits the mood of the film, though, because it allows the storyline to fly along without need for rapt attention to the details of the many settings or to dwell on the historical accuracy of depictions of pre-Castro Cuba (although much research did go into what is shown on screen).  It’s also a style that complements the active energy of the near-constant music and feels very Caribbean in its colorful simplicity (it also helps to downplay the details of our protagonists’ bodies in their moments of birthday-suit directness, both in and out of bed).  Altogether, it’s easy to watch, great to listen to, and certainly a deserving recipient of all of the critical accolades it’s received and a fit contender for the Oscar, although it likely never stood a chance against Rango’s Hollywood-heritage sensibilities.  I’m not a big fan of traditional musicals and this one’s melodramatic story twists are too reminiscent of what has disengaged me from much of this genre in the past, but it is a great listening experience, a satisfying love story, and a useful acknowledgement of the realities of how cruel racism (Rita’s career essentially stops in Las Vegas when she drunkenly complains on stage about being able to perform in a fancy hotel but not being allowed to sleep there) and hardened ideologies (Chico can’t perform “imperialistic” jazz in his new Communist-ruled home nor can he return to the U.S. after his phony drug-bust because of the mutually-imposed travel restrictions) that exist in society outside of the view of more escapist musicals.  We get fictionalized versions of such institutionalized cruelties in live-action performer biographies such as Diana Ross as Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues (Sidney J. Furie, 1972) and Dustin Hoffman as Lenny Bruce in Lenny (Bob Fosse, 1974), but this acknowledgement that black Hispanics face a double dose of difficulty in our society, not only as depicted in the 1950s scenes but implied also for our contemporary real world, is a very adult aspect of this unrated film (likely not submitted to the ratings board to avoid problems with the frank depiction of intercourse), not intended to occupy your children on a weekend afternoon.

            As noted above, you might enjoy its essence enough if you simply let yourself flow with the powerful rhythms of the music but you do get a bit more with the active animation of the visuals and occasional aspects of the story that manage to rise above the seemingly gratuitous romance problems, streetwise life-threatening action scenes (although the depicted death of Chano Pozo over a drug deal gone bad is based in alleged fact [if that's not too much of an oxymoron]), and travelogue montages (when Chico slips into Manhattan to try to reunite with Rita he goes into a dream sequence that seems borrowed full-on from the dream ballet in An American in Paris [Vincente Minnelli, 1951]) that seem to have bled over from other movies.  Certainly the love that Chico and Rita maintained for each other despite their 47-year separation should warm your heart and encourage you to feel that any hope is possible to be realized, even when the odds seem horribly set against you.

            Similarly, in David Wain’s Wanderlust the odds of romance finding fulfillment constantly seem to be stacked in hilarious manners against young married urbanites George (Paul Rudd) and Linda (Jennifer Aniston), whose careers aren’t connecting in Manhattan (maybe they should have tried being jazz musicians); their options are dim for improving when they try moving in with George’s belligerent brother Rick (Ken Marino), his distracted (read margarita-filled) wife Marisa (Michaela Watkins), and their briefly-seen, obnoxious son in their Atlanta McMansion neighborhood; and their world goes completely underwater (as does their car) when they stumble onto a rural commune—excuse me, “intentional community”—run by—excuse me again, not run (just dominated in every aspect)—by Seth (Justin Theroux), an archetypal (non- [according to him]) hippie whose technology awareness seems to have been frozen in the 1980s (considering this movie is set in current day with our tight job and housing markets I can only imagine Seth was whisked off to this Elysium forest enclave as a child and he hasn’t ventured further than the connecting highway turnoff ever since). 

            To use Thomas Schatz’s terms about our prized American formulaic entertainment movies in his Hollywood Genres book, both musicals and romantic comedies are example of “genres of integration,” where the social structure is established and the main story arc deals with reining in the too-independent rebel (who is more at home and needed in a “genre of order,” such as a western or crime film) and re-establishing the social norms that were in place before the story finds its necessary narrative conflict.  One way to bring about the problem that must be resolved so that the movie’s world can become tranquil again is to somehow separate the romantic pair, the protagonists in these genre movies, which allows resolution to come upon their reuniting and assumed social continuance via marriage—as with Singin’ in the Rain or Chico & Rita—although sometimes an unexpected twist comes and the only way for social/interpersonal stability is through separation of the seemingly-intended lovers so they can go further and find someone more suitable—as with Annie Hall (Woody Allen, 1977) or The Break-Up (Peyton Reed, 2006), also starring Jennifer Aniston.  Another “genre of integration” plot structure is to begin with the marriage already in place but threatened by outside forces that may spell doom for the supposedly-resolved couple, just as the Hangover films (Todd Phillips, 2009, 2011, and likely another one in 2013) give us reason to wonder how anyone who could get married after going through what these guys do could possibly remain with a sane mate.  In Wanderlust that’s what we’re dealing with, the old “Can we survive this?” complication.

            Specifically, the complication in Wanderlust is the rural extended family of Elysium and its initial attractions for George which are challenged by Seth’s attraction to Linda, especially as she gets increasingly at home in the place while previously hip hubbie is finding his dream of escape from the rat race is just turning him into a rat, at least for some of the residents of this alternative society.  Despite George’s initial desire to break away from the world of overpriced Manhattan “micro-lofts” (realitor-ese for “too tiny to turn around in”), careers that can collapse without warning as your CEO is led off in handcuffs, oppressive relatives who have built a fortune on port-a-potties (toilets feature prominently in this film at times), and—without previously vocalizing it—a wife whose interests keep changing faster than their finances can accommodate, Elysium proves to be more confining than George had assumed yet it’s also liberating for Linda who finally seems to find her focus on the land.  Soon George is overwhelmed by the total lack of privacy which includes no doors on any of the rooms in the large communal house, horses and sheep wandering around indoors at leisure, and casual conversations from fellow residents as George attempts some natural action on a toilet.  (I told you there’s a constant “earthy” undertone to this film. My wife related well to this scene because it’s a recurring nightmare for her, although she reports that the dream people who wander by unconcerned while she’s trying for a dump are just as blasé as the ones who wander by and talk with George—maybe everyone concerned saw that same episode of “Seinfeld” where another George doesn’t follow his boss into the restroom, thereby missing important instructions for a major project for the Yankees, and Jerry reminds us all of President Lyndon Johnson’s tendency to carry on staff briefings even while nature called, just like Mr. Wilhelm in the TV episode.)

            In Wanderlust, George’s (anal-retentive?) hesitancy to just go with the flow (so to speak) is countered by Linda’s ease of connection with this organic band of farmers, musicians, and free lovers, so much so that when our transplanted couple is invited to a Truth Circle intended to further integrate them into the community Linda is given free reign to express her feelings but George can hardly get a word in edgewise because of the tribe’s constant interruptions even as they’re pushing him to speak up.  He finally does let it all out, including his frustrations with working at a brain-deadening job that he hated in order to finance her forays into filmmaking and apartment buying, resulting in his decision to depart Elysium, especially after his agreement to open up their marriage sexually goes awry.  He’s very tempted by Eva’s (Malin Akerman) attraction to him so he convinces Linda to discard the bedroom door in a very literal way, but when Linda quickly connects with Seth and George finds himself incapable of being anything but a misguided, anxious pseudo-stud (there’s a fantastic scene as George looks himself in the mirror and tries to whip up a frenzy of machismo) with Eva (who rejects him, as she had something more sincere than meaningless intercourse in mind), he decides to leave the whole scene and limp off back to Atlanta, leaving Linda to Seth which isn’t seeming like such a bad deal to her, as she’s become a local breast-bearing celebrity by leading the group in a televised protest (as “a topless Norma Rae”) against a developer who wants the property for a ghastly commercial casino.

            All of this eventually comes around to social integration and true love ways, as a non-threatening romantic comedy should, when George realizes that Linda means more to him than anything so he returns to the non (?)-commune to ask forgiveness; Linda sees Seth for the conniving entrepreneur that lurks under that pile of hair when he agrees to steal the deed to the property from old, addled founder Carvin (Alan Alda) and sell it to the developer for a mere $11,000 (he’s even more out of touch with current inflation than thawed cryogenic Dr. Evil [Mike Myers] was when he wanted to hold the world for ransom of a measly $1,000,000 in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery [Jay Roach, 1997]) so that he and Linda can get beachfront property in south Florida; George and Linda find financial security by becoming publishers of commune-nude-winemaker Wayne’s (Joe Lo Truglio) novel which becomes a best-seller; Marisa finally confronts, then leaves, Rick over his constant affairs and writes her own “novel,” I Hate You, Rick; and, among other happy ends I don’t even remember, Carvin finds that his memory was fooling him and his several commune co-founders are still alive including one with another copy of the deed so all’s well that ends well in this formulaic froth that’s at turns active, energetic filmmaking (particularly nice is the early montage of George and Linda driving to Georgia with quick alternations of radio sing-a-longs, romantic connections, sulking disconnections, and snoozing that implies they hardly ever even took a restroom break at one of those ubiquitous toilets), traditional romantic comedy tropes of alternating attractions and altercations, original comic situations and dialogue that’s really biting at times (especially Marisa’s deadpan deliveries), and some rapid-fire wrap-up jokes that even manage to work Ray Liotta into the mix (maybe you can find the last five minutes somewhere on the Internet [see below], possibly the best part of the whole film).

 

            Like Chico & Rita, Wanderlust has a lot going for it even if you have to admit that with their traditional genre structures so well in place these films aren’t absolutely the best things out there right now, especially with all of the Oscar winners taking their victory laps.  Still, both of these films are effectively entertaining whether you’re in the mood to shake your body a bit by grooving along with some marvelous music or by loosening up with some consistent laughter.  If you’ve had enough of watching hatchet-job political debates and worrying about when the Mideast is going to explode, you’re probably ready for some diversionary relief, which either of these romantic tales can provide in good measure.  But if your mood gets too mellow, don’t forget to close the door to the bedroom; you never know who might wander in, from Cuban ex-lovers to Georgia farm animals, all of whom caused intrusions in these films that you wouldn’t want to duplicate if you can help it.
     
          If you'd like to know more about Chico & Rita here are some suggested links:

http://chicoandrita.com/home.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTWxB9hRjwI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoLKN-pW1CE  (This is the first segment of watching the entire film with English subtitles but you’ll have to locate the rest of it on your own.)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chico_and_rita/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/chico-rita

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/chico_and_rita/
     
          If you'd like to wander more through Wanderlust here are some suggested links:

http://www.wanderlust-movie.com/Wanderlust/home.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxKQHc-tqNM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yebSCMdxo44 (This is one of dozens of sites where you can watch the entire film for free if you fill out a survey, try to qualify for a prize, etc.; help yourself if you are interested. Supposedly if you choose to watch through https://www.flixaddict.com/signup?start=1&sf=blue&ref=10367&member_id=65673463

you’ll be doing it legally and free but I take no responsibility for those claims.)

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/wanderlust_2011/

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/wanderlust

http://moviereviewintelligence.com/movie-reviews/wanderlust_2012/

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