|
BaftaBaby 
"Always entranced by cinema."
|
 Posted - 12/01/2008 : 16:41:03
|
What Just Happened
I'm not going to say this is Barry Levinson's best film by a long way. But neither is it the disaster that some critics would have you believe. It's an easy analogy to call up Robert Altman's The Player, which is a very different film indeed.
Of course they have a lot in common. Altman's screenwriter Michael Tolkin was the son of a studio executive and a very successful comedy writer. The film was his adaptation of his book. Same as Levinson's film, in his case a book by Art Linson, not raised in show biz, but a respected writer/director/producer.
Yes, both films swim in the treacherous Hollywood shark pool with some comic insights into the process. But Altman's far-more absurdist film anchors itself to a genre premise; it equates a popular culture built on deceit with The Death of Art set in a criminal context in which we never get to meet the protagonist. [actually I can't even remember if he does appear onscreen at the end, but the point's made]
Yes, there are cross-overs with Levinson's film, namely in what constitutes a sell-out, but his focus is on self-delusion and reconciliation. Neither it, nor for the most part, Ben its main character - a highly experienced film producer played exquisitely by Robert De Niro - run away from reality though Ben would like to.
The film's opening sequence is the set-up for a photo-shoot, Vanity Fair's cover to honor The Most Powerful People in Hollywood. Ben is unsurprised to be included, though careful to strike the expected tone of humility. Nevertheless, he's savvy enough about La-La-Land status to attempt a better positioning of himself for the magazine. Levinson then escorts us through the incidents of Ben's previous week, and by the time we get back to the photo shoot, the film's title has revealed its signficance.
Along the way De Niro reminds us that he doesn't have to inhabit a genre cop, a priest, or an OTT crazed dad to assure us of human complexity caught in a prism of humor, honor, a yearning to improve, to trust one's intelligence and resourcefulness without compromise, and ultimately, to understand what makes life worth living. His journey kept reminding me of Shelley's poem Ozymandias, which I think is worth quoting:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Ben's at a stage where he'll only be able to resist the tide of ambitious Hollywood newbies trying to edge him out if the projects he's got on the go pay their way at the box-office. He's confident enough to take risks, and Lou his studio head [played by Catherine Keener at just the right level of punching slightly above her weight] - will back him, provided some changes are made. She speaks of losing just 15 million instead of 25 as though the amounts are in Zimbabwe currency.
Ben's latest film's an edgy gang-genre called Fiercely, directed by an arrogant rehabilitated-addict British wunderkind [Jeremy Brunnell looking and sounding like a younger Keith Moon] who believes he can buck the system, resisting Lou's changes with a range of retaliations. The film purports to star [the real] Sean Penn.
Both he and Bruce Willis ostensibly play 'themselves' - though each delivers a cruel parody of international stardom. Willis has more to do, but both give wonderful performances.
Willis is contracted as the star of Ben's next film, due to start principal photography even as Fiercely gets its screening at Cannes. There's a lot at stake. Willis's insistence on keeping the beard he's grown and the weight he's acquired, both wholly unsuitable for the action hero he's meant to be, and both conspiring to make him look like a rabbi, are only some of the things Ben has to deal with.
The others involve several aspects of his private life, wherein all the luxury and American dreams that materialized along the path of success have been ceded to two ex-wives and their respective kids. The fact that he's still attached to the latest wife ties together most of the non-studio threads of the story.
Ben's double journey is deftly if not obviously handled by Levinson, though the nay-sayers may have a point in occasionally wanting some clearer signposts. The fact that De Niro's considered portrayal isn't spitting fireworks was the right choice. In fact, all his choices are spot on. Unlike Ben's.
But finally, whereas Altman's film leaves the bittersweet taste of despair, Levinson's ends with a kind of wise hope.
|
|
What Just Happened
