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Dirty Laundry
Now and then, a documentary
film comes along that makes us re-examine the rules that unofficially govern
the genre: Can there be a middle ground between fiction and fact? Can a
documentary use scripted scenes and yet remain ontologically authentic? How
much can you stylize material before you alter the reality that you're
striving, at least in theory, to capture?
Unmade Beds , Nicholas
Barker's " 'real life' feature film," has proudly worn its mongrel status as a
"directed" documentary of single life in the big city, employing, in the face
of criticism, what amounts to a cackling-punk defiance. The movie tracks four
aging New Yorkers--two men, two women--through their lonely dating rituals, in
the process depicting a universe of lusty, coupled-up haves and downcast,
excluded have-nots, all viewed Rear Window -style through rectangular
openings in the massive apartment houses in which they reside.
This is
not cinema
vérité , and nothing has been left to chance. The
director selected his four subjects from many hundreds of potential candidates,
followed them around for months, and then scripted their monologues and
dialogues to reflect what he says he saw. Calling his own film "an exercise in
mendacity," Barker goes on, "I'm quite happy to tell lies about my characters
and even collude with their self-delusions if it enables me to communicate
larger dramatic truths."
Spurned by U.S. distributors, Unmade Beds opened two
weeks ago in a small screening room in downtown Manhattan, where it proceeded
to set box office records and generate lots of (largely favorable) press. In
part due to smart publicity, which has bannered some of the bad reviews and
commentary ("I have to tell you that this film upset me so much that I really
don't want to have anything to do with it"--a New York publicist), it threatens
to become a cause
célèbre --and to be coming soon to a theater
near you. It's always nice to see distributors proved wrong about the merits of
"difficult" films, but in this case I think they did the decent thing.
Unmade Beds isn't just bad--it's obnoxiously, noxiously bad, a freak
show for the empathetically challenged. The outrage it has prompted isn't the
Puritan kind; it's more like legitimate revulsion at watching a blowhard
pervert people's lives in the name of "larger dramatic truths."
Those
truths are large, all right. Take Michael, the 40-year-old, 5 foot 4 inch
lonely guy who has been looking for a wife for almost two decades. If you were
to walk past him on the street, you might think that a man of his small stature
might have some trouble getting dates and be rather bitter about it. The larger
dramatic truth is that Michael has lots of trouble getting dates and is
very bitter about it. Just in case you feel too sorry for him, however,
Barker is careful to include a homophobic monologue in which Michael complains
about young women who waste their lives hanging out with effeminate males.
Michael turns out to be the film's most
sympathetic subject--by a wide margin. At least he's not Mikey, a paunchy
54-year-old who writes but can't sell screenplays and who always flees blind
dates, because the women he gets fixed up with are "mutts." Sounding like one
of the low-level gangsters who posture like kingpins in Donnie Brasco ,
Mikey talks a lot about mutts. He also reminisces about that 24 hour period in
the '70s when he managed to sleep with three different beautiful women, whose
pictures he shows off. These days, all he meets are mutts. He comes off as a
pathetic little loser--a mutt.
Aimee, on
the other hand, is a pathetic big loser, weighing in at 225 pounds.
Determined to get married before she turns 30, she generally is filmed beside
bags of groceries and assorted junk foods. She cries about her situation to her
thin friend, Laurie, who, in one scene, gently mentions Aimee's weight. Clearly
the scene is scripted, but Aimee does a good job acting taken aback. She has
always been fat--and she's "OK with it," and a man just has to accept it. This
is followed by more talk about how you attract men. Will they respect you if
you call them back? If you express too much interest? "Or," the viewer thinks,
"if you're 225 pounds?"
The only natural performer here is Brenda, a garrulous
exhibitionist who blossoms with the camera on her--she could have a career as a
Penny Marshall-style character actress. Divorced and aging, Brenda needs money
and is willing to charge for her sexual services. It shouldn't be too
difficult, because men are always showing her their dicks ("I'm up to two dicks
a day"). They meet her and, a few minutes later, they show her their dicks.
Weird, huh? What Barker leaves out (it's in a New York Observer article)
is that Brenda, a former lap dancer, works in marketing at a strip joint.
Presumably, men standing next to her in line at McDonald's don't show her their
dicks. Nor, presumably, does she show them her breasts--although she bares them
for Barker's camera, jabbering about her body while she doffs her clothes and
steps into the shower and soaps up.
Barker
might have crafted his subjects' monologues from their own words, but he has
robbed them of their spontaneity--and, thus, of their essence. They aren't
thinking or trying to come to grips with their situations in front of your
eyes, because they already know what they're going to say: They've been fixed
like butterflies on the ends of pins and held up for voyeuristic inspection.
The scenes with friends and confidantes have a crude, programmatic purpose. You
can imagine the director composing a shot (the shots are tightly composed and
elaborately lighted) and reminding them, "In this scene she points out that you
should lose weight and you get shocked and defensive. Ready ... Action."
Call me square, but I find this antithetical to
the documentary spirit. An Englishman who trained as an anthropologist before
going to work for BBC Television, Barker clearly made up his mind about his
material before his cameras began to roll--so it's no surprise that it feels
prechewed and predigested. When reality interfered (Brenda apparently did not
go through with a marriage to an immigrant in search of a green card for
$10,000, as she does on-screen), Barker brushed the truth aside as immaterial,
following her up the steps of City Hall in her wedding dress because it was
"true to her character." But what separates documentary from fiction is that
real people are often more complicated, and more conflicted, than finished
characters--as Brenda proved to be more (or, at least, other) than the sum of
her parts. That's the kind of truth that reveals itself to documentary
filmmakers after the fact, when they go over footage and discover unexpected
patterns, dissonances, glimmers of a universe that's richer and messier than
the one they set out to portray.
So what are Barker's "larger
dramatic truths"? Single people in big cities can be desperate. Single people
fear they're going to die alone--unloved and unloving. People are judged and,
in turn, judge others by how they look. Big news. One could argue, charitably,
that the movie is meant to be prescriptive, that Barker intends for us to
regard the ways in which his subjects delude themselves and thereby learn to
see through our own self-delusions. But Barker hasn't concocted a larger
dramatic structure that would hold those larger dramatic truths together
and help us comprehend where these people went wrong. He dramatizes right up to
the point where a dramatist would be expected to provide some insight--and
then, hey, he's a documentarian.
Unmade
Beds might make a good date movie. There's little to argue about in its
subjects' personalities--both males and females will find them repulsive--and
the picture the film paints of single life in the big city is so bleak that
you'll probably want to jump into bed with whoever is sitting next to you.
Anything to keep from turning into one of those people.
The Slums of Beverly Hills also walks a line between two
genres, in this case coming-of-age sex comedy and autobiographical monologue.
Tamara Jenkins, the writer and first-time director, has an eye for absurd
juxtapositions that was obviously sharpened by the pain of her nomadic
upbringing. Her protagonist (Natasha Lyonne) spends her teen-age years being
shuttled with her two brothers from one cheap dive to another in the 90210 ZIP
code, all because her egregiously unsuccessful father (Alan Arkin) wants them
to be educated in the best schools. ("Furniture's temporary; education is
permanent.") It's a major omission, then, that we never see those schools or
the kids' interaction with their stable, well-to-do Beverly Hills counterparts.
We can't tell if the father is, on some weird level, justified in his fervor,
or whether he's screwing up his children--subjecting them to humiliation and
robbing them of a sense of permanence--for no reason. Jenkins hasn't quite
figured out how to shape her narrative, which is full of episodes that are
there because they actually happened but that don't have a payoff. I almost
wish she'd included more voice-over narration, more commentary on the things
that, as a filmmaker, she hasn't learned to bring out.
The
Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's
exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of
'70s fashions and decor. The father, to obtain financial support from his
wealthy brother (Carl Reiner), volunteers to take in his vaguely schizzy,
dipsomaniacal niece (Marisa Tomei). She and her cousin compare breasts, play
with vibrators, and talk in pig Latinish gibberish, but Jenkins never lets the
proceedings get too sentimental: The whimsy is always cut with an acidic
awareness of the family's desperation. "Are we middle-class now?" ask the
children, hopefully, before another crisis sends them back into their van,
cruising past the movie stars' mansions, in the mean streets of Beverly
Hills.
Grading on the steep curve established by
summer blockbuster seasons past, these have turned out to be a pretty good few
months at the movies. Even the commercial swill ( Deep Impact ,
Armageddon , The Mask of Zorro , Small Soldiers , Snake
Eyes , Halloween: H20 ) has been of a high grade, and Saving
Private Ryan and Return to Paradise were Vitalis slaps in the kisser
for people woozy from all the warm weather escapism. Out of Sight was
tender and charming, as was, in its gross-out way, There's Something About
Mary . And, on the indie front, The Opposite of Sex , Buffalo
66 , and Pi have proved that there's still commercial life after
Sundance. Sure, we had stinkers, but even Godzilla was fun to jeer at.
And there's something reassuring about the fact that The Avengers is so
rotten: proof yet again that people with piles of money can hire wizard
production designers but can't fake class.
I don't know who the
credited screenwriter, Don MacPherson, is, but it's unlikely that he has ever
seen an episode of the old Avengers , let alone sussed out the source of
its appeal. Opening with a slapstick sequence of agent John Steed (Ralph
Fiennes) doing kung fu, the film shifts to a scene in which he meets Mrs. Peel
(Uma Thurman) while sitting naked in a sauna with only a newspaper to cover his
private parts. The series was erotic in a way only prim English humor can be:
The Old Boy Steed was capable of throwing a punch and bonking someone with his
bowler, but he left the karate kicking to his liberated, leather-suited distaff
associate. Here their roles have been witlessly muddled, and MacPherson's idea
of banter is to have the pair complete each other's clichés.
Whereas the original Steed,
Patrick Macnee, was to the English Men's Club born, Fiennes is an eternal
caddie. The willowy Thurman looks great in her outfits, but it's ever more
apparent that she isn't much of an actress--at least, not a trained one--and
her attempts at insouciance are embarrassingly arch. As the eccentric master
villain who controls the weather, even Sean Connery is flat-out terrible,
acting high on the hog. To think Connery once found the Bond films so far
beneath him! When he sputters lines like "Time to die!" one imagines Dr. No,
Goldfinger, and Blofeld snickering in the wings.
to inform people that documentaries aren't always accurate to persuade people to be critical of movies they watch to explain different films he's seen recently to inform the audience of the changes in cinema