Elvis Goes to Oz: “Wild at Heart”

 I watched Wild at Heart in memory of the late Diane Ladd: it was one of three films for which she received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, though she never won the statuette. In 1974, she first earned a chance at Oscar glory for her supporting role as a feisty diner waitress (“Kiss my grits”) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She was nominated a second time in 1990 for Wild at Heart, and then a third time a year later for Rambling Rose. Remarkably, in the latter two films she played opposite her real-life daughter, the very talented Laura Dern. (There’s a Roger Corman connection too—Laura, born in 1967, was apparently conceived while her parents were location, shooting Corman’s biker classic, The Wild Angels.)

 Wild at Heart was written and directed by David Lynch, who had burst into the public consciousness in 1986 with Blue Velvet. In that provocative film, which explored the perverse underbelly of an apparently wholesome mid-western town, young Laura Dern (about 17 at the time) played a schoolgirl whose sunny naïveté is in marked contrast to the perverse doings going on all around her. She was again to star for Lynch four years later, but in a highly different role. In Wild at Heart, Dern plays Lula Pace Fortune, a North Carolina cutie simply oozing with sexuality. Her man is Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), a ne’er-do-well Elvis Presley enthusiast who treasures Lula even more than he does his genuine snakeskin jacket. Soon after the film begins, he’s carted off to prison, but when he returns it’s Lula he wants most. And the bulk of the film becomes their odyssey through the American South, heading for the distant dream of California.

 I hardly anticipated that this film is an unlikely nod to Dorothy and her friends easing down the Yellow Brick Road. (Instead of walking, the lovers cruise in a gaudy convertible, but the far-off Emerald City shines brightly in their eyes.) Of course an Oz story needs a Wicked Witch, and that’s where Diane Ladd comes in. As shrill socialite Marietta Fortune, she’s determined to separate daughter Lula from her lover, and it’s only gradually that we fully understand why. A widow, Marietta has several useful local men at her beck and call, and her intentions are hardly honorable.

 Though the film’s Oz references do not overwhelm the story, they give it a fanciful quality that sets it apart from darker Lynch projects. Nor does it fit tonally into the familiar “lovers on the lam” film genre, which encompasses grim dramas like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, as well as such older classics as They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950). It’s fun to spot the Ozian allusions, which include ruby slippers, a big pink bubble, and a real-life oversized Munchkin. True, Wild at Heart is not without its moments of graphic Lynchian mayhem. But its violence is of the comic book variety. And the ending is one that Lynch himself considered happily ever after, with true love conquering all, even wicked witches. (This was a marked change from the conclusion of the novel on which the film is based.)

 To the surprise of many (including critic Roger Ebert), Wild at Heart was cheered at the Cannes Film Festival, and received the prestigious Palme d’Or. Back at home, though,  Lynch learned his flick would be X-rated if cuts were not made. What I saw on DVD was still pretty wild. It may be perverse, but I liked encountering a “Dorothy” who could emphatically declare, “You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”  

 

Animal Attraction: Dog Day Afternoon

We’re fast approaching the time of year when the Library of Congress announces the new inductees for its National Film Registry, honoring movies with cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance. I’ve just watched a 1975 film that made the list back in 2009. Dog Day Afternoon can be said to have historical significance, because it’s based on an actual true-crime incident that was covered in Life magazine in 1972. But with the great Sidney Lumet at the helm, it’s also an aesthetic marvel.

 Lumet’s long film career began in 1957, with the tightly focused, highly suspenseful jury room drama, Twelve Angry Men. Lunet directed several films based on classic American plays, including A View from the Bridge and Long Day’s Journey into Night (a powerful version of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical stage production). There were lighter works too (he put on screen The Wiz, the “ghetto” version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a huge Broadway hit), but he was perhaps best known for crime thrillers, like Serpico and his very last project (in 2007), Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.  He was four times nominated for Best Director Oscars, but could never quite eke out a personal win. (He did receive a richly deserved honorary Oscar in 2004, seven years before his death at age 86.) His most honored film was probably Network, a cutting satire of the TV industry that was nominated for major 9 Oscars and won four, though Rocky took home the top prize. I personally have a special love for his late career film, Running on Empty (1988), the poignant story of a counterculture couple whose son (the late River Phoenix) tries to opt out of their nomadic lives as fugitives from the FBI. On that film, as often happened for Lumet, his writer and lead actor got nominated for Oscars even though he himself didn’t.

 Dog Day Afternoon is surely one of Lumet’s mid-career best, made just after Murder on the Orient Express and before Network. It’s the story of a bank robbery, but with a significant difference. In most bank heist films, going back to the very early days of cinema, there’s a lot of money at stake: the bad guys either get it or don’t. If they succeed in robbing the bank, they either get away or (more often) are foiled at the very last minute, thus proving that crime doesn’t pay. But Dog Day Afternoon is much more of a character study: at its center is a loser who’s desperately trying to untangle a messy domestic situation by funding his male lover’s sex change operation. His solution is to rob a Brooklyn bank, one that turns out to have virtually no cash on hand. As the tension and the temperature rise, Sonny tries to achieve his goals by taking a clutch of bank-tellers hostage: their emotions range from fear to anger to perverse amusement. There’s also another gunman on the scene, the eerily silent Sal (John Cazale), who seems violent enough to commit mayhem.

 The Brooklyn neighborhood re-created on film by Lumet becomes part of the action, as counterculture crowds sympathetic to the hapless Sonny gather in the street to heckle the swarming NYPD cops and straight-arrow FBI guys. Though movies are, of necessity, filmed out of sequence, the mood of this one is so well-sustained that we feel we are on the spot, watching it all unfold in real time as the weather gets hotter, Sonny gets sweatier (inside the bank, the air conditioning has been dismantled), and the possibility of bloodshed becomes more and more likely. 

 

The Play’s the Thing: Why Tom Stoppard Lost It At the Movies

 The deaths, alas, just keep on coming. (In today's news, it's the great Frank Gehry, an architect blessed with rare skill and imagination.) Over Thanksgiving weekend, I read of the passing of one of our greatest playwrights, the Czech-born English man of letters, Tom Stoppard. A fascinating individual as well as an extraordinarily talented wordsmith, Stoppard had premiered his last play (at the age of 83) in 2020. Fittingly, Leopoldstadt was both a brilliant dramatic achievement and a belated exploration of his own Nazi-era Jewish roots. Like most of his plays, it is very much a work tailored to the stage, and will not be coming to local cinemas anytime soon. Which doesn’t mean Stoppard is adverse to film, as I discuss in a 2021 Beverly in Movieland post that I’m repeating here as a Stoppard tribute.  

“Inside any stage play there is cinema wildly signalling to be let out.” This Tom Stoppard quote, from the impressive (and weighty) new biography by Hermione Lee, hints at the famous playwright’s complex attitude toward the movies. From his youth onward, Stoppard was a fan of movies, starting with Disney’s Pinocchio, which he saw at the ripe old age of four. As an adult he loved everything. from Marx Brothers laff-fests to European art films to such popular Hollywood fare as The Graduate. (He and its director, Mike Nichols, turned out to have much in common – including early lives disrupted by Nazis – and later became close friends.)

  But Lee’s biography makes crystal-clear the gulf between writing for the stage and writing for movies. As the successful playwright of such works as The Real Thing and Arcadia, Stoppard revels in prestige and power. It’s not simply a matter of custom: the legalities of the theatre world stipulate that the text of a play cannot be changed for the purposes of stage production without the author’s consent. Some playwrights are probably shy about exerting their will, but Stoppard is not among them. Although unfailingly polite and collaborative, he insists that any changes to the text of a play be made by him. He also demands consultation on production matters, which means that he’s present not only at rehearsals but also at auditions and meetings of the technical staff. The performance of a Tom Stoppard play is, first and foremost, a Tom Stoppard production.

  At the movies, though, it’s the director, not the writer, who is king. (Or, I guess, queen, though female directors continue to be rare indeed.) A major director can hire and fire screenwriters at will, and can even have two writers toiling on the same project without being aware of one another’s existence. Other members of the production team often chime in with their own ideas, and stars have been known to contribute (and sometimes insist on) their own rewrites. This should not be a world in which Stoppard would want to operate, except for the fact that movie gigs are so very lucrative, and Stoppard’s lifestyle is so very lavish.

  Stoppard has been credited on several major movies, including the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love. He has also directed an ambitious though modestly budgeted 1990 screen version of his own earliest hit, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead, reasoning that only he would have the audacity to ruthlessly re-focus his own much-admired play. He quickly discovered that he was fundamentally NOT a filmmaker: his instinct was always to focus on dialogue, at the expense of camera movement. Afterwards he acknowledged that a filmmaker, though not a playwright, can change the frame. “In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks.”

 Aside from his several screenplay credits, Stoppard has become invaluable to such major directors as Steven Spielberg, because they trust him for smart, honest assessments of their pending projects. For Spielberg, he tried to tamp down the soppy elements that ended the romantic 1989 film, Always, but he also was insistent that Steven Zaillian’s final draft of Schindler’s List not be ”improved” upon. Sometimes Stoppard beefed up dialogue scenes, without screen credit but for serious sums of money. See, for instance, his sparkling work on the key father/son scene between Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Spielberg’s third Indiana Jones film, which ends with Connery’s Henry Jones telling his long-neglected son that “you left just when you were becoming interesting.”

 

  

The Unsung Stuntman: Carl Ciarfalio Takes His Last Bow

  I don't normally re-post old Beverly in Movieland entries.  But I was so saddened to read about the death of ace stuntman (and very good guy) Carl Ciarfalio in November of this year that I decided to honor his memory by  repeating this profile from January 10, 2013. (You might remember Carl for pummeling Tom Cruise in a bare-knuckles boxing scene in Ron Howard's Far and Away--the rare on-screen fight that Cruise ever lost.)  

Now that the list of Oscar nominees is out, I’m pausing to acknowledge Hollywood’s forgotten men (and women). Stunt performers have been around since the movies began. But they rarely get the recognition they deserve. Take Harvey Parry, who used to stunt-double the great silent film star, Harold Lloyd. Parry’s contracts specified he could not admit to doubling for Lloyd until after Lloyd’s death. But wasn’t Lloyd -- an extremely athletic fellow -- capable of doing his own stuntwork? Modern-day stunt actor Carl Ciarfalio admits this was true, mostly. Lloyd in his prime was “much like today’s Tom Cruise. Tom does almost everything, but not everything.”

Carl Ciarfalio knows a great deal about stuntwork. He should, after 38 years in the business. You’ve seen him on-screen in major films like Fight Club, Mission Impossible III, and The Amazing Spider-Man. He’s got a Roger Corman connection too, having worn the “Thing” suit in Concorde’s underground hit, The Fantastic Four. It all began when he and a wrestling-team buddy auditioned for a stunt show at Knott’s Berry Farm. Knott’s was looking for big guys who could fall down and be funny. Carl, then digging ditches for a plumber, figured the Knott’s gig would make a great summer job, before he entered Cal State Fullerton. But “within a couple of months I had a cowboy hat and a gun and I was on stage and people were applauding and laughing, and I told my parents, ‘I’ll go back to school one day.’” Instead, of course, he ended up in the school of hard knocks.

A stuntman’s career requires training, as well as a serious approach to one’s craft. I told Carl I’d been on the set of New World’s Big Bad Mama when stuntmen performed a dangerous car flip. They walked away unhurt, then headed for the nearest bar. Carl agrees this often happens, especially on location, but “at the end of the day . . . I like to go home and take a shower and take a deep breath and think about what the day was about. Because you’re only as good as your last gag.”

In his off-hours, does he do crazy things for fun and recreation? “No, ma’am, I’m exactly the opposite of that. There’s a huge difference between thrillseekers and daredevils and professional stunt people. Professional stunt people need to have that A-type personality to be able to step off the cliff or light themselves on fire, but they also need to be able to do it in front of the camera -- hit their marks and then do it a second, third, fourth, and fifth time. So that makes it different than a daredevil who is trying to beat the odds. Scripted stunts, scripted action is much different than jumpin’ off the roof and hopin’ you make the pool.”

Now that he’s an elder statesman of sorts, Carl increasingly works as a stunt coordinator, facing the pressure of keeping his entire team safe from harm. One big challenge: “Low-budget films want it all, and have no money for anything.” In which case, he’ll demand script changes, because “no piece of film is worth an injury or a death.”

As one of the first governors representing stunt performers at the Television Academy, Carl has helped make sure stunt coordinators now receive Emmy recognition. Oscar, though, has yet to catch up. Given the current popularity of action films, he hopes this will soon change. After all, “a James Bond movie would be nothin’ if it was just walkin’ and talkin.’”

Hail and farewell, Carl!   

Food, Glorious Food: “Big Night”

I’ve always enjoyed movies about cooking. Given that we all have to eat, I guess it’s not remarkable that food preparation can be used in so many ways to comment on the human condition. In the 1987 Danish film Babette’s Feast, a French refugee introduces an austere Scandinavian family to the joys of good food . . . and by extension the earthy pleasures of life.  Taiwan-born director Ang Lee, in his 1994 Eat Drink Man Woman, uses a retired chef cooking for his adult daughters as a way to explore Chinese  tradition as well as the relationship between generations. In 2023’s The Taste of Things, starring the luminous Juliette Binoche, a pairing involving love and loss unfolds through the relationship of a gourmet and his loyal cook. And we can’t forget the Pixar animated film, Ratatouille, which proves that you’re never too small to be very good in the kitchen.

 Earlier this year, Netflix presented Nonnas, a star-studded TV movie based on the real-life story of a New York man. He paid tribute to his late mother’s talents as a home cook by launching a popular Staten Island restaurant in which the kitchen is staffed by a clutch of Italian mamas. This slight but charming film is notable for casting veteran actresses of Italian descent (like Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, and Talia Shire), and having them fight epic stove-top battles over cooking techniques and regional specialties.

 Then there’s Big Night, a 1996 labor of love co-written and co-directed by Stanley Tucci. Tucci, a hyper-versatile character actor who was Oscar-nominated for playing an ominous neighbor in 2009’s The Lovely Bones, is most fondly remembered (by me, at least) as a sympathetic gay art director in 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada. He also made an impressively down-to-earth Roman Catholic cardinal in last year’s Conclave.

 Throughout his career, Tucci has not been shy about proclaiming his love for good cooking, especially of the Italian variety. In 2021 he hosted  Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a CNN series that followed him through the land of his ancestors. That same year he published Taste: My Life Through Food, a memoir that spent sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Other Tucci publications include What I Ate in One Year and several cookbooks.

 So it’s no surprise that when Tucci set about to make an original film, he put food preparation at its center. Big Night casts Tucci and Tony Shalhoub (of Lebanese descent but comfortable playing a wide range of nationalities) as Italian-born brothers determined to create a fine-dining restaurant near the New Jersey shore. In the film, Primo (Shalhoub) is the older brother, an artist in the kitchen who’s intolerant of shortcuts and trendy gimmicks. Tucci himself plays Secundo, the would-be practical brother who’s determined to see the business succeed, but has his own lapses into fantasyland. While locals cram into a livelier but far less authentic Italian-American bistro nearby, the brothers are desperate to stay afloat. That’s when, for reasons the film makes clear, the duo decide to risk everything on an elaborate gourmet banquet that’s spectacular but in many ways poorly conceived. This is a story about the restaurant business—yes!—but even more about the push-and-pull relationship between two brothers with very different visions of what they want to achieve in life.

 Big Night is not an Oscar-winning kind of movie. But it nabbed several writing awards, including an Independent Spirit nod for Best First Screenplay. Clearly, Tucci’s got talent in areas other than acting, and I can’t help wondering what he’ll serve us next. 

 (Here's a fascinationg addendum, provided by Hillel Schwartz, a friend and loyal reader:)  Stanley Tucci played Paul Child (Julia Child's husband) in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia. Tucci wrote about his deep admiration for Julia Child in his Taste and in an article for TIME Magazine: https://time.com/6103409/stanley-tucci-taste-julia-child/.  Ironically, Tucci was diagnosed in 2017 with a tumor at the base of his tongue, and lost his sense of taste and smell, but this was successfully treated with chemotherapy and radiation, although he had to have a feeding tube for six months. And now his co-star in Big Night, Tony Shalhoub, has his own tv series, where he goes around tasting versions of bread in different ethnic cuisines.

“Jay Kelly”: Stars in Their Eyes

I recently heard a sweet story involving a weather delay at a small airport somewhere in the northwest. For various complex reasons, the passengers suddenly had to rely on ground transportation to get to where they were going. What made all the difference was the fact that one of the passengers was the actor Keanu Reeves. Charmingly self-effacing, he befriended his fellow travelers and used his clout to hire the bus that got them all to their destinations. When they finally parted, they felt they had been personally blessed by this close proximity to stardom.

 That’s part of what being a movie star is about: having an appeal that reaches beyond the screen and makes average citizens feel they have a personal relationship with someone who is magic. There’s a similar sort of moment in the new Noah Baumbach film, Jay Kelly. In it George Clooney plays a world-famous leading man who seems (on the surface, at least) a whole lot like George Clooney. The episode begins on a European train on which Kelly, instantly recognizable by all the other passengers, charms them with self-deprecating humor. Then a disturbed man grabs the pocketbook of a nice old lady, stops the train, and runs off into the Italian countryside. Without a second’s hesitation, Kelly shifts into heroic mode, as he’s doubtless done in countless popular flicks. He leaps from the train and pursues the thief, finally emerging triumphant with the errant purse, to the huzzahs of all the other passengers. That’s the upside of being famous.

 Baumbach’s film (co-written by the talented British actress Emily Mortimer) shows us the downside too: the toll stardom takes on one’s family life, as well as the skewed sense of self that develops when the star is always encircled by a fawning entourage. The film certainly conveys the difficulties faced when an ageing celebrity is no longer so clear about his path forward, and we do feel a certain sympathy for a nice-guy leading man who’s starting to be tired of the usual clamor of expectations. But I found myself (as various critics groups have done) even more interested in the hangers-on who pay a price for their loyalty to the great man. The second lead in this film is played by Adam Sandler as Ron Sukenick, Jay’s long-time manager. He’s a guy who puts family obligations (and pretty much everything else) second to his duties as Jay’s companion, fixer, office wife, and general factotum. Yes, he’s even been known to touch up the star’s greying temples, with needed. Now he’s left his own kids at home with an increasingly resentful wife (played by Baumbach’s own wife, Greta Gerwig) while he and Jay schlepp around Europe to attend a gala tribute event that Jay had previously turned down, but then mercurially changed his mind about at the very last minute. Sandler, who’s long since graduated from the childish comedies that first made his reputation, has already won some performance awards for this role, and I suspect there’ll be more.

The movie’s certainly a reflection on the price of stardom. And non-stardom: there’s a small but important subplot about the young Jay’s talented buddy who, through the kind of fluke with which the film industry is rife, never gets the chance to move ahead in his career. This is not Baumbach’s best film: its time-jumps and on-the-nose plotting detract from the kind of tightly-focused artistry he generally brings to projects like Marriage Story and The Squid and the Whale. Still, even if it doesn’t reach the starry heights, this is a film worth pondering.

 

 

 

Hairless in the Basement: “Bugonia”

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos is not one to play it safe. Neither, apparently, is Emma Stone. The Internet tells me that Lanthimos is a part of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave.” Unlike such earlier Greek filmmakers as the great Michael Cacoyannis—who dramatized classical tragedies like Electra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971) while also bringing a full range of dramatic colors to 1964’s modern-day Zorba the Greek—Lanthimos is not interested in ennobling his characters. He seems to have real affection for the grotesque. I haven’t seen all of his English-language films. But The Lobster, in which single adults are given 45 days to find a mate or risk being turned into the animal of their choice, is both bizarre and extremely entertaining. And I loved Lanthimos’s first collaboration with Emma Stone, in 2018’s The Favourite, which made me regard the 18^th century British monarchy in a whole new light. None of this, though, prepared me for Poor Things (2023), a kind of berserk Frankenstein story in which Stone’s young adult character starts out with a small child’s brain, then develops a teenager’s libido, before finally reaching a kind of mental and emotional maturity. (The Oscar Stone won for this role was definitely well-deserved.)

 In this year’s Bugonia (the title refers to an ancient Greek folk ritual involving bees and cow dung), Lanthimos and Stone are together once again. And once again he seems to enjoy systematically destroying her wide-eyed beauty in the name of grim humor. In the film, Stone plays a soignée big pharma exec who works out of a hypermodern building set in the rural American countryside. She’s a powerhouse at work, but this doesn’t stop her from being kidnapped by two scruffy locals and imprisoned in their basement. The older one, Teddy, is played by the recently ubiquitous Jesse Plemons, who—with his always disheveled red hair—is looking more and more like Opie gone to seed. He’s the idea guy: the one who is absolutely convinced that Stone’s Michelle is really a dangerous space alien sent to threaten Planet Earth. The younger, Don, is Teddy’s always-loyal cousin. (He’s played by young Alban Delbis, who is genuinely afflicted with autism. A star of his SoCal high school’s drama class, Delbis gives an impressively moving performance.)

 The notion that a successful entrepreneur in a business suit and heels would  be accused by a doofus or two of actually coming from outer space sounds like it could make for fun at the movies. That’s what I thought my evening would be like, but the film’s poster should really have disabused me of that notion. Though a few of my fellow filmgoers managed to guffaw a time or two, Bugonia is hard to classify as a comedy, even a very dark one. Yes, there are some unexpected plot twists that encourage us to smirk, but I defy anyone to chuckle at the film’s gut-punching ending.

 Most critical reviews of Bugonia have been positive, I’m told, My hometown newspaper, The Los Angeles Times, titles its strong review “It’s Emma Stone’s planet now as the alien comedy ‘Bugonia’ proves.” The focus by the Times critic is on how cleverly Stone plays with our emotions, and how much she endures for her art, up to and including having the hair on her head brutally shaved off on camera. To promote the film’s opening, a Culver City theatre staged a promo performance exclusively for bald people, or those who were willing to lose their locks on-site. But despite the resulting hoopla, I’m sensing that audiences—with or without hair—are staying away.