The Big Chill: Snow Days, Frozen Yogurt, and the National Film Registry

While much of the U.S. has been shivering through snowstorms, I’m almost embarrassed to say that we in SoCal are enjoying glorious weather: the kind that encourages you to be outdoors taking a walk, not inside watching a movie. Frozen yogurt sounds great to me right about now, and there’s a popular little shop nearby called “The Big Chill.” Which just happens to be named after a 1983 film that recently made it onto the National Film Registry administered through the Library of Congress.

 In 1983, The Big Chill was a hugely popular film peopled by some of Hollywood’s brightest new talents, including such stars-in-the-making as William Hurt, Jeff Goldblum, Kevin Kline, and Glenn Close. They play former college pals gathering in a comfy home in South Carolina to memorialize one of their number who has died, a suicide. It’s a film whose central subject is nostalgia: they’re all remembering back to the Sixties, to their college days at the University of Michigan, when they were young, optimistic, and full of ideas about how the world should be run.

 Looking over the whole list of new inductees to the National  Film Registry, I’ve concluded that nostalgia is a central concept in many of them. Sometimes the movies themselves are thematically looking back on an earlier (and maybe better) era; sometimes it’s the modern viewer who’s transported by a classic film to a time when life seemed to hold much more promise than what we know today.

  What do I mean? Well, let’s start with two musicals from the 1950s that both made this year’s list. They were released by different studios (Paramount and MGM), but both, curiously, have the same top-billed star, Bing Crosby. Both are set in what was then the present-day, but the reality they portray is definitely candy-coated. White Christmas (1954) unfolds largely in and around an old country inn where two WWII army buddies who now have a nightclub act woo two talented singing sisters, while also trying to help the inn’s owner, their former commanding officer. Of course the plot climaxes with the singing of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” a song originally written for a 1942 Hollywood film with a very similar premise, Holiday Inn. Listen to its hyper-nostalgic lyric: “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know.” And 1956’s High Society is a musical throwback to 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, portraying a ritzy but placid social environment that all of us would just love to experience.

 There are some serious dramas on the list too. Glory (1989) is a powerful historical drama portraying the 54^th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an African American unit that fought (under white commander Colonel Robert Gould Shaw) for the Union during the Civil War. I suspect most of us are hardly nostalgic for the racism and blood of the War Between the States, but we can look back with admiration on the raw courage of Shaw and his men. Similarly, 1993’s Philadelphia graphically portrays the depths of the AIDS crisis. It’s not a time to which we’d want to return, but the story unfolds in a way that makes heroes out of its central characters. And Tom Hanks’ Oscar-winning portrayal of a dying gay man includes a heartbreakingly nostalgic scene in which he relives an operatic performance by Maria Callas.

 We can feel a much happier kind of nostalgia in recalling how we (or our children) loved The Incredibles (2004) or how Wes Anderson helped us look cheerfully back to a time that never quite was in 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

 

“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar . . . and Wes Anderson”

I seem to be having a bit of a private Wes Anderson festival lately. Some cinematic research led me to re-watch Moonrise Kingdom, The French Dispatch, and his latest, Asteroid City. As always, I was charmed by Anderson’s enchanting visuals, and by his use of some of the world’s best actors in quirky and unexpected ways. And yet I could never shake the notion that most of Anderson’s work is much ado about nothing: that he lacks the story sense to make something that actually has meaning. With Oscar night coming up so soon, it’s appropriate to mention that Anderson’s films have never lacked for Academy love. Over the years, there have been 16 nominations in various categories,  most of them technical. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014—perhaps the Anderson work with the most to say) actually collected 9 nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. And it won statuettes for its costume design, hair and makeup, production design, and original score. Still, the big prizes have eluded Anderson himself, maybe because many Academy voters see Anderson’s works as charming stunts, rather than as truly meaningful creations.

 Perhaps this will be the year when Anderson finally wins his own Oscar. He’s on the short list not for Asteroid City (which got shut out of all categories) but for his forty-minute adaptation of a Roald Dahl tale, “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” Dah’s whimsical though sometimes macabre way of looking at the world seems to beautifully suit Anderson’s stylistics, allowing him to romp visually while giving some spine to his storytelling. Clearly Anderson is on a Roald Dahl kick: for Netflix he has applied  his cinematic skills to a whole 1976 volume of Dahl stories, of which “Henry Sugar” is the first and best.

 For “Henry Sugar,” Anderson enjoys the services of some of England’s finest, including Benedict Cumberbatch (as the title character), along with Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and (playing a version of Dahl himself) Ralph Fiennes. All seem to have been directed to play straight to the camera, delivering their lines at a speedy deadpan clip as though they were reading straight from the Dahl text. And what a text it is, comprising an exotic tale within a tale. Fiennes as Dahl introduces us to Henry, a wealthy Englishman whose only goal is increasing his substantial fortune by playing cards for money. In his countryman’s well-furnished library he happens upon the account of an Indian mystic who learned after years of strenuous concentration to read with his eyes securely bandaged. To Henry, the knowledge of this possibility leads immediately to thoughts of how he can best his card-playing cronies by being able to read the cards in a deck though only seeing their backsides. He applies himself to this effort, and succeeds magnificently, coming away with a brick-sized packet of cold, hard cash. But of course things don’t work out as planned, and Dahl’s neat twist of an ending shows us the surprising ways that greed can work on the human psyche.

 Dahl has supplied the story line: Anderson contributes his own magic, mostly of the visual variety. His locations—whether they represent Dahl’s cozy writing cottage, a baronial stately home, an Indian guru’s jungle hut, or a hospital lounge—all seem as artificial as stage sets, and they come apart and re-form (with the help, at times, of stagehands) with dazzling speed. What Anderson has achieved is a short film that gives us the immediacy, and the aesthetic pleasure, of live theatre. Which makes me wonder: why doesn’t Anderson give stage work a try?  

 

The (Moon)Rising Career of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson’s directing career can be summed up in a single word: whimsy.  The eleven features he’s made since 1996 are unique partly because of their skewed vision of the world we all know. His fans enjoy the idiosyncratic performances he gets from his informal stock company of actors, which includes such big-name talents as Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Frances McDormand, Jason Schwartzman, Edward Norton, Anjelica Huston, the always amusing Bob Balaban, and of course Bill Murray. Then there’s his distinctive approach to set design: his visuals tend to make everything look just a wee bit artificial, as though the characters are living and working in a giant dollhouse.

 Anderson’s work is not to everyone’s taste, and I admit that his droll , deadpan approach sometimes strikes me as too much of a good thing. Asteroid City, for example, is so busy being spoofy about the threat of extraterrestrials and the production of a theatre extravaganza that I gave up on trying to find a thread between the film’s various component parts. Anderson is at his best when he can find the heart of the matter: the human emotions connecting the artistically clever touches.

 That’s what I like about 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Yes, this island-set film has many of the familiar Anderson touches, like a cast of legendary faces, an oddball use of music (here Benjamin Britten’s “A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” is featured, played on a kid-sized portable record player), and a mischievous use of maps, letters, and other documents to tell the tale. There’s satire aplenty in Anderson’s look at a troop of Boy Scouts (led by Edward Norton and here called Khaki Scouts) who are working hard on their eccentric wilderness skills. Characters have funny jobs, or do their jobs in a funny—though sometimes grotesque—way. (Bruce Willis is a local police chief embroiled in a secret affair with one of the island residents; Tilda Swinton plays a straight-laced social services officer who seems to be keen on electroshock therapy.)

 But the chief focus of Moonrise Kingdom is on two young people unwilling to learn the ways of their elders. Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop, are both about 12 and on the brink of puberty. Neither is at all comfortable with the adult world that seems to have no place for them, and a chance meeting leads to a clandestine correspondence, and then a daring attempt to break away from civilization and live on their own, as a sort of pint-sized Adam and Eve. (Suzy is rather taller than the clever but nerdy Sam, one of the film’s endearing details.) 

 Pretty soon everyone on the island is engaged in the effort to find the missing pair, and then figure out what to do with them. The ending is about as quirky and happy as a Wes Anderson project can be, leaving the viewer content that life—in all its craziness—will go on. I love the fact that Anderson’s sometimes over-the-top visual ideas vie for attention here with the island’s natural beauty. (The scout troop’s treehouse is an eccentric marvel.) I also love the sense that the story at times mirrors some of the grand old tales we all know. Sam is, picturesquely, an orphan wanted by no one. And the scene of Suzy in the woods, reading from one of her enchanting storybooks to a rapt circle of Khaki Scouts, seems straight out of Peter Pan. This is Anderson’s stab at a coming-of-age film. As the young characters find love, it’s easy for the viewer to fall in love with them.

 

Born in the U.S.A.: Indiana Jones and Asteroid City

There was a time, back in the Thirties and Forties, when Hollywood backlots stood in for all the exotic places on the globe. You needed to set your story in a Casablanca bazaar? An Irish village? An exotic palace high in the Himalayas? If SoCal couldn’t find a suitable location, perhaps you went as far away as Yuma, Arizona (where Crosby and Hope filmed Road to Morocco). Back then, Hollywood studios’ screenplays circumnavigated the globe, but their production was strictly all-American.

 How things have changed! I just saw Wes Anderson’s new Asteroid City, an all-star meditation on the difference between reality and artistic invention. Some of it is apparently set in New York, where a TV documentary captures the evolution of a fledgling theatre piece written by Broadway great Conrad Earp (Edward Norton). Most of it—showing the playing-out of Earp’s artistic vision—is set in a candy-colored version of the American Southwest, complete with a quaint filling station, a roadside café, and a bungalow court, as well as a freight train that passes through now and again. This out-of-the-way place, known as Asteroid City, gets its name from a small globule of space junk that once landed here. Now it’s the location of a modest but prestigious gathering of military brass, some “brainiac” kids who’ve won a science competition, and their eclectically assorted parents. And did I mention there’s an alien sighting?

 The locale, the cast, and the background music (lots of old western tunes that would surely make the Coen Brothers happy) all shriek Americana. So I was more than a bit surprised, in reading the closing credits, to discover that Asteroid City was shot largely in Spain, with additional production units in France and Italy. I’m sure the financing of the film had something to do with the choice of shooting locations. Anderson, who has made such films as The Darjeeling Limited, and The French Dispatch, has a great affinity for exotic locales. By choosing to shoot in far-flung corners of the globe, he’s doubtless come up with some lucrative funding sources that depend on him filming far from Hollywood, even when he’s dealing with all-American subject matter.

 I like Anderson’s loopy vision of the world, and it’s fun to see such major talents as Scarlett Johansson, Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston and even Tom Hanks pop up in offbeat roles. (Jeff Goldblum is billed as the alien.) The approach worked beautifully in probably my favorite Anderson ensemble flick, The Grand Budapest Hotel. (His sensitive coming-of-age romance Moonrise Kingdom is lovely but stylistically uncharacteristic.) But it certainly helps, when the canvas is so broad, if we care about the characters, and if the film is actually about something coherent. In Asteroid City, Anderson’s movement back and forth between the behind-the-scenes creation of a drama and the actual playing out of the finished version can be seen as meaningful . . . or simply aggravating. Me, I’ll go with the latter adjective.

 But of course the big news this week is about the launching of Indiana Jones and the Dial of  Destiny. Talk about Americana—and a great film with which to kick off a holiday weekend. No, I didn’t choose to brave what I hope will be big crowds at the multiplex (today’s film industry needs all the blockbusters it can get). But I rented Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Harrison Ford gets to play (delightfully) against old pro Sean Connery. Indie’s crusty dad may be Scottish, but the man himself is a strong, smart, courageous All-American. July 4 doesn’t get much better than that.