REVIEW

Wrestling with Real Life

By David Sterritt

The Class, Sony Pictures Classics

The Wrestler, Fox Searchlight Pictures

Synecdoche, New York, Sony Pictures Classics

Gran Torino, Warner Brothers

In this atmosphere, the best hopes for constructive filmmaking often lie far from Hollywood studios, in state-subsidized movie industries abroad (where box-office grosses don't reign supreme) and in independent companies. This helps explain why the best recent picture to open on American screens began as a low-budget project for Israeli television and expanded into a theatrical feature with financing from Germany, France, and ITVS, an independent American outlet. Waltz with Bashir is so original and unconventional that simply describing it means putting together words not usually spoken in the same breath—it's an animated documentary made up of historical facts, intimate memories, psychological reflections, and nightmarish visions. Such a multifaceted hybrid could easily have disintegrated on the drawing board, but thanks to the talents of Israeli writer-director-producer Ari Folman, the finished film is emotionally rich, psychologically true, philosophically compelling, and historically urgent.

The events that begin the story have disturbing parallels to the mayhem that erupted in the Gaza Strip late last year. Reacting against Palestinians who'd been firing rockets into northern Israel, the Israeli army invaded southern Lebanon in June 1982, hoping to eliminate threats from the north by occupying Lebanon all the way to Beirut and installing the Christian Phalangist leader Bashir Gemayel, a favorite of Israeli officials as well as Christian militias, in the Lebanese presidency. Two months later a deal was struck whereby Palestinian fighters would leave Beirut and Israeli forces would stay outside the city in return. But shortly after this Gemayel was assassinated in East Beirut, whereupon Israeli soldiers entered the city and Phalangist forces followed, descending on the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps—which were empty of fighters by now—and slaughtering some 3,000 men, women, and children in two days of collective revenge for Gemayel's murder.

This is explosive material by any standard—morally, historically, dramatically—and Folman has made it into indelible cinema via three highly creative ideas. First, he decided to build the story around his own efforts to recover repressed memories of fighting in the Lebanon War as an Israeli soldier; he himself is the main character, and he sets off to interview former comrades after a friend describes a recurring nightmare that appears to be linked with that period in their lives. Next, he wrote an intensely concentrated screenplay based on the most revealing of those interviews, and recruited the men who spoke the words to do so again on the soundtrack. (Five agreed to do so, while two are dubbed by actors.)

Folman's most daring decision was to make Waltz with Bashir an animated film. (He uses some of the same techniques that Pixar employs for its blockbuster cartoons, although a less Pixar-ish movie is hard to imagine.) Using animation allows Folman to heighten the impact of documentary elements (the events, the interviews, the voices) by imbuing them with the expressive properties of unfettered visual art. It also prepares the ground for the film's overwhelming conclusion, which no one this side of the late Primo Levi could adequately capture in words. I even see the animated format as a signal of the movie's freedom from cinematic materialism, since its avoidance of photographic imagery—which always lends a touch of seductive magic to people, places, and events—underscores the unique nature of its burningly important subject. Every sentient moviegoer should see Waltz with Bashir. It is irrefutable and irreplaceable.

The Class

The Class, directed by French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, comes to theaters with such impressive credentials—the top prize at Cannes, opening night at the New York Film Festival, and so on—that audiences might fear it's too arty to be much fun. Au contraire, it's as lively and engrossing as anything Hollywood has cooked up in ages, and it packs a political wallop to boot. If you don't spend much time in schoolrooms, this movie should be mandatory homework.

The action takes place in a Paris school that serves an ethnically diverse, working-class area. There a thirty-something teacher named François copes with a roomful of utterly unpredictable adolescents. Shooting in docudrama style with handheld cameras, Cantet makes a surprisingly large number of them into fully three-dimensional characters, and in a balancing act that only a world-class filmmaker could pull off, he builds equal sympathy for the (mostly) boisterous kids and the (usually) easygoing man whose job is keeping them under control and drumming some learning into their heads.

The movie gets its unwavering sense of authenticity partly from Cantet's filmmaking savvy and partly from the fact that François is played by François Bégaudeau, who cowrote the screenplay from his own autobiographical novel about teaching in this kind of classroom. The kids who play the kids are equally genuine, and the dialogue they speak is as fresh as if they'd improvised it while the camera rolled.

What strikes me most strongly is how vividly the film portrays the dance of multicultural diplomacy that goes on ceaselessly between teacher and pupil and, on subtly different levels, among the students themselves. When a feisty boy decides to bait François by asking if he's gay, for instance, François has to enter a tricky psychological contest without a moment's notice, being fair to the question—he has no choice about that, since he's assigned the kids to write candid self-portraits about themselves—without giving them the idea that privacy and discretion are meaningless words. On the flip side, even the spunky kid who opened this hot topic is careful to keep saying it wouldn't matter if François were gay, there's nothing wrong with that. What's fascinating here isn't the boy's (questionable) sincerity but the way that even a high-spirited troublemaker knows there are some lines people never cross unless they want to make real trouble.

Real trouble also happens in The Class, and by the final scene you feel like Colvin and Pryzbylewski must have felt after supervising students in season four of The Wire. Everyone survives in the end, but it's clear that some of the kids have fulfilling lives ahead of them and some just don't, despite the best efforts of the truly caring adults who want to educate them. The film's French title is Entre les murs, meaning "between the walls." Its English-language title is better, since The Class is about socioeconomic class as much as it's about anything. The movies it most resembles are documentaries such as Michael Apted's long-running Up series and Frederick Wiseman's great High School films. But like Folman in Waltz with Bashir, the makers of The Class use fiction-film techniques to infuse their lifelike material with all the more force and credibility. It's a brilliant achievement.

The Wrestler

A side effect of today's movie materialism is a tendency to see people in terms of groups and stereotypes, losing sight of each person's individuality. Waltz with Bashir avoids this by portraying wartime events through subjective memories, and The Class overcomes it by according full attention and concern to the individual students it singles out. The Wrestler, directed by the American independent Darren Aronofsky, keeps its story on a scrupulously human scale by zeroing in on a scrupulously human subject—the inherent worth of a man so damaged, defeated, and dispirited that his very presence would be off-limits to most big-studio productions.

This man is Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a professional wrestler who was famous long ago but now lives on a precarious routine of bottom-drawer matches and small-time fan events that barely pull in a living wage; things get even worse when he suffers a heart attack that could put him out of the business for good. Seizing on slim hopes for renewed happiness, he reaches out to his estranged daughter, who is acutely suspicious of him, and to a good-hearted stripper he knows, who fears harming her own future by entangling it with his. The film's humane values emerge in its tireless respect for Randy's spasmodic efforts to dig out from an error-ridden past, and they're underscored further by Aranofsky's choice of Mickey Rourke to play the beaten-down protagonist. Rourke's once-promising career has been sabotaged by so many setbacks, from out-of-control interviews to cosmetic-surgery calamities, that now he "doesn't look like a movie star playing a battered wreck, but like the genuine article," according to one critic. That overstates the case, but Rourke's portrayal of The Wrestler has an irresistible compassion that bespeaks intimate familiarity with the role's inner truths. There but for the grace of God go all of us.

Synecdoche, New York

A different kind of compassion arises in Synecdoche, New York, which illustrates how difficult it is to live an examined life in a culture where "creativity" and "self-knowledge" are buzzwords instead of calls to action. The film's ostensible setting is the city of Schenectady in upper New York State, but the actual setting is somewhere inside the melancholy skull of one Caden Cotard, a theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman with his customary insight.

Caden's family life, physical health, and existential sanity are going to pieces before his helpless eyes, and his only solution is to confront this sea of troubles through his art. In a stroke of rare good fortune, he wins a MacArthur "genius grant" and uses the money to embark on a stage production that will plumb the endless depths of his suffering soul. Seventeen years later he's still in rehearsals and figuring out what the title should be; in fact, he's still figuring out what the subject should be, and he's lost all track of where reality ends and creativity begins.

Synecdoche, New York is the ultimate Charlie Kaufman movie, carrying his mirrors-within-mirrors imagination (he wrote Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) as far as I think it will ever be able to go. Lest you think Caden loses touch with reality because he's obsessed with his play, note that time and causality are already scrambled in the movie's first moments, and it's far from certain that anything we see is really happening at all. Or should I say "is" "really" "happening," as Kaufman might prefer? At first I thought the film might be an exercise in eccentricity for its own sake, but I changed my mind when I felt the depth of its sympathy for the hero's Sisyphean effort to understand the place of the soul in a world obsessed with commodity and fame. Caden goes about things all wrong, and his ending is tragic. But his inward odyssey is unlike anything I've ever seen on film.

Gran Torino

And speaking of unprecedented feats, we've now seen Clint Eastwood release two major productions in a year—first Changeling and then Gran Torino, in which he also stars—while approaching the indisputably old age of eighty. Once a sexy superstar who specialized in frontier gunplay and vigilante violence, he's now a senior citizen who philosophizes on morality (Mystic River), death (Million Dollar Baby), war (Letters from Iwo Jima), and other big questions. Gran Torino is less imposing than those pictures, but in its way it's a thought-provoking tale.

Eastwood plays a cranky Korean War vet named Walt Kowalski, the last remaining Anglo in a Detroit neighborhood now filled with Asian-American immigrants. Walt spends his days scowling at the Hmong family that lives next door—Clint's a great scowler—and when a teenage boy auditions for gang membership by trying to steal his vintage car, he decides to shape the whippersnapper up with tough-love discipline. This puts him on the gang's enemies list, paving the way to a classical Clint-movie showdown.

According to a plausible theory about Eastwood, his later movies are acts of atonement for the Neanderthal lunkheadedness of his Man With No Name and Cop With No Rulebook years. Gran Torino can be Exhibit A for this argument, since everything is designed to counterpoint the reactionary persona of Eastwood's younger days—A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do! Go ahead, make my day!—with the kinder, gentler Clint who's emerged with the mellowness of age.

The grand finale clinches the case. It's corny and overdone (the Christ-on-the-cross symbolism is way over the top) but it's fascinating as a political reverse spin on Dirty Harry by the guy who gave us Dirty Harry in the first place. A scrubbed-up Dirty Harry after all these years? There may be hope for Hollywood after all!

David Sterritt, chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University, was film critic of The Christian Science Monitor for decades. His latest books are Guiltless Pleasures and The B List.

Source Citation

Sterritt, David. 2009. Wrestling with Real Life [Review of the movies Waltz with Bashir, The Class, The Wrestler, Synecoche, New York and Gan Torino] Tikkun 24(2): 61.