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How bad do the moviemakers want us to feel about a recently dead “artiste” in this contrived, annoying and pretentious bore? Very bad. There could not be a worse time to release Tumbledown than now, what with the recent devastatingly sad loss of David Bowie. He was a true artist, whose death touched at least a couple of generations in a real and stinging way, and who went out in a rare blaze of glory with his final album and the magnificent play Lazarus, which both redefined and redeemed the concept of the “jukebox” musical. Next to this, the concerns of Tumbledown, about the “tragedy” of a one-hit-wonder folksinger-songwriter’s death and the rush to immortalize him by his grieving widow (Rebecca Hall) and the eager-beaver Hofstra literature professor (Jason Sudeikis) who comes to her Maine town to research his biography (and, of course, fall in love with her), seem piddling indeed, not to mention downright obnoxious. The basic setup is similar to that of Keeper of the Flame, one of George Cukor’s lesser, garishly Gothic efforts, in which reporter Spencer Tracy tries to track down the truth about the late husband of an affectedly mournful Katharine Hepburn, a great political figure and thinker who turns out to be a secret Fascist. In Tumbledown, we never see the greatly fussed-about genius, Hunter Miles, who perished in a mountain fall, but are meant to glean his genius through the whining, droningly insipid songs (by Damien Jurado) we hear bleating away at regular intervals. “Small loss” is all you can think, impiously, throughout the film’s contrived progress and annoyingly hushed and reverent ambiance. Writer-director Sean Mewshaw’s script is littered with “deep thoughts,” as when he has his heroine intone while watching a grizzly bear root through garbage, “You spend your whole life trying not to die in some way or another, and then something terrible happens to someone, and you wish it was you.” Hall, with her lanky, melancholy beauty, like a pre-Raphaelite Olive Oyl, can be a decent actress, as she proved in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, but comes across as narcissistic and grievingly faux-deep in her too casually chic Ralph Lauren-ish “rural” ensembles. (It is revealed that she has a PhD from Brown and even wrote a book herself, Renascence and Renewal: Seasonal Motifs in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, typical of the movie’s embarrassing literary strain.) Sudeikis has zero opportunity to display the comic flair and invention from his “Saturday Night Live” stint–rare that someone so conventionally handsome can be so funny–and is further weighted down by impossible lines like “I’m rescuing you. Hunter was an amazing guy, but all I see is the girl he wrote his best songs about, and I love the shit out of her.” Joe Manganiello as a dimwitted macho suitor of Hall’s (his typecasting must get him down), Griffin Dunne as her elfin small-town newspaper editor, and Blythe Danner, doing some kind of weird overbearing Jewish mother shtick, try to enliven things. They all fail. —David Noh RAMS COHEN MEDIA GROUP/Color/2.35/Dolby Digital/93 Mins./Not Rated Cast: Sigurdur Sigurjónsson, Theodór Júlíusson, Charlotte Böving, Jón Benónýsson, Gudrún Siburbjörnsdóttir, Sveinn Ólafur Gunnarssonm, Jörundur Ragnarsson, Porleifur Einarsson. Written and directed by Grímur Hákonarson. Produced by Grímar Jónsson. Executive producers: Thor Sigurjónsson, Alan R. Milligan, Tom Kjeseth, Eliza Oczkowska, Klaudia Smieja. Co-producers: Jacob Jarek, Ditte Milsted. Director of photography: Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. Editor: Kristján Lodmfjörd. Production designer: Bjarni Massi Sigurbjörnsson. Music: Alti Örvarsson. Sound mixers: Björn Viktorsson, Pétur Einarsson. Sound design: Huldar Freyr Arnarson, Björn Viktorsson. A Netop Films production, in co-production with Profile Pictures, in association with Film Farms and Aeroplan Film, in collaboration with Act3, Askja Films, Hljodgardur, Red Rental and Trickshot. In Icelandic with English subtitles. Scrapie, a contagious, incurable disease, threatens sheep farmers in a remote Icelandic valley. Low-key drama won the Prize Un Certain Regard at the 2015 Cannes Films Festival. Shot with documentary precision, Rams examines estranged brothers who live on adjoining farms in rural Iceland. What starts as a slice of deadpan Scandinavian miserabilism turns into something much darker by the movie’s end. A critical favorite at Cannes, where it won the Prize Un Certain Regard, Rams will find an art-house audience among fans of Roy Andersson and Per Petterson. Writer-director Grímur Hákonarson focuses first on Gummi (Sigurdur Sigurjónsson), an elderly, taciturn sheep rancher whose life seems completely circumscribed by his farm. It’s not until his ram Garpur loses in a local contest that we learn that Gummi’s brother Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) lives right next door. For reasons that emerge slowly, Gummi and Kiddi haven’t spoken for 40 years. (They communicate through notes carried by Kiddi’s dog, Somi.) So when Gummi finds possible evidence of scrapie in Kiddi’s flock, the brothers are not in the condition to handle the news. Highly contagious, scrapie attacks the brain and nervous system of sheep. Since there is no cure, the only alternative is to kill all of the stock, dismantle and disinfect their stalls, and wait two years to start again. Although the government compensates the farmers for their livestock and equipment, many are unwilling to continue raising sheep, and elect to leave the valley. Kiddi refuses to cooperate at all, instead drinking himself into stupors before passing out in subzero temperatures. Gummi at first appears to go along with authorities, but he has a secret that will force the brothers to face each other and their future. Hákonarson’s vision is strict and exact. He isolates his characters in Iceland’s beautiful but unforgiving landscape, placing them alone in rough meadows under a glowering sky. Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s camera is as shy and defensive as the characters, who have trouble speaking or even making eye contact. Day-to-day details—cooking, washing, mending fences—make up much of the movie. Life on a remote sheep ranch is exotic enough to make Rams easy to watch, although the spare narrative ultimately becomes trying. Both leads are powerful actors completely at ease with both their charges and the emotional demands of the story. Rams might have made more sense as a short than a feature, especially since Hákonarson intentionally avoids overtly dramatic situations until it is too late to help anyone. That his dour, bleak outlook is perfectly appropriate for his story doesn’t make it any easier to watch. —Daniel Eagan BAND OF ROBBERS GRAVITAS VENTURES/Color/2.35/95 Mins./Not Rated Cast: Kyle Gallner, Adam Nee, Matthew Gray Gubler, Hannibal Buress, Melissa Benoist, Daniel Edward Mora, Stephen Lang, Eric Christian Olsen, Johnny Pemberton, Beth Grant, Cooper Huckabee, Lee Garlington, Creed Bratton. Written, directed and edited by Aaron Nee, Adam Nee. Produced by John Will, Rick Rosenthal, Matt Ratner, Arun Kumar. Director of photography: Noah Rosenthal. Production designer: Rodrigo Cabral. Music: Joel West. Costume designer: Autumn Steed. A Torn Sky Entertainment and Whitewater Films production, in association with Blacklist Digital, Lola’s Prods. and Tilted Windmill Prods. Inspired by the most celebrated works of Mark Twain, this sprightly and very funny caper film–which is also an affecting meditation on friendship and the pain of growing up–is surprisingly engaging. A good yarn is a good yarn, and there have been endless adaptations, in every conceivable medium, of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Writerdirectors Aaron and Adam Nee’s Band of Robbers is the latest, much more of an “inspired by” effort than a literal screen transferral, but it’s so damn fresh and entertaining it practically feels like the first one. Here, Tom (Adam Nee) and Huck (Kyle Gallner) are small-town close friends from childhood, except in adulthood they have trodden very different paths. Huck has just 48 WWW.FILMJOURNAL.COM FEBRUARY 2016
een released from prison, while Tom is a rookie policeman, stuck in the hell of issuing motorists tickets. Huck wants to stay straight and hopefully create the family he never had for himself, but Tom is obsessed with finding a local mythical treasure they’ve known about for years. He also drags poor Huck into his wacky, half-baked scheme to form a band of thieving-from-the-rich Merry Men, comprised of the two of them and three other none-too-bright but ingratiating pals who all too easily bear the telling label of “manchild.” Their aim is to find that gold mine by any means necessary, but they run afoul of the very scary Injun Joe (Stephen Lang), who soon enough is terrifyingly on their trail. The Nee brothers confidently sets up a very wry and dry comic tone from the first frame, and I found myself chuckling over the many deadpan comic moments–like those involving Huck and his overly religious, bigoted old witch of a landlady–and then falling in love with the characters. That happened for me during the scene in which Tom holds the first meeting of his band in the “mancave” –i.e., the basement of one member’s house, overseen by his sullen wife, formerly–and now awkwardly–the girlfriend of our fearless leader. They’re all hapless bumblers, but so funny in their monumentally clueless ways that you have no basic problem with blithely going along with the Nees’ wild and woolly but ultimately quite canny agenda. The band’s first heist, a pathetically bungled robbery of a pawn store, is one hilarious comedy of the worst errors and, in the later, more hardcore action scenes, when these boys must contend with Injun Joe and sundry other homicidal villains, the Nees’ comic invention never flags, even as bullets fly and the nominal heroine, of course Becky Thatcher (charming Melissa Benoist, playing a policewoman in serious like with Tom), gets seriously hurt. Things turn even darker when Jorge (Daniel Edward Mora), an illegal immigrant gardener (and stand-in for the immortal slave, Jim), who works at Huck’s residence, becomes very adversely implicated in the gang’s harum-scarum plot. Technical credits are very strong, with Noah Rosenthal‘s handsome cinematography and Joel West’s nicely subtle and winsome music score happily adding to the sprightly, inventive mix. The cast of largely unknowns is a simple trove of human delight. Adam Nee proves himself a wonderfully deft and droll farceur, with a lovely sense of the absurd at all times, apologizing to his gang for the format of the big heist plan he passes out to them (“I couldn’t get the Wizard to exit resume”). Gallner, who narrates the film, although diminutive, has a matinee-idol-handsome face and, while game to go along with his buds, movingly conveys Huck’s deeper sensitivity and inner longing, utterly foreign to the other guys. Lang has made a tidy career of playing psycho- and sociopaths of varying stripes and, pretty amazingly, delivers a performance as Injun Joe which yet manages to be full of surprise and danger. The other characters, who all amusingly strive to be politically correct–a running gag here–naturally question his offensive name and are patiently met with the piquant answer, “It’s not meant to offend; I’m really into the culture and the aesthetic.” —David Noh EISENSTEIN IN GUANAJUATO STRAND RELEASING/Color-B&W/2.35/105 Mins./ Not Rated Cast: Elmer Back, Luis Alberti, Maya Zapata, Rasmus Slatis, Jakob Ohrman, Lisa Owen, Stelio Savante. Written and directed by Peter Greenaway. Produced by Bruno Felix, San Fu Maltha, Femke Wolting, Cristina Velasco L. Co-producers: Liisa Penttila-Asikainen, Peter De Maegd, Guy Van Baelen, Wilfried Van Baelen. Director of photography: Reinier van Brummelen. Production designer: Ana Solares. Editor: Elmer Leupen. Music: Sergei Prokofiev. Costume designer: Brenda Gomez. A Submarine, Fu Works and Paloma Negra presentation, in co-production with Edith Film, Potemkino, Mollywood. In English and Spanish with English subtitles. Peter Greenaway rightly adores the great Sergei Eisenstein, but at times it’s hard to tell from the excessive, chaotic, cartoonish and far too noisily salacious portrait he presents. Sergei Eisenstein, had he done nothing besides the jaw-droppingly innovative, eternally iconic The Battleship Potemkin, was assuredly a great filmmaker, one of the very greatest, and in Eisenstein in Guanajuato, self-confessed admirer Peter Greenaway focuses on the director’s time in Mexico in 1930. The trip was at the invitation of a Mexican film company, headed by socialist writer and activist Upton Sinclair and his wife Mary, to make an apolitical feature, and this movie sort of explains why that movie never really happened. It begins exuberantly, with the arrival of Eisenstein (Elmer Back) in this brave new Latin American world, reveling in the vivid sights and sounds which both inspire and confound him. Greenaway employs his familiar battery of flamboyant cinematic techniques–split screens, green screens, crazy editing. gaudy flashbacks and collage-like visual insertions depicting Eisenstein’s Russian past and Hollywood debacle when he was fired by Paramount and, always, gorgeous, gorgeous cinematography– to what seems, at first, good effect. But this subject in particular demands that a story be told, and it is here that Greenaway runs afoul. Although Eisenstein’s homosexuality is, like that of Ozu, in the opinion of some largely a matter of conjecture, a gay affair in Mexico is concocted, featuring his guide, one Palomino Canedo (Luis Alberti), a religious scholar who is married but not averse to relieving the 33-year-old Russian of his supposed virginity. Artistic license is fine, and a dewy queer relationship for Eisenstein is an appealingly bold trope, but Greenaway has always been a director far more adept at shock (and pontificating) than romance. The film degenerates into crassly prurient sensationalism which, despite all the explicitness and trademark genitalia–the film could almost be subtitled Sergei’s Foreskin–like all the sex in Greenaway movies is profoundly unerotic. This is exacerbated by the fact that the two never stop blabbering on and on about socialism, sexual politics, Sergei’s Old World vs. Palomino’s New, and blood, of course, being painfully shed in a nasty and tiresome schoolboy notion of gay coupling. (Remember Brokeback Mountain’s spit-andmount moment?) It all culminates in Palomino sticking a miniature Soviet flag in Eisenstein’s pillaged posterior. Small wonder that the film never quite recovers from that scene, and what follows– an extended vituperative encounter with the outraged Sinclairs, who want to pull the project’s plug, memorable for their cartoonish portrayal and a show-offy unbroken tracking shot; and the brief actual scenes of filming which, perhaps inspired by Eisenstein’s strong connection with an admiring Chaplin, have a shallowly antic, slapstick feel–seems increasingly trite. This work, being Greenaway, is also obsessed with death, and the Mexican Day of the Dead rite predictably becomes a huge motif, with a surfeit of dancing skeletons along with constant returns to the town’s Museum of the Dead, filled with ancient, rotting corpses. Eisenstein’s climactic, sorrowful exit from his Paradise Found is almost his one quiet moment in the entire film, but Greenaway heavy-handedly makes it more blubberingly bathetic than truly poignant. A mixture of Soviet pressure for Eisenstein’s return (to a Stalinist country which decreed homosexuality a crime deserving ten years’ hard labor, where he died after the triumphs of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible at age 50), his distracted, lackadaisical work ethic, and the company’s dissatisfaction with his results and the man himself are posited for the project’s truncated termination. Both lead actors are to be commended for their above-and-beyond commitment to this intense vision of cinematic greatness. Back does manage to capture something of this genius’ complexity and excessive, quixotic nature–when he’s not vomiting or defecating in the streets, mumbling about how constipated he was in Russia–and it’s not his fault that his director has him often behaving like Roberto Benigni in his most over-the-top awards-show manner. Palomino is a sleek clotheshorse in Brenda Gomez’s natty period bespoke, conveying both charm and intelligence, explaining his country’s culture to Sergei, before displaying other impressive talent. —David Noh FEBRUARY 2016 WWW.FILMJOURNAL.COM 49
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