My Year of Flops (22 page)

The bluebloods are so shocked that their metaphorical monocles shatter in horror, and Patrick sees the error of his ways. The Davison-
as-jerk scenes underline just how little we know about the supporting cast. They exist to give Mame people to play off and advance the plot. It's Auntie Mame's world; they just live in it.

The Jews-and-single-women-are-people-too message was somewhat anachronistic in 1958. By 1974, it was prehistoric. So much happened between '58 and '74: the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations, a sexual revolution, the French New Wave, Nehru suits, miniskirts, the fleeting popularity of the 1910 Fruitgum Company, tie-dye.
Mame
didn't change with the times; it was done in by them. It was part of a wave of slow-moving, pea-brained, exclamation-point-crazed musical dinosaurs (including
Dr. Dolittle, Star!, Hello, Dolly!, Paint Your Wagon
) that acted as if the '60s had never happened. These musicals appealed to a nostalgic yearning for a simpler age, but even squares found
Mame
easy to resist.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Fiasco

Chapter 4

It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's A Flop! Superheroes, Science Fiction, And Action

Lady And Gentleman, You Are Now Floating In The Floposphere Case File #46: It's All About Love

Originally Posted July 3, 2007

Watching Thomas Vinterberg's Dogme 95 breakout hit
The Celebration,
I experienced an intoxicating rush of discovery. I was excited about the film, but I was even more excited about Vinterberg films to come. If he could accomplish so much while adhering to the rigorous set of aesthetic strictures he helped create as one of the architects of the Dogme movement (a militantly naturalistic cinematic wave that made acolytes take a “vow of purity” and went from “bold new way of reinventing the language of cinema” to “bullshit PR stunt” in roughly 15 minutes), I could only imagine what he'd be capable of without the restrictions Dogme 95 imposed upon its filmmakers.

After
The Celebration,
Vinterberg was inundated with scripts and offers from money people eager to get into the Thomas Vinterberg business, but nothing struck his fancy. The real trick is to nab geniuses
before
they make their masterpiece, not after. Get in bed with Michael
Cimino after
Deer Hunter,
and you wake up the next morning with
Heaven's Gate,
a pounding headache, an empty wallet, and your office cleared out when you show up for work.

Vinterberg wilted under the pressure. He spent years working on a bizarre screenplay that seemed ripped painfully from the innermost recesses of his soul. It's a futuristic science-fiction love story that doubles as a moody meditation on love, loss, and a world spinning out of control.

Vinterberg's follow-up to
The Celebration,
2003's
It's All About Love,
takes place in a near future troubled by grimly whimsical “cosmic disturbances.” The world is freezing. It snows in July. Tap water turns to ice in seconds during cryptic freeze-storms. Ugandans begin magically levitating. People start dying en masse from lack of love, littering the streets with corpses whose hearts simply cease beatingas much from a dearth of affection as lack of oxygen. Evil scientists repeatedly clone heroin-addled superstar figure skater Elena (Claire Danes, who's saddled with a shaky Polish accent that makes her sound vaguely vampiric).

It must have looked like an unholy mess on the page, but the producers probably figured that the man behind
The Celebration
could transform his script's fuzzy mélange of intriguing but half-baked ideas, lifeless characters, and cryptic social commentary into a satisfying, halfway-cohesive whole. They were wrong.

Vinterberg's
Celebration
cachet attracted a remarkable cast. Joaquin Phoenix and his soulful eyes of infinite sadness signed on to play John, a brooding, lovesick intellectual with a Ph.D. in Polish literature, which only sounds like the setup to a bad joke. Danes plays his estranged wife, a gloomy mega-celebrity with a bad heart, insomnia, and a history of drug abuse. Sean Penn plays Phoenix's brother Marciello, a sensitive soul given to loopy, pseudo-poetic, pseudo-philosophical monologues about the nature of the world and the importance of human connection. Marciello used to be afraid of flying; then he took medication that worked so well that now he can't do anything but fly. In another movie, that might qualify as a
goofy throwaway joke, but Marciello literally spends his every scene expounding about the world from airplanes.

After an extended break, John returns to New York to sign divorce papers for Elena, only to be swept up in a web of intrigue and deception. Elena's family has commissioned at least three clones of her so that when Elena decides to leave the lucrative world of figure skating, they can replace her. But first, they must destroy Elena before she can screw up their plans. John helps Elena escape east, to an arctic hellhole where popular leisure-time activities include freezing and dying.

Vinterberg got it backward. When working with a tiny budget and Dogme guidelines, he crafted a movie as entertaining and funny as any Hollywood crowd-pleaser. Then, while working with big American stars, a budget of $10 million, and no restrictions, he made a film as weird and noncommercial as any gritty Dogme provocation.

As befits a film that closes with a monologue delivered by a man doomed to live out the rest of his life on an airplane—expounding about how, when it comes right down to it, it really is all about love—
Love
has a jet-lagged rootlessness and pervasive sense of dislocation. For all its faults, it captures that fragile post-9/11 mind-set of naked vulnerability and yawning doubt, before our souls again grew calloused and we developed an insatiable curiosity about the private life of Paris Hilton and the sweet 16 parties of the superrich. It poignantly evokes that strange historical epoch when it seemed somehow like the world would just stop, that the universe would punish us for the mess we'd made.

Though Vinterberg likely wrote the film before 9/11, it nevertheless conveys how the event single-handedly rewired our sense of the possible and the impossible, and upended our sense of reality. In a world where planes fly into buildings and zealots armed with box cutters can strike widespread terror in the heart of the richest, most powerful country in the world, why shouldn't Ugandans begin floating mysteriously?
Love
is filled with images that are simultaneously ridiculous, beautiful, and audacious, like a skating ballet with four Elenas gliding in unison that devolves into an ice-rink massacre as one Elena double after another loses her so-called life.

Like Wong Kar-Wai's strangely simpatico
2046, Love
finds a maverick abandoning logic in a quixotic quest for beauty and truth. With its doppelgängers, surrealism, abstract characters, and gorgeous, painterly long shots,
Love
feels like a waking dream, especially in a superior second half that delivers the science-fiction goods while plunging farther and farther into its own insanity.

So is
Love
ultimately a Fiasco or a Secret Success? It'd be a real stretch to call it a success, but it's exactly the kind of movie I wanted to highlight in My Year Of Flops, a film so stubbornly singular that it belongs to a sub-genre all its own—a mad, mad mix of science fiction, allegory, left-field social commentary, and romantic melodrama. If I weren't so damnably attached to my rating system, I'd give it a final score more in line with its free-floating craziness, like say, Three Floating Ugandans, Two and a Half Elena Clones, and Seven Loopy Marciello Monologues. Can I call it a Semisecret Fiascopiece? Heck, if Vinterberg can make a movie this defiantly weird, then I think I'm entitled.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Semisecret Fiascopiece

Mad Mutated Case File #64: The Island Of Dr. Moreau

Originally Posted September 4, 2007

In previous Case Files, I have proposed what I call the Great Gazoo Theory: that sometime in the mid-'70s, Marlon Brando began taking marching orders from the Great Gazoo, the tiny, effeminate green alien only Fred Flintstone could see. For example, Brando's behavior on the set of
The Score
is wholly understandable if you imagine the Great Gazoo hovering over his ear and whispering, “Hey, dum-dum, if you really want to show that Frank Oz fool what's what, call him Miss Piggy and refuse to talk to him.”