JACKIE
(US/France/Chile/China - 2016)
Affected and mannered by design, Natalie Portman's feature-length impression of Jackie Kennedy carries this artsy, dream-like collage by acclaimed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain (TONY MANERO, NERUDA). Taking place in the week after the assassination of JFK (Danish actor Caspar Phillipson), JACKIE is a largely experimental work that isn't concerned being a straightforward biopic, and that works in its favor about as often as it works against it. A framing device has Jackie being interviewed by a journalist (Billy Crudup) at the family home in Hyannis Port several days after her husband's funeral. She makes it clear from the outset that she won't indulge the obvious ("You want me to describe the sound the bullet made when it collided with my husband's skull?"), and she will shape the story and have final edit over what is written and presented to the public. From the moment LBJ (John Carroll Lynch) is sworn in on the flight back to D.C., a shell-shocked, blood-splattered Jackie is adamant about making sure her husband is honored and his public persona preserved. Whether she's planning his memorial or telling her story to the journalist, Jackie is constructing an image, that will shape the world's perception of herself and JFK for years to come. Her goal is to present to the world "the brief, shining moment that there was a Camelot," while acknowledging "There won't be another Camelot...not another Camelot."
PATERSON
(US/Germany/France - 2016)
A quiet film even by Jim Jarmusch standards, PATERSON is a low-key character piece focusing on a Paterson, NJ bus driver named Paterson (Adam Driver) and--it's never really specified--his wife or girlfriend Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), and their English bulldog Marvin (a fine canine performance by eight-year-old Nellie, who was diagnosed with cancer during production and died shortly after filming). A creature of habit, Paterson wakes up every day between 6:10 and 6:15 am, eats a bowl of Cheerios, and walks to work. In his down time and on his lunch breaks, he writes poetry in a journal. When he gets home, Laura makes dinner and tells him about her day, which usually involves her constantly changing life goals ("I need to learn how to play the guitar so I can become a country singer and be as big as Tammy Wynette," she tells Paterson, who's obviously just hearing about this dream for the first time, right between her wanting to be a fashion designer, a painter, and hoping to start her own cupcake business), then he walks Marvin and stops at a neighborhood dive bar run by Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley), for one beer and some conversation before calling it a night. This is Paterson's daily routine, which we follow over the course of a week, and in the context of the film, we see little in the way of a social life (they go see ISLAND OF LOST SOULS at a revival house on Saturday) and nothing in the way of family or friends (a photo on a table tells us that Paterson is a former Marine). PATERSON is about finding heart and soul in the mundane and the everyday, whether it's Paterson being inspired by a box of Ohio Blue Tip matches or eavesdropping on slice-of-life passenger conversations while he's behind the wheel. To that extent, it feels a little like Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's 1995 arthouse hit SMOKE, but the daily repetition recalls Chantal Akerman's JEANNE DIELMAN and the general mood of the film comes off somewhat like Jarmusch's attempt at making a less-precious Wes Anderson film (the recurring use of twins gets a little too cute after a while). The atmosphere is intriguing--Jarmusch sets his scenes in old-school Jersey neighborhoods that have likely been unchanged for decades, and Paterson himself seems like a man not made for these times (he doesn't even have a cell phone). It's a film about the millions of average nobodies who have artistic ideas within them that need to come out but everyday life just happens. Flighty but loving Laura wants Paterson to publish his poetry, but he writes it mainly for himself. He's fine with that, and he's happy. There's a reverence for the history of Paterson, whether it's the invocation of revered Paterson-born poet William Carlos Williams, whose most well-known collection is titled Paterson, and in the framed photos of hometown heroes on the wall of Doc's bar. On a cursory glance, not much happens in PATERSON, but it very subtly sneaks up on you, as in a late sequence where Paterson, on one of his solitary walks, meets a kindred spirit in a traveler from Osaka (Masatoshi Nagase, who was in Jarmusch's MYSTERY TRAIN back in 1989) carrying a tattered Japanese translation of Paterson, that really carries some unexpected emotional resonance. (R, 118 mins)
MAX ROSE
(US - 2016)
Screened at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival and shelved for three years until it hit a few theaters in the fall of 2016, MAX ROSE marks the first significant big-screen role for Jerry Lewis since 1995's little-seen FUNNY BONES. Lewis brings much emotion and poignancy to the title character, a forgotten jazz pianist who had a brief day in the sun in the late 1950s but never became a star. As MAX ROSE opens, 87-year-old Max is dealing with the death of Eva (Claire Bloom), his wife of 65 years. He's understandably hit hard by it ("I can't even remember my life without her," he says) and despite the doting attention of his adult granddaughter Annie (Kerry Bishe) and attempts at bonding from his somewhat estranged son Chris (Kevin Pollak), Max grows obsessed with something he uncovered in the days before Eva's death: a makeup compact with a hidden inscription from a "Ben," dated November 5, 1959, the day he was in across the country in a NYC studio cutting his only record. Max is haunted by the notion that Eva had a secret lover and questions the whether his marriage and his entire life has been a lie, even breaking down and airing this potentially dirty laundry during the eulogy at Eva's funeral. A health scare permanently sends cantankerous Max to a retirement home, where he's not enthused about knitting and cooking classes but finds some buddies in a likable trio of fellow old-timer widowers (played by Rance Howard, Lee Weaver, and legendary political satirist Mort Sahl, and watching guys like Sahl and Lewis riff provides some of MAX ROSE's best moments), but he can't get "Ben" out of his mind. When he eventually finds out who Ben is and that he's still alive (Dean Stockwell turns up in the third act), Max realizes he can't have any kind of closure until he gets to the bottom of Eva's relationship with him.
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