The Reader

After having watched The Reader I realized something interesting: It is a movie about guilt and involves a former guard at Auswicz, but this description simultaneously tells you everything and nothing.

I will not spend much time on the plot, which is beautiful. Or on the writing, which feels like a punch to the gut. Or on the direction, which is unquestionably splendid.I will speak, instead, of the experience of watching Kate Winslet playing Hanna Schmitz.

When you first see her, she is a middle-aged woman, still beautiful, still vibrant, but possessed of demons that we can only guess at. She can be brusque, almost cruel, and yet is capable of tenderness and joy. You can understand the fifteen year-old Michael’s fascination with her. There is a scene in a church where she is moved to tears by the choir, and Michael observes her, smiling. Winslet is so radiant in that scene that you can understand what he feels like to bask in it.

When we see her next, she is on trial for being complicit in the murder of Jews at Auswicz. I cannot overstate how much heavy lifting Winslet does in this segment. The trial itself has some of the most interesting dialogue I have heard in the movies. Consider how difficult it might be to try and humanize someone like that. Oh, I don’t mean “humanize” in the sense of excusing her guilt with any kind of pop psychology. But think about how the only faces of the perpetrators of the Holocaust that we encounter in the history books and in fiction are the ones who are shown as obviously evil. Eight thousand people worked at Auswicz, yet only a handful were convicted of murder. Did the rest of them not know what they were involved in?

The third act shows Hanna as an old woman. It shows how a haggard, almost zombie-like prisoner suddenly finds herself rejuvenated when she begins to receive tapes of Michael reading out loud to her, as he used to during that summer years ago when they were lovers. From Hanna’s standpoint, she had two lives: one involving her job as an SS guard, and another involving her affair with the young Michael. It is in this segment that these two lives collide. It all culminates in a scene of surprising power between Hanna and Michael, where little is said but much is resolved. Watch Winslet’s eyes and body language in this scene. Watch how she tries to reach out from the world she lives in to the world she once had, and how she reacts to him as the scene progresses.

The counterpoint to her performance is provided by a pair of actors – David Kross playing the younger Michael and Ralph Fiennes playing the older one. While Kross has done an absolutely fabulous job, his role is more of a foil to Winslet’s character in the first two acts. It is Fiennes who really brings home how much these experiences have affected him. Watch how he struggles with his own guilt in the scene with a Holocaust survivor (played by Lena Olin) who testified against Hanna at the trial. It is amazing how much the man conveys while playing such an emotionally closed-off character.

As good as they both are, the movie belongs to Kate Winslet. The Oscars have had a dubious tradition of honouring the person rather than his/her work in a movie. What with Winslet being nominated so many times without winning anything, I always feared that she might finally end up winning for a decent performance in a weak year. The good news is, The Reader features her best performance to date — if she hadn’t won for this one, she might as well not have won at all. The even better news is, she’s still working.

 

Open question: Schrodinger’s Death Match

I woke up early on Monday morning a week ago so I could watch the Oscarcast on TV. Most of it was fairly standard — Kate Winslet’s dad whistling and Philippe Petit balancing the statuette on his chin were the highlights for me. By my reckoning, that’s slim pickings. My wife missed most of it, so when we watched the retelecast in the evening, I noticed a couple of things:

1. Dustin Lance Black’s speech (Best Original Screenplay, Milk) was snipped a little bit from the morning, specifically the part where he tells all the gay and lesbian people out there that they are beautiful creatures of value, or something on those lines.
2. Sean Penn’s speech was also snipped. Which part? The ones where he uses the phrase “You commie, homo-loving sons of guns.”

It turns out that the STAR TV network did this across Asia. Once my commie, homo-loving son-of-gun self got over its outrage, my cynical self told me that I should know better than to expect unbiased coverage. At the very least, I should know better than to expect it twice in a row.

So here’s my open question for the day: If we we have a Celebrity Death Match between Sean Penn and Rupert Murdoch, who will win?

Penn’s experience in tactfully dealing with the paparazzi makes him the odds-on favourite. However, Murdoch’s handiness with a pair of scissors means that, if he has anything to do with it, we’ll never really know how many blows Penn actually landed on him. 

What do you guys think?

 

Mickey Rourke

Did any of you happen to see Mickey Rourke’s speech at the Indie Spirit awards last week? This is what he did up on stage:

I’m happy for Sean Penn, I really am. He probably deserved the award as much as Mickey did (I haven’t seen either movie yet, so I can’t comment). But as acceptance speeches go, he isn’t in the same league.

Then again, nobody is.

 

To Kate Winslet, Part Deux

Dear Kate,

Ref: My earlier letter to you regarding accepting awards that are surely your due by now

Congratulations! I couldn’t be happier.

Good speech, too.  Not outstanding, but definitely an improvement. Asking your dad to whistle — and, to our delight, actually hearing him do it — was an especially nice touch. My only regret at that point was that Lauren Bacall wasn’t around for a reaction shot.

Keep ‘em coming!

Regards

Ramsu

 

Thank you, etc.

Not from me, although I have much to be thankful for. This one is about acceptance speeches.

My friend Rajendran posted a comment to my Kate Winslet post asking whether the reference to Emma Thompson was due to her acceptance speech at the Globes years ago, for Sense and Sensibility (Thompson won for Best Adapted Screenplay). And I realized that not many people might know about this little gem. So here it is, in full:

 

Thank you very much. Good Heavens. Um, I can’t thank you enough, Hollywood Foreign Press, for honoring me in this capacity. I don’t wish to burden you with my debts, which are heavy and numerous but, um, I think that everybody involved in the making of this film knows that we owe all our pride and all our joy to the genius of Jane Austen. And it occurred to me to wonder how she would react to an evening like this… [Puts down statue on stage, reads paper] And this is what I came up with.

Four a.m., having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintences. There was Lindsay Doran of Mirage, wherever that might be, who’s largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly appeared to understand me better than I understand myself. Mr. James Shamis, a most copiously erudite person and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has learned to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Kenton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a great deal of money. [Breaks character, smiles] TRUE!! [back in character] Miss Lisa Hanson of Columbia, a lovely girl and Mr. Garrett Wiggin, a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing, that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activity until 11 p.m. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due, therefore, not to the dance, but to waiting in a long line for a horseless carriage of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport.

P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Thompson, who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious Creature!

Thank you.

 

This is the sort of speech that makes for a wonderful trivia question, and warms the cockles of my quizzing heart. She followed this up with an Oscar win as well, although that speech was marginally less wonderful:

 

I don’t really know how to thank the Academy for this. And if I try we’ll be here till Christmas. So I better get on…

Before I came, I went to visit Jane Austen’s grave in Winchester Cathedral to pay my respects, you know, and tell her about the grosses. I don’t know how she would react to an evening like this, but I do hope — I do hope she knows how big she is in Uruguay.

Profound thanks to Columbia Pictures and the lovely forms of Lisa Henson, Gary Wiggan, and Mark Canter for hiring a first-time writer; to James Shamus for his rare intelligence; to Sidney Pollack for asking all the right questions, like ‘Why couldn’t these women go out and get a job?’ Why, indeed. To the cast and crew, for being impeccable. To my friend and my teacher, Lindsay Doran, for being the single most frustrating reason why I can’t claim all the credit for myself. And finally, I would like with your permission to dedicate this Oscar to our director, Ang Lee. Ang, wherever you are, this is for you. Thank you.

Source: Wikiquote

Bonus feature

Since I am in a generous mood (also since I don’t have to do much else other than cut-pasting these items here), here are Youtube links to Hugh Grant’s acceptance speech for his second Golden Globe win (Best Actor in a TV Series – Drama, for House):

 

 

To Kate Winslet

Dear Kate,

Congratulations! I am extremely glad that you won not one, but two Golden Globes for your performances this year. I haven’t seen either movie, but I am sure you deserved them.

I am fairly certain that the Oscars aren’t that far away. The Academy has a habit of awarding people a statuette on the basis of cumulative achievement, so there is only so long that you can keep racking up the record for maximum number of nominations before a certain age.

But when you do win, could you please spend some time preparing a good acceptance speech? Practice before a mirror, learn to compose yourself before you walk on stage, do what you have to do. Spend some quality time with Brits who seem to know how it should be done with class and wit — Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson… It can’t be all that difficult.

Whatever you do, just don’t stand there gasping thank-yous like you’re orgasming after a mercy fuck. It doesn’t become someone of your stature.

Okay? Okay.

Sincerely

Ramsu

ps: Youtube link attached for those of you who haven’t seen it. To her credit, she starts off by apologizing to the other nominees for having taken more than her share

 

Make-up can disguise you, but can it make you invisible?

I was talking to a friend yesterday about Kamalhassan. Mostly, I was trying to express why the man doesn’t do it for me anymore.

Aside: This is a pre-Dasavatharam post. I figure I’ll see the movie someday, but this analysis does not account for this latest data point. Then again, I do statistics for a living, so I don’t let data get in the way of my conclusions.

For a number of movies now, I have found myself unmoved by his performances. His comedies still work wonderfully (I bust a gut watching Panchatantram), but the “serious” performances mostly leave me cold. Hey Ram, for instance, simply did not work. I thought Rani Mukherjee was luminous and breathtakingly sexy in her brief performance as his Bengali housewife. I thought Atul Kulkarni was scarily intense as a Hindu fundamentalist. But the rest of it was just… what is that term a lot of bloggers (women, especially) seem to use to good effect? Meh.

Anbe Sivam was another example. A lot of people seem to love that movie. Me, I didn’t get bored, but that’s the best I can say for it. Meh again.

Don’t get me wrong: there are movies of his that still work for me. I am still moved to tears by the ending of Salangai Oli. I am still affected by the power of Nayakan. I still smile even when I think about Michael Madana Kama Rajan.

Part of the problem is that Kamal seems to have his own corollary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity — he bends spacetime around him. His roles seem to be subtly and not-so-subtly designed to help him project the whole Alpha Male vibe. Even when he is beaten and helpless, he has to be spectacularly beaten and helpless. And that is a problem for me. Somehow I get the feeling that he isn’t trying to engage or entertain us with his performance, but patronizing us.

The other part of the problem is familiarity. We have seen this guy on screen and admired him for so long that nothing he does seems to surprise us anymore. Kamal is, like many others, a mannered actor. So, whatever role he does, it isn’t easy to forget that this is Kamalhassan playing that role. And this is where the title of my post comes in. The man sometimes drowns himself in whatever costume he’s using in a movie, but somehow, he never lets you forget that you’re watching him.

If you want a counterpoint, here is one: Surya in Perazhagan. Why? Because no matter how conscious I am of the fact that Surya is playing Chinna, I forget all of that when I see the performance. There is nothing, nothing of the Surya we have seen in other movies in that performance. Which is why it ranks among the great performances of Tamil cinema.

Kamal used to be able to do that. But somehow, not so much anymore, even when he is disguised.

A long time ago, when Sivaji got released, I wrote a little post about Amitabh and Rajni, and how one man has reinvented himself in ways the other hasn’t. The same holds, in some sense, for Kamal as well. He experiments with the roles he does and how he looks, but he never really lets you forget that it is him doing those experiments.

This is true of AB as well today — he has reinvented himself as a character actor, but it is not easy to forget that it is him playing whatever role he’s playing.The only movie in recent times where he has managed to do that for me is Nishabd. The movie’s theme is provocative, but there is nothing one can fault about the performances. AB especially is phenomenal here, and he does this by achieving an economy of performance that is rare. There isn’t a single muscle that seems to move unnecessarily, nor a single word that is spoken when silence will do. You see an actor who is not Acting.

The only immediate parallel I can think of is Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt, a performance where most of his energy would have been devoted to displaying no energy at all on screen. For an actor with phenomenal screen presence, it takes extraordinary skill and courage to become invisible.

Can Kamal become invisible? Sure, he’s got the talent to do it. But will he do it? That, I’m not so sure of.

ps: This has been a long rant, so thanks for reading this far. Now go read Baradwaj Rangan’s piece on Being Kamal Hassan. As always, he says it better than I ever could.

 

Hrithik Roshan

My wife and I were discussing Hrithik yesterday. A look at his recent releases (insofar as the word “recent” could be used to mean “the last five years”) reveals that he hasn’t had a flop in a while. But then, he hasn’t done too many movies recently either. You get one Hrithik movie a year on average, it makes a heck of a lot of money, everybody goes home happy. It’s a good strategy, I suppose.

But what about Hrithik as an actor? The lesser the number of releases, the more the expectations (commercial and otherwise) from each release. What this means is that there isn’t much margin for error, and consequently for experimentation. The last movie where he really had to stretch himself as an actor was Koi… Mil Gaya. And that was, mind you, a movie that helped him pull himself out of the rut of bad movies he had been doing at the time. Since then, Hrithik’s choices have all been about minimizing variance.

It is not like he has done the same role over and over again. He played an immature half-adult turning into an officer and a hero in Lakshya, a superhero in Krrish, an ace burglar in Dhoom 2 and a young emperor in Jodhaa Akbar. That is more variety than most others have managed.  And what is more, he has been, consistently, the best reason to watch each of these movies. In some cases, Dhoom 2 in particular, the only reason even.

But these roles have required him to play characters who are not far outside the range of his demonstrated ability. They have required him not to create, but to embody a character. Not that it hasn’t required effort. Each character has focused on a different facet — restraint and majesty in Jodhaa Akbar, freshness in Krrish, sheer style in D2… He has done extremely well, to be sure.

But has he gone out on a limb and truly transformed himself? Created someone out of thin air? Does he want to?

 

Freeze Frame #78, #79: Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na

In my opinion, Kabhi Haan Kabhi Na is the most endearing movie of SRK’s career. This was before he refined his act, but one can see how his screen presence and his energy take the movie up a couple of notches. For those of us who first noticed him when he played Abhimanyu Rai in DD’s Fauji, this movie was a natural progression from that character as well as a much-welcome return to form after clunkers like Chamatkar and King Uncle. Two scenes stand out for me in this movie.

The first is the Don song sequence. Sunil (SRK) and his band get an opportunity to perform at a local club frequented by all the local gangsters. They start off doing pleasant, peppy numbers and get booed off stage. Then Sunil convinces them to do a number about a poor unemployed youth who picked up a gun in anger, became a don and lost the love of his life. (The fact that it is a big production number that could not have been put together at such short notice is besides the point.) The song works unsurprisingly well, but what adds a touch of genius to it is the shot where the head honcho there (played by Goga Kapoor) pulls out his wallet and stares longingly at what is presumably his long-lost love’s photograph. I remember being quite delighted by it when I first saw the movie – until that point, it didn’t really explore the comic angle of these gangsters. They were just generic bad guys that you didn’t want to mess with.

The other scene I really liked comes right at the end,during Anna’s wedding. Sunil has stepped aside so that she could marry the love of her life, and is the best man at their wedding. Just as Chris is about to put the ring on Anna’s finger, it falls out of his hand and rolls away. The entire congregation is searching for it when he spots it lying near one of the pews. But when someone asks him if he’s seen it, he shakes his head no. Sure, the entire scene is contrived – the ring had no need to fall off. But what it manages to convey is good enough to warrant the contrivance. Sunil’s character has an arc during the movie, but even though he’s reached the end of that arc, it shows that he’s still on the same circle.

 

Another John Cusack rant

You might remember that I blogged about this guy along time ago. Here’s an interesting post by Sandhya who’s been trying to figure out why she’s crazy about him. Quite a nicely written post, I might add. An excerpt:

Most of his roles are about the guy in checked shirts who’s quite cool in an ‘alternative’ sense who almost got the girl. He’s the Jeaneane Garofalo of romance. And therefore more attainable. Yet worth pursuing when you’ve figured out that the sexy scowling professional salsa dancer is interested more in crack than human beings.

Read the entire post on the mystery of John Cusack’s appeal here.