For once, with very little school related business in the way and only phone calls to make, the Cap'n has time to catch up on a backlog of movies. It's good too, because I've had two movies from Netflix for what feels like forever, always being put on the back burner. Now that I've finally finished watching Slumdog Millionaire and Synecdoche, NY, I'll share some brief thoughts on both films. Both come from indie favorites, but the difference is that one was the Academy Award Winner for Best Picture this year and the other was reviled at Cannes for being "indulgent". We'll see if they deserve their reputations.
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Slumdog Millionaire is a well made movie, I can't argue with that. The structure is interesting, the story unfolds in an interesting way, it's shot and edited impeccably, and I can totally understand why audiences went crazy for it. It has a feel good ending, a "love conquers all" meets "rags to riches" story, and cute kids. Against some stiff competition, I have no trouble seeing how and why it was the Best Picture of 2008, and it's nice to see Danny Boyle finally win an Oscar after a career I've enjoyed almost every part of*.
The question is: why didn't I enjoy Slumdog Millionaire? Despite all of these things which I'll readily acquiesce to, I found myself getting bored with about an hour left, and I had a nagging feeling the movie was doing exactly what I was worried it might.
Before I'd ever seen the film, I heard really faint criticism about Slumdog Millionaire about its representation of Indians as poverty ridden. Doing some simple searching, I found a page on the admittedly (at times) dubious Wikipedia about this, but my mind was already wandering somewhere else. I began to wonder if Slumdog Millionaire represented neo-Orientalism?
Having watched the movie, I have a hard time arguing against an Orientalist reading of Slumdog Millionaire. The film depicts the hard life of three homeless children who are subjected to miseries and rise out by resorting to petty and (finally) organized crime. Well, the "bad" brother does, because he works for a gangster who helps "Westernize" Bombay. The "good" brother, who wants the girl eternally torn between the two of them works for a call center for a European telecommunications firm and then becomes a folk hero in the Indian version of a British game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. When he wins it all, he finally shows the girl that he's worthy of her true love and shows the authorities and conventional thinkers that Jamal the slumdog is more than the bottom of the barrel.
Nearly all of the money Jamal and Salim make comes from western tourists or the game show, and there's a particularly interesting scene where Jamal takes two Americans on a "tour" while Salim and his friends strip their car clean. When a policeman sees Jamal with the Americans, he starts beating him, but the tourists ask the officer to stop and then give Jamal "American hospitality" in the form of a hundred dollar bill. At the end of the film, after winning 20 Million Rupees, Jamal is waiting at the train station for Latika (his true love) and is leaning against a statue of Frederick Stevens, a British architect who designed the train station during India's colonial period.
It doesn't help that this film about India which is partially in Hindi is written and directed by the former colonizers of India, Brits. This makes it very difficult to watch this film without that critical lense in place when you consider how Slumdog Millionaire presents India to the "west". The film is wildly popular and I do wonder how western audiences understand the film and its role in an ongoing struggle to break the cycle of "East" and "West" in a postcolonial discourse. I find many aspects of the movie troubling in ways which completely distract from the storyline and disrupt enjoyment of the film for its admittedly fine technical merits. I'm not trying to accuse Danny Boyle or Simon Purefoy or Channel 4 Films of intentionally perpetuating Orientalism, but you could certainly make the case that Slumdog Millionaire continues in the tradition of Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
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I'm afraid I'll have a difficult time talking at length about Synecdoche, NY. It's not because I didn't like the film; in fact, it moved me considerably. The problem is that I feel like I must watch it three or four more times to have a firm grasp on what I experienced.
What I can say is that this strange backlash against Charlie Kaufman that began with Cannes is totally undeserved. Claims that the film is "indulgent" or "intentionally obfuscating" are debatable, if I must concede that much, but I would have to guess that this reaction is tied to the fact that Synecdoche, NY is not "funny" in the same way Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are.
The film has whimsy, but it is frequently tainted by a downbeat perspective on life, one that likely turned people off but which I found to be the charm of the film. Despite how dour Caden Cotard's life seems, he finds a way to push through in his search for truth. The whimsical elements of the film tend to make Synecdoche, NY more confusing than endearing, particularly the way the film wraps around itself so many times and becomes difficult to navigate. Strangely, as the actual setting becomes more complicated, I found the film easier to follow.
If anything, the beginning of the film is the hardest to get used to. Philip Seymour Hoffman's Caden is a difficult character to latch onto, one whose sense of time and of emotional meaning is schizophrenic at best. However, if you can follow the disjointed period up until he receives the grant and begins working on a play that represents "truth", I really feel the heart of the film Charlie Kaufman is working with becomes apparent. Ironically, this is also the point where we meet characters who play characters we're already following often in the same scene.
For example, after Caden begins casting the play, he casts a man named Sammy to play "Caden", and then casts a woman named Tammy to play "Hazel", the assistant to Sammy's "Caden" so that it reflects the real Caden's relationship with the real Hazel. Therefore, we have scenes with Caden (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Hazel (Samantha Morton) interacting with "Caden" (Tom Noonan) and "Hazel" (Emily Watson). To confound this, periodically Sammy and Tammy break "character" and interact with their counterparts. It doesn't help that with the makeup Emily Watson can at times be a dead ringer for Samantha Morton.
And yet, by the time you've gotten to that point in the movie, it's really not that hard to follow. I admit that it sounds tough, but I had a harder time getting used to the "dream logic in real life" (as Kaufman puts it) that moves us through Caden's medical problems in the early parts of the film.
Synecdoche, NY is not an easy film to watch because it is so demanding of your attention, and there are layers I'm not even getting yet. Nevertheless, by the time it ended I was moved deeply and will make every effort to buy this film when I can. Charlie Kaufman has not "lost it", as some critics dismissed the film as. Instead, he strips away the easy levels of entry in order to dig deeper into the psyche, and what he finds as "emotional truth" in that labyrinth is something special indeed. I can't recommend all of you to see it because I think some of you will justifiably hate it, but some blogorium readers will connect with Synecdoche, NY in a personal way. I hope.
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Well, that covers two movies. I still need to watch Frost/Nixon in order to freshen up the queue, including the possibility of re-watching JCVD and Neil-favorite The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a movie I simultaneously dread watching and yet must see. The spine numbers demand it.
Oh, and chide me for it now, but I feel compelled to rubberneck at the oncoming trainwreck that will be s. Darko. Believe me, I know, but the Cap'n does it so others need not to.
* Sorry, but The Beach kind of sucks. I do love Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, A Life Less Ordinary, and 28 Days Later, although I have not seen Millions.
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