Both individually and collectively, Americans may profess a desire for honesty, but the intrigue of serial deception — as a practiced tradecraft, and almost an art — makes compelling subject matter of state espionage, spies and double agents. So a movie like The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby, a documentary about the same-named former Central Intelligence Agency head, directed by his son, Carl Colby, would seem to offer a fantastic chance to explore the topic from a unique perspective, to richly plumb that different psychological and ethical space that trickery and lying on such a grand scale requires. Unfortunately, The Man Nobody Knew is neither fish nor fowl, and can’t get off the ground as either a unique familial memoir or a uniquely accessed view of recent world history.
Colby, wiry and discreet, began his career as an OSS officer, parachuting into Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, working behind enemy lines to foster dissent and effect sabotage. Later, rising through the CIA, he helped sway elections against the Communist Party in Italy, and eventually ran the controversial Phoenix Program in Vietnam (tabbed as a “kill squad” by its detractors), which sparked today’s legacy of counter-insurgency. Colby is most well known, however, for defying the wishes of President Ford after rising to the rank of head of the CIA, and opening up to Congress about some of the international spy agency’s most tightly held “extra-legal” operations, including attempted assassinations and coup support in various countries around the world.
Despite the possessiveness of its title, and the way it clutches its now-deceased subject to its bosom, there’s a puzzling lack of commitment on the part of Colby to the personal quality of the narrative. Family photos are aplenty, and William’s long-time wife (the director’s mother) sits for several interviews, which are parceled out amidst much historical footage, and chats with other interviewees. But there are huge gaps in family history, and the filmmaker never never solicits the opinions of his siblings, which would have given the movie crucial, added dimension. Most problematically, though, Colby includes a mess of awkward first-person narration; it pops up at weird times, uncomfortably juxtaposed, and lacks the depth and honesty for which one yearns, since Colby never really wades into the breach and significantly discusses what he knew about his father and thought him to be doing at the time versus what he knows now.
This gives The Man Nobody Knew a quality of fitful engagement. At its core, Colby’s film is seemingly about the blinkered awakening of a conscience, and how his father, after Vietnam and President Nixon’s Watergate disgrace, felt the need to increase transparency, by degrees, while also safeguarding national secrets. This third act revelation, though, gets the bum’s rush at the expense of much historical set-up. Some of these passages — about Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.’s apparently singular role in the overthrow of Vietnam’s President Diem, for instance, three weeks before the eventual assassination of President Kennedy — are shocking, newsworthy, and probably vital to a greater understanding of American history. But other stretches come off as staid, lackluster middle school filmstrips. And Colby, too, brooks no discussion about his father’s mysterious death. These shortcomings make for a movie that dances around intrigue, but never consistently engages it. In death, as in life, William Colby remains something of an enigma.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Man Nobody Knew comes to DVD presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, with English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing. Its bonus packaging is pretty nice, consisting of an interview of Colby by James Reston, Jr., a photo gallery and a CIA timeline, as well as previews for additional First Run Features titles. There are also a half dozen excised scenes, shining further llight on the difficulties of keeping secrets in an open society — something that Colby apparently believed was still possible, but also in need of oversight and reform. For more information on the movie, click here; to purchase its DVD via Amazon, meanwhile, click here. C (Movie) B (Disc)
Daily Archives: May 19, 2012
Multi-Hyphenate Maïwenn Talks Cannes Winner Polisse
The Grand Jury Prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival last year, and recipient of more than a dozen Cesar Award nominations, Polisse represents a unique French entry in a well-worn genre — the grizzled police department drama. Centering on the myriad investigations of the Child Protection Unit of a Paris bureau, the movie features all sorts of shocking, sad and scandalous subplots about child abuse, abandonment, underage pickpockets and predatory sexual behavior. But it’s also surprising for another reason — its writer-director and co-star, Maïwenn Le Besco, is a female, trading in a genre most typically reserved for men. I had a chance to speak to Maïwenn recently, about her movie, its life-changing reception at Cannes, her love for Las Vegas, and what drew her to the arts. The conversation is excerpted over at ShockYa, so click here for the full read.
Hysteria
Period pieces often get a bad rap simply by virtue of the fact that so many of them center around stuffy romantic hand-wringing, and so they perpetuate the idea that there exists between the various generations an impenetrable chasm of behavioral dissimilarity and fractured emotional resonance. The utterly delightful Hysteria, however, explodes that myth. A sly yet seriously mounted comedy that plays like a post-war Ealing Studios pin-prick satire of British character and society, director Tanya Wexler’s film, about events leading up to the creation of the vibrator, might just be one of the more drolly enjoyable cinematic experiences of the year.
Hysteria unfolds in 1880s London. Worn down by doctors who regard his sanitation and “germ theory” advocacy (as in, arguing their existence) as poppycock, Mortimer Granville (Hugh Dancy) is reconsidering a life in medicine at all when he finally secures an apprenticeship under Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce). Dalrymple’s thriving solo practice centers around treating women suffering from nymphomania, frigidity, melancholia and anxiety — afflictions of the female nervous system thought to stem from a disorder of the uterus. His enlightened methods show that such conditions can be ameliorated by relieving tensions within women — manually stimulating them to a certain emotional “reset,” if you will.
The younger, handsome and dexterous Granville proves a hit at this, and his improved lot makes him a worthy suitor of Dalrymple’s daughter Emily (Felicity Jones). As Granville works himself to numbness (literally), however, he develops more complicated feelings for Emily’s headstrong elder sister, Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a firebrand social reformer who, much to her father’s chagrin, runs a settlement house in London’s East End. After having offended a patient, though, Granville eventually finds his good fortune reversed. It’s at this point that, in a flash of tangential inspiration, Granville teams up with his friend and benefactor, the eccentric and wealthy amateur inventor Edmund St. John Smythe (Rupert Everett), to tweak a new creation and birth the vibrating electric stimulator. Amazement and good feelings ensue, naturally.
Hysteria represents Wexler’s third feature film, but her first in nearly a dozen years, after taking a break to start a family. There’s no rust, however; the movie serves as a cheeky, fun showcase for her overarching talents. From developing the material with producer Tracey Becker from a fledgling two-page treatment to overseeing some smart, beautiful production design from Sophie Becher, Wexler has superb instincts for melding potentially wild and over-the-top material with the sort of straightly played societal underpinnings that make the movie’s comedy stand out in relief. The performances are a delight, too. Dancy brings just the right amount of put-upon yet eager-to-please uncertainty to his role. Jones, so wonderful in Like Crazy, and Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, are both engaging, and credibly different romantic foils to Dancy’s character. And in down-shifted, arched-brow form, Everett is a scene-stealing delight.
Hysteria for the most part nicely balances the disparate tonalities of its story, rooted in fact but trussed up in formula, with a pinch of screwball banter; Dorothy Parker would dig this movie, most assuredly. A rather cutesy ending, yielding to romantic conventions, dings the movie a bit, but it’s still a delight — a genuine conversation-starter sure to put a smile on one’s face. For more information, click here to visit the movie’s website. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 95 minutes)
Polisse
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Polisse is a French cop drama that comes across as something of a cinematic “turducken” — filling, yes, but also rather unnaturally stuffed to the breaking point with different and sometimes at odds tastes. Directed and co-written by Maïwenn (who typically eschews her surname, Le Besco), the movie connects fitfully through its sheer urgency — it’s a work of deep feeling. Vacuuming out the exotic benefit of its foreign film presentation, however, many arthouse patrons might be left wanting slightly more disciplined and pruned storytelling.
The film centers around a Child Protection Unit in a northern Paris police precinct, where ethnic and gender tensions inform the squad’s behavior, giving it the feel of a prickly family whose bickering stems from an intensity of caring and investment. Leader Balloo (Frederic Pierrot) tries to keep everyone in line, including Nadine (Karin Viard), Iris (Marina Fois), Mathieu (Nicolas Duvauchelle), Chrys (Karole Rocher) and the hotheaded Fred (Joeystarr), who is suffering from a separation from his daughter. When a photographer, Melissa (Maïwenn), is assigned by the Interior Ministry to track them and photograph their efforts, it exacerbates underlying tensions.
Nominated for 13 Cesar Awards, the French Oscar equivalent, Polisse (its title reflects a childish misspelling of the word “police”) feels lauded a bit more for its reach than its grasp. The movie has a gritty technical construction that certainly lends it a compelling, documentary-like feel, but in its panicked rush to include so many personal crises and underline the point that there is no line of clear demarcation between the professional and private lives of its characters, it comes across as too cocksure and overbearing by about half.
Its rangy and frequently jaw-dropping collection of case stories — said to be comprised wholly of material that Maïwenn witnessed directly during a lengthy research embed with police officers, or factual experiences shared by them — certainly afford Polisse its most arresting moments. And there is a delicateness to a great many of the film’s scenes with children, at least insofar as the presentation of the minors. Its performances, though, range from solid to simply over-modulated. Maïwenn opts for a baseline emotional setting of overheated, so the movie — already more of a slice-of-life portrait that doesn’t have any naturally building dramatic tension — just starts to come across as pummeling, and one-note. An ending that includes some out-of-left-field tragedy feels like cheap overreach for emotional statement, too. Polisse has moments of raw connection, but it comes across also as less than the sum of its parts — a messy canvas that equates every square inch of color with manifest profundity. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sundance Selects, R, 127 minutes)
Natural Selection
The darling of last year’s South By Southwest Film Festival, where it picked up seven awards, Natural Selection has an interesting central idea and a pair of fairly arresting lead turns, but it doesn’t convincingly dig down into its characters, and is further bogged down and hamstrung by its technical limitations. A cracked road trip in which a devoted Christian housewife jointly rescues and falls for a hedonistic, previously unknown family member, writer-director Robbie Pickering’s feature debut is an indie effort shot through with good intention, but lacking in either deft enough execution or a tonal commitment one way or another that might tip it toward an honest recommendation.
After her husband Abe (John Diehl) suffers a stroke, Linda White (Rachael Harris, quite good) discovers that, though she’s been living in abstinence due to the fact that she can’t have children and Abe professes a belief that acted upon sexual desire outside of procreation is immoral, her husband has actually been visiting a sperm bank regularly for almost 25 years. Discovering that he might have a child, Linda sets out for Florida, where she finds Abe’s 23-year-old son Raymond (Matt O’Leary, above left) outside of Tampa, living in a filthy shack with drug paraphernalia strewn about. After convincing him she’s not a door-to-door proselytizer, and paying him $20 for his time, Linda asks if Raymond has “any hobbies, aspirations or pets.” He shoves her out of his house, but later, needing to escape a police dragnet, Raymond shows up at Linda’s hotel and submits to her desire to reunite him with the biological father he’s never known.
The mismatched pair hit the road. Raymond means to quickly ditch Linda, and take her car and money. But, somewhere between petulant and overjoyed at being pampered by her, he soon develops a certain begrudging respect. Linda, meanwhile, cut off from romantic connection for so long, finds herself opening up emotionally in ways that she hasn’t been able to with her husband.
In Linda and Raymond, Pickering has one of the main ingredients for a solid cinematic effort — two extraordinarily different characters thrown together by circumstance and forced to coexist. But he never scratches past the surface of any of the other characters — including Linda’s sister Sheila (Gayland Williams) and her high-strung brother-in-law pastor, Peter (Jon Gries, of Napoleon Dynamite) — and so a subplot involving pursuit by the latter comes across as sloppy and ill-conceived.
Linda and Raymond remain oil-and-water types, too. The film successfully sketches the contours of their guilt and loneliness, and there’s a potent scene where Linda and Raymond open up and share difficult truths about their respective pasts after breaking into a diner and cooking up some waffles. But Natural Selection requires that they ignore issues front-and-center, too, like Raymond’s drug use or Linda’s Christian devotion. These problems melt away, so caught up is the movie in the self-supposed heft and engagement of its thematic underpinnings or allegorical statement. Natural Selection possesses the loose framework of a more interesting film, but it’s an incomplete sketch rendered in disposable fashion. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Cinema Guild, R, 90 minutes)