The Dead Girl

The Dead Girl (2007) directed by Karen Moncrieff stars Toni Collette as Arden, Piper Laurie as Arden’s mother, Giovanni Ribisi (Rudy), Rose Byrne (Leah), James Franco (Derek), Bruce Davidson (Leah’s father), Mary Steenburgen (Leah’s mother), Brittany Murphy (Krista) Josh Brolin (Tarlow), Kerry Washington (Rosetta), Marcia Gay Harden (Melora).

This is a very complicated and carefully told story that unfolds in five chapters. It starts when Arden finds the body of a dead girl in a field in the rural landscape where she lives with her mother. Arden tells the police and becomes a local celebrity which leads to her being asked out on a date by Rudy who works in a grocery store. Arden is played beautifully as someone who is caught in a stifling and cruel relationship with her ailing mother. She breaks free from that and leaves with Rudy.

The next chapter shows Leah, the morgue attendant who is living with the pain of a missing sister, and the effects of that. The story here is about how the various family members are trying to deal with having had the older daughter gone missing without any resolution. They don’t know if she is alive or dead and they don’t know what happened to her. Leah, who is deeply depressed, just wants it all to be over. Through a series of circumstance she believes the dead girl is her sister and that almost frees her until she finds out she was wrong.

The third chapter deals with a woman whose husband goes away on long road trips and the infected, seriously twisted relationship between husband (Nick Searcy) eventually leads to the wife discovering a storage locker where her absentee husband keeps trophies in the form of bloody clothes and jewellery and things of that nature. The wife (Mary Beth Hurt) understands that her husband is a killer and she has to deal with that knowledge somehow.

The fourth chapter shows the mother of the dead girl, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) trying to understand what happened to her daughter, finding out where she lived, that she worked as a prostitute and that she has a daughter. She works through all this and decides to take care of her granddaughter.

The last chapter shows the dead girl herself, Krista, and her last day. She comes across as a damaged soul in a lot of ways, but she is also stronger than you would think at a first glance, and the viewer gets to see some of that too.

It’s so rare to see a film that actually features women in this way. We’re talking beautiful talent, skilled work and honed dialogue showing actual women as opposed to Barbie dolls, with hard choices to make portrayed with all the depth and fullness that these wonderful ladies are capable of. That alone makes this worth watching. In some ways they are all victims and they all rise above, change their lives and move through the world as best they can.

It’s told in inverted order and without sentimentalism. It’s absolutely fascinating and gut-clenching to watch a performance like Mary Beth Hurts and seeing her make the wrong choice, seeing how poisoned her thinking is from what must be a long and deeply infected relationship. It is a movie about human interaction and all the ways in which women can get caught in bad circumstance just as much as it is a movie about a murder.

Complex, intelligent and completely engrossing without any kind of moral soapbox action this movie gives the manifold leading ladies a chance to show their skills.

How did this movie not win more awards?

Mule

Ripley Under Ground

Ripley Under Ground (2005) directed by Roger Spottiswoode stars Barry Pepper as Ripley, Jacinda Barrett as Heloise, Tom Wilkinson as the detective John Webster. The other principals are Douglas Henshall as Derwatt, Alan Cumming as Jeff Constant, Claire Forlani as Cynthia and Ian Hart as Bernard Sayles. Willem Defoe plays the art collector Neil Murchinson.

The story begins with Ripley on his way to an art gallery to see the exhibition of Derwatt’s work. Due to unfourtionate circumstance, a marriage proposal untimely delivered and then refused by Derwatt’s gold digger girlfriend Cynthia and a bad car crash, Ripley becomes involved in an art scam.

The idea is simple. Derwatt’s body is stashed in Jeff, the gallery owner’s country house, in a big freezer. The four friends Jeff, Cynthia, Bernard and Ripley decide to withhold the news of Derwatt’s death until all the paintings have been sold.

On the same night Ripley meets the lovely Heloise, a french student, and falls in love. Or what you will. He is after all supposed to be a psychopath, and if you look at the pathology that is supposed to be a tricky proposition.

The rest of the movie is one long complicated series of circumstance and accidents and bloody deaths all very neatly contrived to increase the sense that maybe Ripley won’t get away with this at all.  He is portrayed as more misfourtionate than mischevious.

The 1999 movie The Talented Mr. Ripley was to my mind a neat, stylish and very dark movie. It had a much more serious tone. I liked it well enough to venture into this one as well.

My response to this movie is not surprising if you take that into account. I find myself watching with a slightly inquisitive tilt to my head. This is a comedy. A very dark, messed up and bloody comedy, but a comedy none the less. Despite the cast, which contains some very good actors, the it feels hectic and contrived. Barry Pepper with his shirt off holds very little fascination for me, and yet the viewer is graced with that view quite a lot. Enough that I would remark on it as being gratuitous.

Not only is it a comedy, but it reverts to slap-stick in a couple of scenes. Ripley going at Derwatt’s frozen corpse with various implements to get him out of the freezer and then falling down the stairs with the corpse in his arms so that various appendages break with a popsicle crunch is a dark kind of slap-stick.

It’s not what I expected, nor frankly, what I wanted out of this movie. Assumptions are of course never a good thing, but like I said I had The Talented Mr. Ripley in the back of my head when I picked this movie up.

I don’t mean to convey that I was not entertained.

But if you want dark, bloody and funny I suggest you watch the TV-series  “Dexter” instead, with the far superior quality psychopath Dexter played by Michael C. Hall. It is put together in a much sharper and frankly more intelligent way.

All in all I find the performances cartoonish and the acting constantly on the verge of being down right silly. There are moments, of course, when it all seems solid, but on the whole I recommend you stick to the first movie.

Mule

Primal Fear

Directed by Gregory Hoblit this 1996 court room drama stars Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Edward Norton and Frances McDormand.

Gere’s attorney Martin Vail is a vain bastard, that much is obvious right from the get go. He embodies all the characteristics of a lawyer when at the top of his game and obviously his goal here is to defend the innocent, or not so innocent, and look good whilst doing it. He has a conscience somewhere, but he is still basically an ambulance chaser.

When the news of a gory murder hits, Vail is first through the gate to get to defend the young suspect Aaron Stempler. Aaron comes across as sweet, shy and misguided. A young drifter who has been taken in by the local church and then subjected to Archbishop Rushman’s (Stanley Anderson) dubious attention. It turns out that the Archbishop has some interesting habits involving the young people supposedly in the church’s care.

So the altar boy murders a priest and then hides shivering and covered in blood by the railway tracks. The lawyer who normally meets events as a cynical tactician is blindsided by the suspect. Aaron seems to have a mean man in him called Roy. Aaron goes from sweet, stuttering and mild tempered confusion to alpha male in two seconds flat. Roy, the other personality, is the one who takes care of business. He protects Aaron. He killed the priest.

So the defense now switches from “there was a third man in the room” to “there was a third man in the room, but he lives in Aaron’s head”, which is a tricky thing to try and pull off.

This movie has been around for a while and I actually saw it back then and now happened to revisit it. This is Norton’s first big performance and he does pull it off in a way which with the twenty-twenty vision provided by hindsight you can say foreshadows his later performances. It is not particularily memorable movie for any other reason, though, more a basic staple of court room drama, and there has been quite a lot of that.

Strong, solid chracter performances, but not much else. Still very enjoyable in it’s basic bread and butter way.

Mule

The Deep End

Scott McGeHee and David Siegel have directed this 2001 drama/thriller staring Tilda Swinton (Margaret), Goran Visnjic (Alek) and Jonathan Tucker (Beau).

The story is basically a tell tale heart surrounding an accidental death. Young Beau, a promising trumpet player has an affair with an older man of questionable moral character. After an ugly scene the older man, Darby Reese (Josh Lucas) falls of a pier and happens to land badly. Very Badly.

Beau’s mother Margaret finds the body and gets rid of it thinking she can protect her son. The family now becomes subject to blackmail from some of the boyfriends unsavoury contacts. They have a video tape of young Beau with his lover and threaten to hand it in to the police unless they recieve 50 000 dollars. The blackmailer Alek (Goran Visnjic) develops a certain sympathy for the family after having help resuccitate the grandfather Jack (Peter Donat).

Despite it’s best intentions this movie does not make it all the way. As long as the suspense is created by Margaret trying to get rid of the evidence and keeping her family together it does well.

Alek, the blackmailer, quite quickly becomes a more sympathetic character, which again, sort of works. He displays obvious concern for Margaret and has an attack of consciousness and I can get behind that. The tension between Margaret and her son, who may or may not be a killer, is nicely understated – they simply can’t communicate about anyhting, much less this. The question of the son’s sexual identity is a huge elephant in the room. So far so good. Margaret desperately tries to raise the money in between being a soccer mom and trying to get hold of her husband who is in the navy and out on a carrier somewhere.

Swinton gives a beautifully understated performance, showing the nerves and offering the blank face of shock while doing what is necessary. Visnjic is a good ganster with a heart of gold. Young Tucker gives a good performance as an angsty, talented but somewhat rebellious teenager.

The problem is that the tempo is uneven and the things that work so well in some scenes, the palpable silence and desperation, becomes campy and stagey in others. Some locations, like the boathouse, feel overly theatrical and the violence is not convincing.

And I simply cannot reconcile myself with the ending. It is not set up well enough for me to believe any of it. I mean, if you are going to sacrifice it has to be more of an involvement than we have here as far as Alek is concerned. Margaret sacrifices, but that is understandable, we are talking about family and she strikes me as someone who will do whatever she has to.

The very last scene depicts Margaret crying in shock and her son Beau comforting her. She tells her son she loves him, and again, I would not mind this as a resolution to the movie, if it wasn’t for the blood and gore.

You just feel the lopsidedness of the events. It is an unhappy mixture of action and drama that tries to be both and neither and winds up failing in all respects, despite solid performances from all the key actors.

Mule