Cinequest Opening Night: THE GOOD HEART

Superficially, The Good Heart, written and directed by Dagur Kári, seems promising: an intimate, character-driven story with a pleasantly murky aesthetic, starring two strong actors. And it's not without charm. But three major issues, all of which could and should have been solved at the writing stage, undermine the performances and hamper the finished film: lack of character development, unclear motivation, and structural problems.

Kári goes to great length to impress his protagonists' characteristics on the audience. Lucas (Paul Dano) is a compassionate street waif who cares so much about others--even complete strangers--that he's unable to refuse anyone anything, although his generosity is repaid with little but grief. Jacques (Brian Cox) is an irascible bar owner with few friends and no family who needs a protege to take over his establishment for him when he finally suffers one heart attack too many.

But so much of what they do contradicts Kári's careful characterizations. For example, Lucas, the ultimate giver, attempts suicide at the beginning, thoughtlessly leaving the tiny kitten on which he dotes unprotected and uncared-for. Jacques is driven to a frenzy and a fifth heart attack when a relaxation tape tells him to envision himself on a white-sand beach. We later learn that just such a beach in Martinique is his favorite place. The inconsistencies continue throughout.

Predictably, as the story progresses, Jacques is influenced for the better by Lucas' seraphic disposition, and Jacques' molding brings out a few sharp edges in Lucas. However, too much growth happens offscreen, and the motivation for change is too often not externalized. Characters are one way in one scene and different in the next, and Kári rarely allows us to see the progression that gets them from A to B. Additionally, we never get any sense of the characters' past. What brought the gentle Lucas to the streets? Whence springs Jacques' perpetual and debilitating anger? If we were given even a hint, their initial behavior and subsequent transformations might seem less arbitrary, their personalities less one-dimensional.

That it's impossible to tell how much time is passing compounds the problem. How long does Lucas' apprenticeship last? A month? A year? The only chronological marker we are given (toward the very end of the movie) is the winter holidays, but, as it always seems to be winter in this coldly blue-lit city, that means little. Additionally, sometimes the scenes occur in a slightly illogical order, as if Kári had shuffled his index cards before writing the script.

A girl shows up. Lucas marries her immediately, despite the fact that they don't seem to be in love and Jacques hates her. The girl flirts with a customer and Lucas throws her out, whereupon Jacques professes to have liked--or at least not disliked--her, after all. Lucas becomes bitter and withdrawn, although the only reason we really know this is that Jacques tells him (and us) so.

Jacques gets on the heart donor recipient list and gives up smoking and drinking. Stripped of the armor of his vices, he becomes serene; a few scenes later, he's verging on vegetarianism. Lucas, gripping a cleaver in one hand and, in the other, the duck he had been about to butcher for their Christmas dinner, says mildly, "You've become a sissy, Jacques."

The inevitable climax is too telegraphed and too convenient to be satisfying. At least Kári didn't fall into the trap of making Lucas' ultimate sacrifice one of his own choosing, which would have pushed the story irretrievably into bathos. That what happens is due to pure chance is fitting and proper.

There's some good dialogue, although one wishes Kári hadn't predicated most of the lighter moments on the idea that there's nothing funnier than watching an old guy swear. And Cox and Dano entertain despite the script's shortcomings. Certain moments do ring true, and they cast light into the dark corners that do not. Movies, like life, are always imperfect.

Jacques Tati's PLAY TIME

I saw a 70mm print of it last Saturday at the California Theatre in San Jose, and I can't stop thinking about it.

Play Time may be the most orderly and controlled meditation on chaos and confusion ever committed to film.  Tati built an entire chunk of city, peopled it with hundreds of actors and cars, and took years to complete the portrayal of forty-eight hours in the life of the charmingly scatterbrained Monsieur Hulot.

The plot is egregiously simple, and there is no dialogue of any import.  Hulot is swept to and fro like a piece of flotsam on the urban tide: missing an appointment, getting hopelessly lost in an office/shopping complex, attending the rowdy opening of an ostentatiously chic eatery, and, finally, forging a tender and very human connection with an American tourist whose story unfolds parallel to his until their paths finally cross.

The people who connect in Tati's world are the innocent, the naive, the outsiders--the ones who are actively bemused or amused rather than passively impressed with their austere surroundings.  The American tour group is hustled from one anonymous "sight" to another, unable to tell the Left Bank from the Right, one country from the next.  Only Barbara, the woman with whom Hulot bonds, sees individuals and flowers, and feels the power lines of history running deep beneath the high-rises and multilane roadways.  To Barbara and Hulot, modern conveniences are superfluous to a happy existence.

The meticulously constructed environment is one of the main characters.  Sound is another.  An officious secretary's heels tap smartly down an endless corridor; massive glass doors thunk open and shut; traffic noise and tomblike silence are juxtaposed in aural smash cuts.  A jazz band wails.  A malfunctioning neon sign buzzes and clicks.  A door slams with a sound like a feather falling on velvet.

Time is increasingly capricious.  The simplest act seems to take an eternity, yet an entire day evaporates in the blink of an eye.  If the map were any truer, it would be the territory.

Tati eschews close-ups on any of his actors, including himself as Hulot, preferring instead to cram the frame with as much detail and simultaneous action as possible.  The city he creates is so full of life and revels so completely in its frenzied hive of activity that the viewer, rather than becoming confused or faltering under the oppressive glare of metal and concrete and glass, is imbued with a sort of euphoria.  The more chaos there is, the greater the chance of transcendance.

The film is a profoundly interactive experience.  This is not simply 1967 Paris, it is all of modern life.  Through the divisive and dystopic elements that, in a film like Gilliam's Brazil, might drive the characters apart, shimmer a vibrant and joyful unity.  In Tativille, we are all in it together.