BEFORE: First off, let me congratulate Saturday Night Live for kicking off their 40th season. Wow, that means they haven't had a proper ending to a sketch in the last 30 years. I watched the season opener just to confirm this, and yep, they still don't know how to write a punchline. Which is odd because the "Weekend Update" segment is full of punchlines (except for the lame character interviews, which, like the sketches, go absolutely nowhere...) so with all the writers they have, why can't they ever end a sketch on a joke? This episode was particularly bad, with characters merely shrugging their shoulders and walking off camera - not once, but TWICE. Time and time again, they create situations that are the equivalent of painting themselves into a corner, with no exit plan - no skit ever ends, it just sort of stops. I still watch it, but just for the phony news and the phony ads, the only highlights left, in my opinion.
Linking from "Midway", Charlton Heston carries over.
THE PLOT: The biographical story of Michelangelo's troubles while painting the Sistine Chapel at the urging of Pope Julius II.
AFTER: Since I'm getting close to the end of the year, I'm really starting to think about what my annual wrap-up's going to be about. Woody Allen and Hitchock, of course, but I hit on a lot of films this year that had something to do with the creative process, whether that was writing ("Ruby Sparks", "Sylvia", "Shadowlands"), singing ("Coal Miner's Daughter", "Sweet Dreams", "8 Mile"), acting ("Cradle Will Rock", "My Week With Marilyn", "Postcards From the Edge") or filmmaking ("Hitchcock", "Saving Mr. Banks" and umm... "8MM"?) Also in the mix was the making of art, thanks to "Pollock", so I fought hard to get this one into the conversation also.
I really wish there had been more included in this film about Michelangelo's process - sure, the film starts with a 15-minute presentation of his best sculptures, but you can get that from any art history or art appreciation class. (I will debate, however, on the narrator's complimenting of some of his sculptures being intentionally unfinished, because he clearly didn't want to disturb the art he had created up to that point, for fear of destroying it. I'll posit that maybe he just got busy with something else, or perhaps distracted. Unfinished is unfinished, he shouldn't be commended for walking away from a half-done Pieta.)
What's fascinating is that the frescoes on the Sistine Chapel are regarded as some of the most elegant and famous religious paintings of all time - everyone knows the image of God's outstretched hand touching Adam during Creation, or the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. But other than demonstrating a stenciling technique for transferring line art to the ceiling, there's very little here about Michelangelo's process. How did a sculptor transition from making 3-D art out of marble into making 2-D art from paint? What about chiaroscuro? Sfumato? How did he develop his color palettes, after working with plain white marble for so long - did they just come out of thin air?
All we really see is Michelangelo seeing an image in the clouds that looks a bit like the famous God/Adam figures - and this is while he's hiding out from the Pope after trashing the frescoes he had done up until that point. So... the whole thing comes from a cloud? Is this supposed to be a metaphor for divine inspiration?
Actually, not many people know this, but since I took A.P. Art History in high school, I'll let you in on a little secret - the whole Sistine Chapel thing was a wacky mix-up. Pope Julius had recently noticed that the paint was flaking on the ceiling, and he really just wanted a new coat of a solid color up there. Nothing too showy, you know, maybe just a basic gray or something - but not a DRAB gray, of course, something of a lively gray. He was in a bit of a rush and heard about a couple of painters who could get the job done quickly, and their names were Michael and Angelo, they ran a little home contracting business on the outskirts of the Vatican. ("When in Rome, call Mike and Angelo to paint your home") Of course, this was before someone invented the Yellow Pages, so one of the cardinals screwed up and contacted Michelangelo by mistake - he went ahead and made these glorious plans for religious frescoes, and he put so much work into it that the Pope didn't have the heart to tell him the truth.
Creative process aside, we do get to see the toll that painting while lying for months and months on a wooden scaffold several stories in the air takes on Michelangelo's body. (That's the "agony" part...) But what about the ecstasy? Ol' Mike had a girlfriend in the Contessina de Medici, according to this film, but he also says many times that he's incapable of expressing love. Oh, sorry, that's right, you're an artist, so you must be COM-plicated. The film makes allusions to him getting in trouble for writing sonnets, but conveniently fails to mention that those sonnets were rather racy ones, written to other men. So there's that.
Also of interest is the depiction of Pope Julius II, also known as the "Warrior Pope". Seeing a Pope leading troops into battle doesn't really make sense from a modern perspective - can you imagine John Paul II or Pope Benedict discussing military strategy? - but this clearly was a very different time. He had to defend his papacy, in a military sense, from the Borgias in Venice, who had allied themselves with France. He also had several children before becoming Pope, at least one daughter who made it to adulthood - this is something else that we'd consider unthinkable for a Pope today.
Also starring Rex Harrison, Diane Cilento, Adolfo Celi, Harry Andrews, Tomas Milian.
RATING: 4 out of 10 cranky cardinals
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