Year 15, Day 85 - 3/26/23 - Movie #4,386
BEFORE: Benicio Del Toro carries over from "No Sudden Move", and I've been making those little tweaks to my chain as I move forward - "The Pale Blue Eye" has been moved to right after Mother's Day, because it's going to serve a crucial link to get to Memorial Day, as I figured. Another film is being dropped from the documentary chain in April (it wasn't really a documentary, anyway) and moved to May for the same reason, it's going to serve as a link between "Top Gun: Maverick" and the Memorial Day film. Two other films that I previously cut are now BACK in the chain for March and April, the slot for one of them is coming up in just two days, so I made these changes just in time, so my counts will stay the same, and my Easter film will still land on Easter and the Mother's Day film will still land on Mother's Day. (Sure, I can always just take a day off, I realize...but that's kind of a last resort.)
It's Day 26 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's theme is "'Drama" (all day). Well, that seems like sort of a lazy catch-all topic. Here's the line-up:
6:15 am "The Champ" (1931)
7:45 am "Grand Hotel" (1932)
9:45 am "Jezebel" (1938)
11:30 am "Citizen Kane" (1941)
1:45 pm "How Green Was My Valley" (1941)
4:00 pm "The Lost Weekend" (1945)
6:00 pm "On Golden Pond" (1980)
8:00 pm "All About Eve" (1950)
10:30 pm "Sophie's Choice" (1980)
1:15 am "There Will Be Blood" (2007)
4:00 am "Midnight Cowboy" (1969)
I think I've seen eight of these, everything but "The Champ", "Jezebel" and "How Green Was My Valley". Another 8 out of 11 takes me to 136 seen out of 294, up a whole point to 46.2% with five days to go.
THE PLOT: A recent widow invites her husband's troubled best friend to live with her and her two children. As he gradually turns his life around, he helps the family cope and confront their loss.
AFTER: Films like this drive me a little crazy - a lot of the scenes are shown out of proper order, for no real narrative reason. I mean, I get that the director wants to flash back to scenes from when Brian Burke was alive, because the information in those scenes may not be relevant at the start of the film, they become more relevant later once we get to know his widow Audrey and his best friend, Jerry. But still, I don't find that's enough reason to rely so heavily on flashbacks that we end up ping-ponging around in time. It's like if a chef brought you a deconstructed meal, like a beef stew or something where the beef and the potatoes and the carrots are all separated on your plate, and you've got to pour the gravy on them and mix them together. So, umm, what the hell are you paying the chef to DO, exactly? Make the meal completely together so that I can eat it!
The important thing is that Brian is dead, and then later we find out HOW he died, when the film decides that this information is important enough for us to have. Sure, once you get new information about the situation, it's going to color everything that went before, and everything that comes after, but that's STILL not enough reason to mix everything up. My general reasoning when I see something like this is that maybe somebody wrote the story in the proper order, and realized that it was just not going to be entertaining in that fashion. If we took the time to get to know Brian as a father and a husband and a friend and THEN he died, well, that would be a big bummer, wouldn't it? And then the aftermath of his family mourning him and his friend trying to get clean just might not have anyplace to GO.
Once you mix the scenes all up, or split the timeline in two - the present and the past both advancing forward, alternately (and let's just assume this is the case, because I really don't have the time to dig into the timelines and confirm this) the narrative problem still remains (the story's got no place to go) but it tends to be less noticeable, because we're constantly distracted by new information from the past and the present. Ideally the two timelines should play off of each other, but that doesn't really happen here. It's all just distractions to keep us from realizing that we're seeing the same boring scenes over and over again, and getting nowhere.
The only contrast maybe comes in little things, like Brian trying to teach his young son to swim, and being very overbearing about it - later on, Jerry has more success in getting the kid to put his head under water, which is great, because it shows there are different ways of parenting kids and some are more successful than others, but it also puts him on the outs with Audrey, because this was a moment she was hoping to someday share with her husband, and it's another reminder that this is now never going to come to be, not the way she envisioned, it, anyway.
It's tough to predict where the film is going, sure, and that's maybe a bit interesting - after Audrey asks Jerry to move into the spare room that's next to the garage, you have to wonder if a relationship between them is possible in the future, especially considering how close Jerry gets to Audrey's kids - but then again, between his addiction and Audrey's resistance to other parenting techniques, perhaps this isn't in the cards at all. Two people can be close and share space and perhaps it never turns romantic, this is a definite possibility, sure. Not all stories become romances, after all.
Especially when Jerry keeps relapsing - like when Audrey kicks him out months after asking him to move in (talk about mixed signals!) and then when she learns that he might be using, she tracks him down in the bad part of town and brings him back home again. More mixed signals, unless she's come to realize that it's her responsibility to pick up where Brian left off, looking after Jerry and trying to get him on a better path.
The other female character, Kelly, is another potential love interest for Jerry, but any kind of relationship is probably a bad idea for him until he can go to rehab and stay clean - but Kelly knows him from the N.A. meetings, and therefore also understands his situation. But if you're looking for a tidy wrap-up on Jerry, his situation and his future, you've come to the wrong place, unfortunately. The film just kind of stops and leaves everything up in the air - and if you're not OK with that, it's probably better to just not start this story in the first place.
Between the neighbor's story, the relapses, the fire that's mentioned in the title, the grief and the addiction stuff, maybe there is a lot going on here, but does it ever really come together into a neat story? Maybe not everything needs to, but things do tend to feel a bit more complete when they do.
Also starring Halle Berry (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), David Duchovny (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Alexis Llewellyn (last seen in "The Chronicles of Riddick"), Micah Berry, John Carroll Lynch (last seen in "The Trial of the Chicago 7"), Alison Lohman (last seen in "Gamer"), Robin Weigert (last seen in "The Good German"), Omar Benson Miller (last seen in "Shall We Dance"), Paula Newsome (last seen in "Spider-Man: No Way Home"), Sarah Dubrovsky, Maureen Thomas, Patricia Harras (last seen in "Love Happens"), Caroline Field, James Lafazanos (last seen in "The Time Traveler's Wife"), Liam James, Quinn Lord (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Ken Tremblett (last seen in "Firewall"), Hakan Coskuner, Peter Hanlon.
RATING: 4 out of 10 pints of ice cream
No comments:
Post a Comment