TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'The Skeleton Key,' 'The Edukators' and '5x2: Five Times Two'


Slightly longer cuts of reviews in today's Oregonian. Click on the title links for the print versions.




The Skeleton Key
(dir. Iain Softley)

Here are a few nice things we can say about "The Skeleton Key":

• I was genuinely surprised by this supernatural bayou thriller's very final twist -- even if it did follow an endless string of "surprises" that any horror-movie fan could block out on a cork board with index cards.

• Also, Kate Hudson -- playing a live-in hospice caretaker sucked into a world of Louisiana folk magic -- looks extremely fetching in a pair of bun-hugging underwear. (I only point this out because director Iain Softley points it out, and repeatedly; the helmer who brought us "K-PAX" and "Hackers" seems hell-bent on delivering hilariously gratuitous shots of said bun-huggers throughout the film.)

• And, underwear shots aside, "The Skeleton Key" just looks splendid. The thrust of the film is that Hudson's character takes a $1,000/week job in the Louisiana sticks, caring for a stroke victim (John Hurt) whose wife (Gena Rowlands) may or may not be using hoodoo potions to keep him in a paralytic state. But of course, Rowlands lives in a rotting swampland mansion, and of course Hudson's growing suspicions lead her into swampy back rooms filled with chicken bones and dusty books and old records and pickle jars full of grott. It allows cinematographer Daniel Mindel to revel in the moist decay of the Louisiana bayou and the dark contours of Rowlands' house.

Okay. Now. Unfortunately, the rest of this review is going to be about where the film has "room for improvement." Because after getting off to a decent, somewhat muted start, "Skeleton Key" just gets sillier and sillier and sillier until it's yet another one of those stupid, noisy thrillers where everyone's running around in a house, yelling and falling down, and you're mostly wondering why nobody bothered to call the cops sooner.

The script is by Ehren Kruger, who did such a marvelous job adapting "The Ring," but who may be stretching himself a bit thin these days. According to the Internet Movie Database, Mr. Kruger has no fewer than five screenplays attached to 2005 release dates, including the insipid "The Ring Two." Which may explain why "Skeleton Key" is downright sloppy at times: It telegraphs suspense, piles on cheap, fake-out scares and inspires questions when it really ought to suspend disbelief.

For example: If you suspected your patient was being poisoned and held prisoner -- somewhere between the "HELP ME" scrawled on the bedsheet and the part where he grabs you and croaks, "Get me out of here!" -- would you really go to a witch doctor instead of, say, the police or at least a really burly social worker?

And also: Why does Kate Hudson tell the paralyzed man sitting next to her to "hang on" when she's about to crash her car? Hang on with what? His piercing gaze?

But maybe that's just nitpicking. The real problems here are characterization and overkill. As written, Hudson's nurse simply isn't likable: After a day or two on the job, she glowers, barges into locked rooms and makes demands of Rowlands (who's stuck saying "Fiddlesticks!" over and over) with the sense of entitlement of a movie star, not a hospice worker.

Meanwhile, Softley and his battalion of sound designers and musicians simply can't leave a spooky moment alone. Even listening to a scratchy old LP, eerie in itself, has to be "helped along" by a soundtrack stuffed with atonal violin playing and needless creaks.

And unfortunately, when everything in a movie is lit, shot and scored to be "creepy," nothing is.
____________________




The Edukators
(dir. Hans Weingartner)

"The Edukators" could be very, very glibly described as "Jules et Jim" for the G8-protest set.

Shooting on handheld video in the Dogme 95 style, director Hans Weingartner introduces us to three adorable young activists fighting for social justice in Germany. Jule (Julia Jentsch) protests sweatshop labor, but she's something of an indentured servant herself: In perhaps the least subtle metaphor for Third World debt-relief ever, she works at a fancy restaurant to pay off the 100,000 Euros she owes a rich businessman, Hardenberg (Burghart Klaußner), after rear-ending his Mercedes.

Meanwhile, her boyfriend Peter (Stipe Erceg) and his roommate Jan (Daniel Brühl) are anti-capitalist pranksters billing themselves as "The Edukators." Using the Man's high-tech tools against him, they break into mansions, rearrange furniture and leave notes telling Berlin yuppies, "You have too much money."

Of course, as our heroes lament, these days the world co-opts passion and turns it into fashion with alarming speed. Are The Edukators nonviolent crusaders or unusually smug thrill junkies -- or both? After one stunt, Jule sums up the intellectual depth of their crusade with a girlish, "That was so awesome!"

And then, very suddenly, things get decidedly less awesome. While Peter's off partying, Jan and Jule bond over music while painting Jule's apartment -- embarking on a romance that tests everyone's open-mindedness. That test becomes a final exam after Hardenberg stumbles on the kids mid-prank, forcing them to kidnap him. Finally, in their mountain-cabin hideout -- which they dub "The People's Prison" -- the activists find out their "political prisoner" was a far more dedicated revolutionary in '68 than they'll ever be in the 21st century.

Jule, Jan and Peter tend to speak in grade-school, Chomsky-for-Dummies platitudes: "Dope chokes young people's revolutionary energy." "Step One: Recognizing injustice. Step Two: Action." "Every heart is a revolutionary cell." "The system is overheated!" "You can't sedate them with game shows and shopping!" And yes, it's tempting to dismiss the whole movie after the umpteenth instance of that sort of blather. (I starting tuning out somewhere around the point that Jan compared the real world to "The Matrix.")

But while Weingartner clearly admires the kids' idealism, if not their intellectual heft, there's also a deeper, more human critique going on under all the claptrap.

Jan, for example, has a feasible plan to knock out European satellite television -- but everyone seems more concerned about using Hardenberg's money to get coffee, wine and cigarettes. And while the kids own up to the selfish motives behind their "political kidnapping," Hardenberg (in a great performance by Klaußner) laments his lost passions -- even as he quietly pits his captors against each other and smokes their weed.

If you can look past the simple-minded Socratic dialogues, thematic deck-stacking, languid pacing and overuse of Jeff Buckley's cover of "Hallelujah" -- no easy feat -- "The Edukators" actually reveals itself as something warm, humane and sad: a movie that genuinely wants you to think about the ways idealism eventually collides with human frailty, what the upstarts and the sellouts might really learn from one another, and whether the moral compromises that eventually afflict all the characters are inevitable.
____________________




5x2: Five Times Two
(dir. François Ozon)

Like "Irreversible" or "Memento" or that one episode of "Seinfeld," the French import "5x2: Five Times Two" unspools in reverse order.

The movie opens shortly after Valentine's Day, as Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss) sign their divorce papers, then adjourn to a hotel for breakup sex that ends in a bitter assault. This loathsome vignette is followed by four lengthy flashbacks that trace Marion and Gilles' doomed pas de deux to its earliest flirtations.

It's an approach that makes "5x2" feel like a happy memory tainted by regret.

Thanks to recent cinema history (see above), this isn't a novel storytelling device. But it's still a fascinating storytelling device. And director/co-writer François Ozon ("Swimming Pool") employs it like an investigative journalist: He turns foreshadowing into 20/20 hindsight, highlighting the ways in which Marion and Gilles were marinating in cowardice, betrayal and denial pretty much from the get-go.

With clinical detachment, Ozon examines how small cracks open into vast chasms. Gilles, a physical and emotional rapist in the film's opening (and the marriage's ending), has a history of passive-aggressive cruelty -- from deliberately missing his son's premature birth to quietly betraying his previous girlfriend (Géraldine Pailhas) at the Italian resort where he starts courting Marion. And while Marion's crimes are less monstrous, her indecision and passivity lead to betrayals, as well -- particularly on her wedding night, as Gilles' drunken impotence inspires her to pull jeans over her lingerie and wander from the honeymoon suite.

Bruni-Tedeschi gives a phenomenal performance here, turning on an emotional dime as Marion. Her journey from hope to dissolution is right there on her face, which can go from sensual to pinched in an instant. Many of the film's best moments involve Ozon zeroing in on Marion during or just after emotional trauma -- as when tears stream down her face while Gilles talks about his adventures at an orgy.

"5x2" is a sort of anti-date movie -- a smart but deeply cynical study in failure, with our sense of loss growing in direct proportion to the characters' romantic hopes. Ozon's surgical approach leaves the film's gorgeous final shot -- which would play as romantic cheese in any other context -- loaded with dread. But it's a dread made bearable by extremely subtle work by Bruni-Tedeschi and Freiss as monumentally self-deluding lovers who stomp on your heart, then ask you to root for them.

Deep hoodoo
Jules, Jim & Trotsky
Multiplying motives in reverse
(The Oregonian, Aug. 12, 2005)


Posted: Fri - August 12, 2005 at 02:39 PM        

|

©