TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'The Squid and the Whale' and 'Touch the Sound'


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




The Squid and the Whale
(wr./dir. Noah Baumbach)

"People tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests," wrote David Foster Wallace. The gas-station attendant and the lit professor are equally capable of bloodlust; only one of them might enjoy Saul Bellow's "The Victim," but both enjoy sex.

"The Squid and the Whale" takes that essential human truth and applies it to a devastating literary divorce.

Baumbach (who co-wrote "The Life Aquatic" with Wes Anderson) is pretty great at charting the primal woes of educated people. His 1995 debut, "Kicking and Screaming," was a witty study of college grads so terrified of adult responsibilities, they refuse to leave their college town.

"The Squid and the Whale" introduces us to the Berkmans -- a family led by intellectuals as needy as children.

Dad Bernard (Jeff Daniels) is a lit prof with dense, acclaimed novels in his past. Mom Joan (Laura Linney) is a rising star with book deals and New Yorker short stories in her future. They sit around the dinner table in their Park Slope brownstone and debate Dickens in clipped tones with their sons Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and Frank (Owen Kline).

But Baumbach (who draws heavily from his own childhood, even setting the film in 1986) is merciless with educated people who can't (or won't) manage their base impulses. And when Bernard and Joan, who've been going through an epic rough patch, separate after 17 years of marriage -- shuttling Walt and Frank around under a clunky joint-custody agreement -- the boys are caught in a crossfire of resentment.

Joan and Bernard trade low blows in front of the kids, hide books from each other, and dissolve into hate-flurries of cutting remarks. And these evenly matched opponents barely notice the devastating consequences for their kids. Walt has to fend for himself as he blunders awkwardly (armed with his father's impossible standards) into his first romance. And middle-schooler Frank starts dabbling in alcohol, profanity and some shockingly icky acts of public self-abuse.

"The Squid and the Whale" isn't always easy to watch, but it's beautifully written and acted, and deeply personal. It has a sharp eye for the small embarrassments of divorce -- as when an impoverished Bernard accepts money from Walt's girlfriend (Halley Feiffer) at dinner. It's also darkly funny. Baumbach's characters speak with that same sort of vaguely distant, cerebral aloofness you occasionally find in Wes Anderson and Whit Stillman characters; when they aren't screaming at each other, they're lost in their own heads. (This is pretty hilarious when Walt's trying to pass off a Pink Floyd song as his own, with the pathetic rationale that, "I felt like I could have written it -- so the fact I didn't was a technicality.")

Everyone turns in strong work -- even William Baldwin as a laid-back tennis pro who calls everyone "brother" -- but this may be a career performance by Jeff Daniels. Bearded and furious, he's created an indelible character in Bernard -- a hypercompetitive, hypercritical, free-swearing, name-dropping, self-aggrandizing has-been who fired his agent (for making unkind remarks about the New York Knicks). He envies Joan's success and worries that Frank is becoming a "philistine," and he's the sort of guy who writes an impersonal "Best Wishes" in a book for his own son. But he's also an incredible blur of contradictions: the clueless intellectual as spurned lover and father. He sleeps with a smut-writing lit student (Anna Paquin) and profoundly misses his family -- actually believing at one point that Joan will take him back if he offers to cook more. (Joan's reaction to this offer, made in front of the boys, is one of the film's cruelest moments.)

The movie's ultimately about Walt freeing himself from these well-meaning, self-centered monsters. Bernard's frequent admonition -- "Don’t be difficult" -- is both a hypocrisy and, clearly, Baumbach's fondest wish.
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Touch the Sound
(dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer)

Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie is a high priestess of drumming.

The Grammy-winning Scot -- billed on her Web site as an "international solo percussionist, composer, teacher, motivational speaker and jewellery [sic] designer" -- comes across as a sort of hyperaware, New Age prodigy mash-up of Tori Amos and Sheila E. She can pull extraordinary noise out of anything -- from gongs to snare drums to xylophones to plastic tubes drummed on the back of musician Fred Firth, with whom she's recording an improvisational album in an empty German warehouse. She can play piles of junk on a moment's notice, anywhere -- from her brother's farm to the floor of a Japanese bar.

But that's not the only reason she's extraordinary.

As we learn 20 minutes into Thomas Riedelsheimer's strange, sensual and slightly overlong documentary "Touch the Sound," Glennie started losing her hearing at 8, depending on hearing aids by age 11. And so, using her eyes and her sense of touch, she's turned her body into "some sort of resonating chamber," as she puts it -- feeling more sound than the average audience member will ever hear.

"Touch the Sound" follows Glennie around the world (and through multiple hair-color changes) as she teaches and plies her much-praised craft in New York, Germany, Japan, Scotland and Santa Cruz. Riedelsheimer bills his movie as "A Sound Journey," and from the glorious opening shot -- which pulls back from Glennie striking a gong, all the way outside to look at the quiet sky above the warehouse -- he's playing any number of cinematic tricks in an attempt to filter our world through her one-of-a-kind sensorium.

He periodically leaves her to zero in on everyday noises we tend to ignore -- the whirring of a fishing line, the flapping of pigeon wings, rippling grass. The juxtapositions and set-pieces can be beautiful. Haunting music plays over water-streaked windshields and animated Times Square billboards. One of Glennie's deaf students awakens to the "feeling" of sound. Glennie stares ferociously at a gong as she extracts its vibrations. She brings down the house during an impromptu snare-concert at Grand Central Station. She's overwhelmed by the cacophony of a Japanese department store. A jet trail becomes a sine wave as it's reflected in a ripple.

"Touch the Sound" would be damn near perfect if it didn't go on just a smidge too long. Riedelsheimer loves to underline his thematic and visual points -- multiple times -- and there are, one could argue, a few too many "meaningful" shots of Glennie looking at everything but the camera, burning incense and making vast pronouncements like, "Silence is one of the loudest sounds -- and the heaviest sounds -- you'll ever experience," or "My role on this planet is to bring the power of sound."

Don't let that keep you out of the theater. You may find your own sense of hearing transformed, however briefly, by Glennie and Riedelsheimer's global tour of the senses.

Dark Waters
Learning to Listen
(The Oregonian, Nov. 4, 2005)


Posted: Fri - November 4, 2005 at 09:22 AM        

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