In Which We Perform An Operation On Doctor Strange

You Would Have Done It So Easy

by ETHAN PETERSON

Doctor Strange
dir. Scott Derrickson
115 minutes

Everyone in Doctor Strange is extremely cognizant of Dr. Stephen Strange's white privilege. The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) is overly contemptuous of the knowledge Strange presumes as a neurosurgeon. "There is no such thing as a spirit," Strange proclaims to her, touching her chest with his hand. Strictly speaking, he tells the truth — magic in Doctor Strange consists of hand-to-hand combat at a slightly quickly pace. When the characters enter The Mirror Dimension, they move slightly quicker and everything looks like an M.C. Escher drawing. But they still fight each other as men and women do.

Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a talented surgeon whose hands are destroyed in a car crash. When he wakes up, his ex-lover and colleague Christine (a pert looking Rachael McAdams) explains that no one could have fixed his digits to the point where he would be allowed to continue performing surgeries. "I could have," he tells her, and then passes out from the extreme trauma of his ordeal.

He is a serious dick after this to everyone, but not exactly as bad as he could have been. He blows through all of his savings looking for a cure, to the point where he is unable to pay the mortgage on a glitzy condo. He finally meets up with Benjamin Bratt on a basketball court, who tells him to head to Nepal.

The next forty minutes of Doctor Strange takes place in Nepal without featuring a single individual from that country, which has to be some kind of record. Swinton runs a cute retreat there, with fully featured wifi and an incredible library. The most dangerous books in the facility are held against the wall by chains for some reason. It is a symbolic imprisonment that parallels the weight of the knowledge they hold.

Slowly, Dr. Strange becomes substantially more attracted to Tilda Swinton than his old girlfriend, who took care of him. Doctor Strange implies that we should be contemptuous of those who tell us how to help ourselves, and treasure more direct aid. When Strange returns to Christine, she moves in for a soft kiss, but he tells her that he has to go away. He can't bear to even look at her. 

Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) is the kind of patient villain who is always explaining his point of view. He seems strangely sympathetic by the end, reducing the weak plot of Doctor Strange to an internecine struggle between coteries within the same discipline. Cumberbatch gets a lot of scenes with Karl (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Ejiofor is not really suited to this lame sidekick role and he and Cumberbatch have about zero chemistry together.

After its bravura opening, Doctor Strange turns into a slog, an impressive feat considering the movie is well short of two hours long. Strange's powers mostly consist of projecting green and orange circles at his opponents, and sometimes toying with time. Both are among the most basic tricks that a wizard can master, and really don't come across as all that eye-popping. Inexperienced director Scott Derrickson seems overwhelmed by the material, and his action scenes are frequently confusing but never pleasantly surprising.

All the emotional parts of Doctor Strange happen in the first thirty minutes of the film. After that, nothing is the least bit consequential, especially after Tilda Swinton has a long talk about how many different universes there are. If so many outcomes are indeed possible, then it is hard to care about any singular one. Kaecilius destroys an important building in Hong Kong, so Strange rewinds time and tries to prevent it.  

Eventually he meets a purple head in another dimension with whom there is no reasoning. This is a prescient metaphor for our current president-elect, or maybe just terrible storytelling. I couldn't tell which.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which The Coen Brothers Enter The Studio System

Backstroke

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Hail, Caesar!
dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
106 minutes

History becomes ancient history. When American people thought of the recent past in 1953, the cultural life of the previous fifty years had not quite absconded from them, principally because there was not too much of it. For Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) to manage his job as a movie executive, he only has to know five or six things, and once he knows them, he has plenty of time to genuflect as to whether he really does know them.

Hail, Caesar! is a kind of anti-nostalgia, pared down to its bare essentials. Scarlett Johansson has only two scenes in the movie as a kind of anti-Esther Williams, a Brazilian actress giggles through one scene like a jack-in-the-box, Tilda Swinton plays twin sister gossip columnists for a combined five minutes and that is it for women in Hail, Caesar! Hollywood during this period (and when you think of it, most others) was largely composed of the interlacing stories of male homosexuals and Jews fleeing Europe.

Esther Williams' movies are not half bad if you watch them today. A lot of times she portrayed the same role she played in life: a talented swimmer in a stage show at odds with the management. Williams' brilliance at marketing herself and her evident abilities as a performer are never touched on in Hail, Caesar!

Instead she is a foul-mouthed slut sleeping with a foreign, married director, not her first. Abandoned by the father of her baby, she has no other options, and so marries Jonah Hill after admiring his physique. Hill is in the movie for two minutes, and Scarlett only five more than that, so how they had made it on the poster moves beyond deceptive advertising into the realm of true evil.

But then, the male stars are just as vapid and sloppy in their art, except for Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum). The best part of Hail, Caesar! by far is an extensive song and dance routine about how there will be no women on a submarine the sailors are boarding in the morning. Tatum, who was recently so awful in The Hateful Eight, appears to be some kind of oscillating god here, and his singing and dancing is ten out of ten. Maybe in the future he could just not talk.

The rest of the movie sets that Josh Brolin strolls onto are shooting awful, satirical versions of failed projects from the period. Clooney is better at pretending to be a period actor than performing a modern role. His not-so-hidden homosexuality is a riff on Tony Curtis, but the vapidity of the character is not. Turning Tony Curtis, a Bronx Jew who was savagely beaten by his schizophrenic mother, served in the U.S. Navy and achieved success from the most meager circumstances imaginable into a spoiled, whimpering ditz is pretty low.

Clooney's character, Baird Whitlock, is abducted by a group of communists. The humor comes from the idea that they explain they have been actively plotting to include communist ideas in their Hollywood scripts in order to do their part for the movement. Isn't this ridiculous? the Coens crow. Except there were films which presented Russia as an idyllic utopia — after all, communists were always substantially better at explaining themselves than actually governing.

But the important thing is that Hail, Caesar! is funny, right? If something is funny, it doesn't matter who it makes fun of, or why, or whether it's true because that would mean, you know, like, actual research. The Coens aren't too good with that part of the process. Over time any director acquires a sinister envy and disgust for actors. Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) even slaps around his young star for not being able to say, "Were that it twere so simple" in a convincing manner.

You feel the contempt for the performers in most scenes of Hail, Caesar! We rush so quickly from moment to moment as Brolin assuages the feelings and insecurities of all these people that you start to think of them not as individuals, but only as problems. Hail, Caesar! is a bunch of brilliant skits that explain all of the jokes for people who don't grasp the overly familiar subject of Hollywood satire. I think most of us understand it by now. William Goldman's book about one year on Broadway, The Season, once estimated that 80 percent of the subject matter in any given Broadway year concerned the theater itself. Today an endless parade of comic book movies saves us from the harsh reality of old.

When I do watch films from this period on TCM, I am not struck by any difference in quality, or even production values. The most obvious change between Hollywood's output today and then is the seriousness of its story choices. During this period, scripts explored non-trivial issues even in frivolous films, and they took their characters just as sincerely, even in goofy contexts. There was a chance of doing that here, but it vanishes as swiftly.

Josh Brolin comes home to dinner with his wife. He doesn't touch her, kiss her, or even look at her. He considers a job offer from Lockheed Martin that would have him working substantially less hours at a higher rate. "What should I do?" he asks his wife (Alison Pill) as he eats the food she has prepared for him, prompting her to comment on a decision that could completely alter the next decade in her own life and the lives of her children. "You know best," she tells him. Maybe I didn't get the joke.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"The Caterpillar Workforce" - Guided By Voices (mp3)

In Which We Treat With The Alien

The Androgyne

by KARINA WOLF

How do you solve a problem like Matilda?

I Am Love, the recent Tilda Swinton film about food, sex and the oppressive ownership of luxury goods, begins as a wintry fable. In the film, Milan is as hermetic as a snow globe and populated by excess: another extravagant table setting. Another jumbo prawn prepared by a molecular gastronomer. Another privileged foot tocking on the expensive Italian parquet. Another heirloom tomato I wished I could pelt at the screen.

With its glorious clothes, homes and elegantly-scripted title cards, the film tells us that the unexamined life is well worth living. The movie concerns itself with a Northern Italian family – its venerable Russian matriarch, Emma Recchi, and her complex (read: avoidant) relationships with children, husband and self. As Alain de Botton recently tweeted, "She was so private, there were things she even forgot to say to herself..." Emma Recchi gives her own inner life a wide berth.

The Recchi family’s subdued wealth and remove recall The Garden of the Finzi Continis, but this time, the family threat comes from a changing economy and a wife’s awakening. Emma, we learn, has emigrated from her native Russia.  The film portrays her as a victim of a kind of human trafficking of the soul, swapping origins for a privileged exile.

Emma’s past is preserved in her cooking — through this art she is reborn when she meets a chef (her son’s business partner) who becomes her lover. With nostalgia, she makes a traditional soup that her favored son adores; she teaches the recipe to her solemn lover. The chef prepares the aspic substance for a Recchi family gathering, and thereby reveals her transgressions. Emma is undone as a mother and a wife — BUT (the film tells us, IN ALL CAPS) maybe these identities do not fit her.

I Am Love is a movie (in fairness, like many movies) made of tropes: food as a gateway drug to an actualized life of sensuality and awareness. But food porn plus Swinton do not equal good story. Here, the gesture, the blandly remarkable settings, the simulation of sensuality are supposed to stand in for authenticity.  Here’s an overexposed leaf or a close up of Swinton’s lithe but imperfect figure.  What statement about the fragility and impermanent beauty of everything can we extrapolate from it?  The movie is an attractive non-narrative as profound as a Louis Vuitton ad. 

A film with Tilda Swinton typically addresses: inappropriate filial love, gender transgression, murder, a life outside the lines. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. Swinton has given naturalistic performances in films like Michael Clayton and The Deep End. But her films are not built around a persona. Instead, they are predicated on the authenticity of her oddity. She embodies the Kantian sublime, inspiring awe and allowing no dominion by reviewers and critics. Even so, the critical rapture about her is somewhat puzzling — I suppose because (for me) Swinton is an actor who appeals to the mind before the emotions. 

Catherine Deneuve might bear a similar, laconic blankness but the French actress tends to exploit stoicism for melodrama. And Deneuve’s straight-faced affect admirably contrasts with her beauty. Onscreen, appearance is (nearly) everything. What are your choices when you don’t resemble any of the types that typically grace the screen? 

Swinton is the world’s tallest androgyne, a human greyhound, an alien odalisque, the perfect principal for a remake of Ziggy Stardust. When Uma Thurman first appeared, she attracted similar attention. Uma, however, was an ingénue as well as an anomaly. She was both beautiful and alien — and found herself lucky enough to become the romantic darling of a number of filmmakers who gave her roles that exceeded, perhaps, her native gifts as a performer. 

I thought of the significance of singular looks when I was watching a screening of Antonioni’s Le Amiche — a remastered film from 1955, beautiful and unusual and full of the unpredictable narrative corridors and subjective reflection that are excised from films today. All of the characters had the most unusual names — maybe they are Italian pet names — there were Clelia and Momina and a very unhappy, self-sacrificing artist called Nene.

Eleonora Rossi-Drago (as Clelia), left, Valentina Cortese (as Nene), Anna Maria Pancani (Mariella) and Yvonne Fureaux (as Momina De Stefani)

The latter was the Italian antecedent to Tilda Swinton — her face somewhere between a Picasso Demoiselles-era painting and a Cocteau personnage. She was a wonderfully convincing actress, not only because she was a finely calibrated performer but because she was singular and unknown. (The men in this film were the marquee stars.)

Tilda Swinton is a director’s darling for a similar reason. She has acted in nearly 60 films without tipping her hand about her personal foibles and quirks. You might google Swinton and find reports on her unusual ménage: living with older baby daddy, younger lover and young son — but she doesn’t populate popular magazines. She is an abstraction more than an identity. Both supernatural and naturalistic, she is believably a fiction.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about Woody Allen. She tumbls here and twitters here. Her book The Insomniacs is forthcoming from Penguin Putnam.

"Century Rolls (1st movement)" - John Adams (mp3)

"The Death of Klinghoffer; Desert Chorus" - John Adams (mp3)

"The Chairman Dances (Foxtrot for Orchestra)" - John Adams (mp3)

deneuve