Archive for January, 2002

Robert Alt­man has con­tin­u­ally vac­il­lated between trea­sure and trash. On the trea­sure side we have his true clas­sics: M*A*S*H, Nashville and The Player. But the trash seems to out­weigh these high-art achieve­ments. Films like Brew­ster McCloud, H.E.A.L.T.H., Pop­eye, Short Cuts, Prêt-à-Porter, and Dr. T & the Women cloud a career that most crit­ics con­sider out­stand­ing. I’m of the opin­ion that Alt­man is a lit­tle high on him­self and that rubs off on his movies, but you don’t read these reviews for opin­ions of peo­ple now, do you?

Gos­ford Park is excel­lent. The trea­sure here is the upper crust of Eng­lish soci­ety and the trash are the peo­ple that serve the treasure’s every whim and fancy. The man of afflu­ence in this film is Sir William McCor­dle (Michael Gam­bon) who is mar­ried to the much younger Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas). The McCordle’s are host­ing a hunt­ing week­end at their Eng­lish coun­try­side estate and all man­ner of the bold and the beau­ti­ful are invited.

The biggest prob­lem is that Sir William is a jerk and not well liked by most of the peo­ple attend­ing the hunt­ing week­end, both priv­i­leged and non-privileged alike. They include such British film and stage lumi­nar­ies as Mag­gie Smith (Con­stance, Count­ess of Tren­tham), Richard E. Grant (George), Clive Owen (Robert Parks), Alan Bates (Jen­nings, the but­ler), Derek Jacobi (Probert), Helen Mir­ren (Mrs. Wil­son) and Emily Wat­son (Elsie). Almost all of the atten­dees have one prob­lem or another with their host and over the course of the week­end some will attempt to show their dis­plea­sure in the gravest way possible.

The Haves in the film reside upstairs away from the Have-Nots and Alt­man does a fine job of jug­gling both the rich and their poor help. It’s all tuxe­dos and caviar above ground-level, while the groundlings that serve them eat at a plain wooden table. The best part of the film is what Alt­man does with the min­gling of the two social classes and how they interact.

The only prob­lem that I had with the film was that the cast was a lit­tle to huge for your aver­age viewer to pay atten­tion to. The major­ity of the time the Haves are referred to by their last names or their title while some­times they refer to each other by first names. A connect-the-dots game could be played with all of the characters.

Other than that one small prob­lem, I liked the film. Altman is a fine crafts­man and it shows brightly here that he truly loves his sub­ject (and like a king, his sub­jects) and gives them rich enough parts to show that all of them, regard­less of social strata, are humans.

Zowie, man! Steven Spielberg’s lat­est film, Catch Me If You Can, is a fun, comedic crime caper, mar­veling at the trade­craft of forgery rather than denounc­ing it. Its spirit is breezy, almost whim­si­cal in it’s tone, and it ele­vates its main char­ac­ter, Frank Abag­nale (Leonardo DiCaprio) to the level of a highly suc­cess­ful artist. Yes, it’s true he did steal cumu­la­tively $4.5 mil­lion, but he had fun doing it, and is there really any­thing wrong with that? And who wouldn’t envy Frank? He’s an “air­line pilot”, a “doc­tor”, a “lawyer”, and, in one of the fun­ni­est seg­ments, attempts to be James Bond, all before he turns 21. If you’re hav­ing fun and liv­ing the high-life, what’s wrong with a lit­tle check forgery, espe­cially when you’re wear­ing a smash­ing orange and white Ital­ian knit shirt sweater combo?

Well, there’s one man, Carl Han­ratty, who doesn’t think any of this malarkey is funny, not one bit, and is the party pooper FBI agents who’s going to bring Frank to jus­tice. He is also one of the most cheer­less and mis­er­able FBI agents in the his­tory of cin­ema. Yeah, his men may not like him very much, but Carl couldn’t care less what they think because he has the entire Fed­eral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion at his dis­posal. One thing can be said for Carl, he’ll get his man, even if it takes him four years and criss-crossing between two con­ti­nents to do it.

Frank is a man who’s wres­tled life to the ground by its horns and claimed it for him­self. After his par­ents (Christo­pher Walken and Nathalie Baye) divorce, Frank flees his famil­ial prob­lems and heads for the Big Apple to find his for­tune. Boy meets world and before you know it he’s broke, home­less and it attempt­ing to kite checks. He quickly real­izes that por­tray­ing the broke stu­dent fails to gain the trust of wary bank tellers, and after an epiphany hits him he takes on the appear­ance of a Pan-Am air­line pilot, because, as every­body knows, you can trust a pilot! Soon he’s swim­ming in cash and fly­ing the jump seat of air­lin­ers across the coun­try, all the while cash­ing bogus checks. Each time Han­ratty is close to cap­tur­ing him, Frank deftly moves on to a new, cooler job.

Star­ring:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­tin Sheen, Nathalie Baye
Directed By:
Steven Spiel­berg
Release Date:
Decem­ber 25, 2002
MPAA Rat­ing:
PG-13 for for some sex­ual con­tent and brief lan­guage.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Dream­Works SKG
3.5 Stars

The major flaw with this film is sur­pris­ingly enough Tom Hanks’ char­ac­ter Han­ratty. The writ­ing, not the por­trayal that is. The FBI man is so card­board and two– dimen­sional that it could have been played by lit­er­ally any­one else. Han­ratty isn’t the main focus of the story, but it would have been nice to see a more rounded adver­sary for the dap­per Abag­nale to pit wits against, rather than the stereo­typ­i­cal hard-ass cop who sits alone at the office, expect­ing phone calls from his prey, antic­i­pat­ing moves like in a game of chess.

Spiel­berg how­ever makes up for this by keep­ing the film’s mood light, allow­ing the bub­bly per­son­al­ity of DiCaprio to carry the film through points that would have been dull in the hands of oth­ers. He han­dles the com­edy well, stay­ing at a shal­low level, rarely delv­ing into the mechan­ics of the forg­eries. In the hands of other direc­tors this might have become tedious but Spiel­berg keeps things mov­ing at a speedy pace. The cam­era work of Janusz Kamin­ski is bright and alive, pri­mary col­ors jump­ing off of the screen, swim­ming around in a big old pool of nos­tal­gia and accen­tu­at­ing the upbeat times of the early 1960’s. In the end, it’s almost hard to turn away, the film is so watch­able it’s infectious.