A Mighty Heart

The cheeky Anthony Lane is at it again, with review of celebrity so delightfully insightful that it surpasses the artistic merits of the commendable films that it purports to comment on. But before the review, a confession: one of the reasons why I find The New Yorker reviews so irresistible (the literary equivalent, if you may, of chocolate truffles on an indolent summer's day) other than the irrepressible wit of Anthony Lane is the artistry of the illustrations that fix the reading experience indelibly, pleasurably, in my mind. No one else quite puts a movie review together like The New Yorker.

But, on to the review. Mr. Lane insists, celebrity and notoriety to the contrary, that Ms. Jolie is an actress. This assertion need not have been made should Ms. Jolie continued to star in movies in the vein of Girl, Interrupted, but one that needs to be repeated lest we lose Ms. Jolie completely to a world of celebrity and notoriety that threatens to consume her, or worse, "brand" her. Here are some choice passages from Mr. Lane's review:

Mariane is French-speaking, with a Cuban mother, and Jolie is equipped with corkscrewed hair, tinted skin, and murmuring accent. We brace ourselves for a star turn, a hundred minutes of vanity project, but here’s the thing: it never happens. Jolie slips into the part, ducks in and out of the action, and generally plays second string to the onrush of events. Blessed with the world’s most recognizable mouth, she confines herself to a single, skeptical pout...

Only once does Mariane crack. Informed of her husband’s death and of its savage circumstances, she goes to her room, crouches over, and keens. It could be the howl from a Greek tragedy, except that our heroine is not disporting herself on a stage, majestic in her grief, but filmed from so close that you can count the knobs of vertebrae at the top of her spine. By this time she is heavily pregnant, and her screams are a terrible parody of birth pangs—an echo that Winterbottom makes explicit, without needing to, in the closing scenes. This hasty, high-intensity, barely consolable film is just the kind of tale on which he thrives—and, more surprisingly, on which Jolie will come to depend if she wants to keep her head above the tides of madness in which, partly on her own initiative, she has chosen to float. Will success spoil Angelina Jolie? Not yet. Can she help it? Yes, she can.

Angelina Jolie. Actress. Who'd have thunk? Sadly, not a lot.

Credits:

Illustration of Angelina Jolie in "A Mighty Heart" by Lara Tomlin. The image comes courtesy of The New Yorker.

Acquired Tastes: Anthony Lane

In my posted comments on Jason de Villa's elegantly informative entry on magazines worth checking out, I wrote:

Thanks for the heads up on Esquire. I checked out some back issues and in terms of content and fluid layout design, it’s top notch. I still prefer my The New Yorker, but I suppose it’s because I’m horribly sentimental, and a little Anthony Lane is better than no Anthony Lane at all.

To which Jason replied:

John-D: If you weren’t my friend I would say “What a literary snob!” Haha!

Well, allow this literary snob to point you in the direction of a more insightful, bitingly intelligent, and wonderfully witty snob, Mr. Anthony Lane. In his latest review, Mr. Lane takes on Adam Sandler in "Reign Over Me" and Sandra Bullock in "Premonition", much to the delight of this, admittedly, snobbish Lane fan:

Of all the things to make you pause, hand on wallet, before shelling out for a movie ticket, try this: a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Adam Sandler. What possible cultural need, one might ask, could be met by such a project? It is thus with a degree of amazement that I find myself nominating “Reign Over Me,” written and directed by Mike Binder, as a movie that might be worth your time.

Later, he makes some rather telling points regarding Sandler's startling effectivity in some decidely un-Happy Gilmore cinematic fare:

I cannot remember laughing at a single scene of his comedies, but here, for once, his chosen persona—the slurring and disconnected goofball—makes sense, although I still think of him as an oddly hollow presence on which to build a movie. His grief is less convincing than his vacancy, and one effect of “Reign Over Me” is to make you ask, Who will improve on Sandler?

I rather like Sandler's occasional flirtation with what could be considered good movies, like Spanglish and the decidedly un-Happy Gilmore art-house movie, Punch-Drunk Love. He might be an actor of very little range, but perhaps it is that sort of "hollow presence" and "vacancy" that allows talented storytellers to use him to tell good stories, where his celebrity is used to attract people to stories largely bereft of the distraction of an overwhelming star presence. Didn't this same quality make Keanu Reeves indispensable in The Matrix?

Illustration of Adam Sandler and Don Cheadle is by Edel Rodriguez, from The New Yorker.