Vera Drake

Directed by Mike Leigh

Fine Line Features

In a life crowded by the tedium of poverty, how can one woman find the space for doing good?

Vera Drake seeks to answer that question while pondering the subjective nature of “good” and exploring whether it’s worth attempting. An intimate film about the lives of a small cast of characters, this simple masterpiece by director Mike Leigh manages to be at once philosophically expansive and physically claustrophobic. Personalities too large for their surroundings compound the effect of poverty on spaciousness—there is merely too little room to accommodate everyone, their needs for privacy and their individual desires. Leigh creates an economy of space, framing the lives of a family at a scale too close for comfort.

Imelda Staunton gives a tight performance as the title character, a mid-century London mother who tests light bulbs in a factory and keeps house for the wealthy to provide for her children and aged mother. Somehow, she still finds the time to invite neighbors over to her apartment for tea and a matchmaking session. In her “spare” time, she performs simple abortions to “help out young girls,” as she conceives of it, in a British cultural climate in which doing so is almost unthinkably wrong.

The feeling of crowding derives not just from an awareness of tight quarters—a shot of Vera’s daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) barely folding herself into her closet of a bedroom or a glimpse of the apartment building’s courtyard, where rusty bikes huddle, fighting for space under a thin metal roof—or from the contrast between this and the spaciousness of the homes Vera cleans. An abiding atmosphere of tension contributes equally. Relations with Vera’s in-laws are clearly strained, and the audience’s knowledge that Vera’s friend Lily (Ruth Sheen) is using her makes the subtle drama bubble until the dramatic push toward an inevitable climax causes it to boil over.

The viewer is meant to empathize viscerally with Vera against the mores and legal code of her time. Leigh expects his audience to seethe that the only option most women had then in the case of undesired pregnancy was to bring someone like Vera into their homes—to let her inflate their wombs with a solution of hot water and soap, shockingly the same procedure recommended today by the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League.

The pendulous arm of justice, too, presses down on Vera Drake. By the end of the film, it is not just women as a social category who must live without freedom but Vera herself, forced to exchange liberty for captivity and the ultimate sort of crowding—that of a prison.

Despite this dark and weighty air, however, moments of great openness and flexible acceptance wriggle through. Vera’s husband (Richard Graham) shines in his unquestioning support of his wife, and her son (Daniel Mays) comes around at his urging, learning to separate his family from the herd and not to condemn his mother like the masses.

Staunton received the award for best actress at the Venice International Film Festival this year, a fitting prize for her exemplary work, but she is not alone in this accomplished ensemble. The acting throughout is of extraordinary quality: a film that could have been all about a message becomes instead a portrait of a time, a place and a family. That in itself is a triumph, and something that makes Vera Drake stand out from the crowd.

—Alexandra B. Moss

Ray

Directed by Taylor Hackford

Universal Pictures

There was something like ashy molasses in Ray Charles’ voice: dripping syrupy sweet with southern charm yet charged with gritty, unhewn candor, it resonated with a sense of immediacy and emotional clarity that was nothing short of divine.

His music can run the gamut from gimmicky pop classics to grandiose orchestral ballads but somewhere floating beneath the calculated, precise production there’s a poignant beauty that could only be described as natural. One’s heart could beat to the slipshod, improvised bravado of “What’d I Say,” or it could wiggle, staccato beat-to-beat, calypso style to “Unchain my Heart.”

And yet somehow, even after seventeen tedious years of development, Ray, based on Charles’ life, does not muster any semblance of the splendor within his music. The film lacks emotional attachment on any level and fails in every way as a meaningful addition to his life and legacy. With a mix of deceitful, manipulative Hollywood storytelling techniques masquerading as artistic strokes and tacky, unfocused, pop filmmaking, director Taylor Hackford manages to turn an amazing story of sheer will triumphing over adversity into a two-and-a-half hour mess that will damage Charles’ memory.

Jamie Foxx, star of Ray, has received considerable Oscar buzz for his almost perfect portrayal of Ray Charles—and deservedly so. From the close-eyed, contorted face that seems to interpret the world with tactile emotion to the quick paced, pitch-perfect, squeaky southern drawl, Foxx has Charles dead on. But with a script devoid of any genuine emotion, and a filmmaker who isn’t quite sure what he’s doing, Foxx’s performance does not resonate. It bears a greater resemblance to a three hour-long impression rather than an Oscar-worthy performance. Foxx is acting, and doing a damned fine job of it, but one knows this: the transparent, shallow notions embodied in the script cannot be hidden by Foxx’s technical skills.

While most viewers under the age of 30 will know Ray Charles for his dirge-like rendition of “America the Beautiful,” or for his shiny-suit stint in a series of Pepsi commercials, Charles’ history is anything but clean. It is certainly not the stuff of our morally-obsessed pop culture. Throughout the film, we see Charles smoke his first joint (which he got from a midget, by the way), sleep with countless women, become a heroin junkie, and systematically, one by one, alienate every person who ever gave a damn about him.

Charles certainly makes up for these shortcomings later in life—for the most part. He drops the junk and becomes quite the civil rights advocate, but he still womanizes heavily, fathering five (some sources say seven) children with other women while still married. However, the film tries to explain his foibles through overdone flashbacks that are peppered haphazardly throughout the film. It’s as if Hackford doesn’t trust us enough to make sense of things on our own, offering us visually tacky psychologically explanatory sequences that retard the tone and tenor of the film.

And it gets worse: Ray is strangely more comic than dramatic. While most contemporary dramas (especially biopics) could easily be called tragicomic, with jokes sprinkled here and there to complexify our sympathies with key characters, this film is too funny, creating a dramatic space in which characters are impossible to judge. When the film’s most loathsome characters are simultainiously its most engaging characters, the viewer’s interpretation of the film is split between what the diegesis is attempting to explicitly say and the way these characters actually show on screen.

Similarly schizophrenic direction is scattered throughout the entire film: the camera stays almost exclusively in extreme close or medium-close shots in order to provoke an ultimately false sense of intimacy and the film frequently inter-cuts between Charles’ sketchy adult life and the recording or performance of some of his biggest hits in an effort to exploit the emotion of Charles’ songs. But there is nothing but distance in Ray; the disruption in tone caused by the frequent comic interludes undermines our ultimate attachment to these characters.

Despite all of its flaws Ray remains somewhat watchable, somehow entertaining. It says all the wrong things in the wrong way but it’s still interesting—Charles led an extraordinary life. Though the film reads more like a bad history lesson than a work that complicates our understanding of a historical figure, Ray is still one to go see—if not for the music then for Foxx. His performance in Collateral is probably more worthwhile, but his Ray Charles certainly deserves wide attention.

—Bryant A. Jones

Zelary

Directed by Ondrej Trojan

Sony Pictures Classics

Zelary, the official submission of the Czech Republic to last year’s Academy Awards, is a beautifully-told story of redemption and second chances in which all is familiar, but nonetheless everything seems new.

Taking place during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, the movie follows the life of Eliska (Ana Geislerova). A medical student in Prague, she and her lover are involved in the Resistance. When the Gestapo discovers their involvement, they’re forced to part ways; he disappears without a word, while she goes off to hide in the countryside village of Zelary with Joza (Gyorgy Cserhalmi), a simple woodcutter from the country who was a patient in her hospital. There is a kind of symmetry in this turn of events; the night before, Eliska saves Joza’s life by offering up her blood for a vital transfusion, and now, by delivering her from the dangers of Prague, Joza saves hers.

In order to elude the suspicion of the friendly but xenophobic villagers, they marry. Although she initially enters this arrangement reluctantly—she is distrusting of Joza and she isn’t accustomed to his extremely rural lifestyle—she gradually falls in love with him and begins to make Zelary her home, rather than just a place for her to lie low until the Nazis forget about her. Actors Geislerova and Cserhalmi artfully and skillfully depict their characters’ relationship as it gradually progresses from the haltingly formal to the faintly resentful to, well, a fairly strong argument in favor of arranged marriages.

Clearly, this fish-out-of-water romance is a well-worn and somewhat predictable formula, but director Ondrej Trojan and writer Kveta Legatova weave such a captivating and convincing story that it doesn’t matter. If anything, the unsurprising plotline serves to create a sense of comfort as the film delves deeper into the intricacies of life in a small Eastern European village during World War II; everyone knows everyone else and, if it weren’t for the very occasional appearance of Nazi soldiers—often accompanied by violence—it would feel as though the picturesque village of Zelary were entirely untouched by the 20th century, let alone the war.

Accordingly, Trojan takes his time, drawing the story out and eschewing the fast-paced action-oriented style of most Hollywood films, while still maintaining the audience’s undivided attention. There are extended moments in this film when the Germans seem far, far away and the bitterest and most dangerous of Eliska’s enemies seem to be limited to that shifty-eyed drunk who lives on the other side of the hill. Once directly confronted by the war, however, all of the villagers quickly come together and even the unlikeliest of heroes come to their neighbors’ aid.

To have given too much away is not really a problem when reviewing this film, but rest assured that Zelary has much more to offer than what is described here. This gem from the Czech Republic is a breathtakingly photographed portrait of the way life in Czechoslovakia—and indeed much of Europe—during that period was so cleanly book-ended by the start and end of the war, revealing just how much wartime could define a stage in a person’s life, but seemingly leave the rest of it fairly untouched.

—Steven N. Jacobs

Sideways

Directed by Alexander Payne

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Writer-director Alexander Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor seemed on a winning streak with Election and About Schmidt: both were inventive and quirky, two qualities their newest collaboration, Sideways, unfortunately lacks.

The film follows Miles (Paul Giamatti), a burned-out teacher and struggling novelist, and his best friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) on a road trip through California’s wine country organized to make the most of Jack’s last days of bachelorhood. The trip in Miles’ mind is about tasting great wines and in Jack’s is about getting laid as much as possible before marriage shuts him down. Despite their somewhat incredible friendship—they have completely opposing interests, outlooks and goals—the acting is exceptional and Giamatti and Church exude a chemistry that makes their friendship believable and oddly charming.

But sadly, the movie is ultimately worthwhile only for its fine performances. Sideways’ structure is painfully episodic, never allowing audiences to become fully engrossed in its obnoxious characters. Jack has a few funny moments, but more consistently comes off as annoyingly superficial. Miles is filled with self-pity—he suffers from depression without trying to hide it behind a façade of humor—and is utterly unwilling to try to improve his situation. For example, on their trip, Jack and Miles hang out with a waitress named Maya (Virginia Madsen) who’s smart and warm and gorgeous and…into Miles? The plain, bitter, mopey Miles? Give me a break. And how does Miles react to Maya’s interest in him? By feeling more sorry for himself, a characterization flub which might be funny in a Woody Allen movie, but Miles isn’t bitterly sarcastic enough for this to be humorous. Payne then awkwardly reveals a piece of Miles’s family history that “explains” why he’s so depressed in the last minutes of the film. If Payne had introduced this information earlier, it might have really held the film together: Miles’ self-destructive behavior and dreary attitude would be motivated by his past and, therefore, more excusable.

Similarly unexplained behavior on Maya’s part—her unexplained interest in Miles—reflects another broad problem: Payne spends remarkably little time giving us a sense of his female characters—God forbid we lose some of the shots of scenery and endless montages of vineyards to make room for character development. So little time is devoted to his female characters that Payne is forced to use the cheap tactic of writing Maya a soliloquy about “the life of wines” in order to give her supposed spiritual depth.

Maya’s incomprehensible interest in Miles is troubling in that Payne simultaneously seems to celebrate ordinary people like Miles and Maya while being condescending towards them—why on earth would the gorgeous and intelligent Maya want to go out with a bum like Miles? Is it because she’s a lowly waitress, so she couldn’t possibly expect something better?

Also plaguing the movie is its relentless muzak-wishing-it-was-jazz soundtrack. At the movie’s opening, I thought it was for comedic purposes—Payne used awesome over-the-top music to great comedic effect in Election—and that it would go away in a few minutes and a real score would kick in. But the music in Sideways isn’t part of a joke. It’s just bad music and there’s a lot of it in the movie. And that’s really sad and, indeed, makes you wonder if the mysterious cause of Miles’ depression is the shitty music following him around.

I think part of the reason I was so bummed out by this movie (aside from perhaps unfairly high expectations based on Payne’s other work) is because I’m not part of its intended demographic, which I think is really the middle-aged people it’s about. Proof? When Maya asked Miles which wines he had in his collection, Miles replied, “It’s not really a collection. It’s actually more of a small group”—laughs went through the majority of the middle-aged reviewers. The college kids just sat there, confused and praying that in twenty years we don’t find that line funny.

—Geneva Robertson-Dworet