Kyle Buchanan has a post at Defamer taking Jeff Wells and Anthony Lane to task for questioning the plausibility of race relations in Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married. His basic point is that critics who are old and white can’t hold back their “thinly veiled discomfort with the shocking idea that white people can marry black people in 2008 without someone giving a speech about it.” But this is actually a common complaint about the film, and it’s definitely not limited to those afflicted with either oldness or whiteness. I saw and sort of fell in love with the film at Toronto where a lot (a LOT) of critics were dismissing Rachel for its allegedly laughable multiculturalism. Not only does the white Rachel take a black husband without comment or incident, but the members of the wedding party wear saris, even though no one involved is visibly of sari-wearing ethnicity. Scandal!
At Toronto, I was still a little bit too in love with the film from first viewing to be able to come up with a finely calibrated, bullshit-free rationalization, but I knew that to make the argument that the film’s melting pot was somehow inauthentic, and/or tacked on by Demme to reflect his own sensibilities rather than those of his characters, was to fundamentally misunderstand the film. I think I thus may have said something stupid in defense of the film whilst under the influence of whiskey and petulant certitude. Whoops.
But a month later, I’ve calmed down and sobered up, and I’ve figured out exactly why Demme’s “cultural appropriation” is not just “obnoxious exoticism“, but is absolutely integral to the film’s story.
So: Miramax is suing Daily Mail columnist and chick-lit novelist Allison Pearson, alleging that in 2002 they gave her an advance and a two-year contract to produce a new book, on which they’d own the movie rights. To give some perspective: the deal was brokered during the Harvey Weinstein era, and Miramax now alleges that they haven’t even been able to get Pearson to return their calls since 2006––a year after the Weinsten’s gave over their stake in the mini-major to Disney and left to start their own company.
But: Since Pearson is married to New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane, and according to Gawker, there is “speculation that critic-pandering Harvey Weinstein—when he was at Miramax—might have been inspired to buy her book because of Pearson’s husband.” Which make me wonder: totally hypothetically, if Anthony Lane was paid off to wink-wink positively review Miramax output from 2002 until the Weinsteins left the company in 2005, did he at least do a good job of it? My findings after the jump.
The best thing about Alex Holdridge’s In Search of a Midnight Kiss(trailer above) is its conceptual audacity: not only is it a film about walking in L.A., but it devotes much of its screen time to romanticizing corners and aspects of the city well-known to natives but rarely seen on film (and never as the backdrop for meet-cute one-night-stand cinema). As long as it sticks to being a visually stunning love letter to the much-maligned city, an inverse of the L.A. segment of Annie Hall, a filmic rehab from City of Quartz to a city of romantic fantasy––I can totally get on board with it. It’s when the actors open their mouths that I start to have a problem.
So much for Peter Bart’s pet dead horse about the untraversable gap between ticket buyers and film reviewers––Iron Man, so far the year’s best reviewed film, is also thus far 2008’s fastest moneymaker. The critic/audience sync continued this past weekend with Speed Racer. It takes a rare film to unite critics with as disparate a sensibility as Anthony Lane and Armond White in common vitriol; it’s almost unthinkable that the same critically-despised film would fail to appeal to the masses.
“Speed Racer kills cinema,” went White’s fuming, unusable pullquote. But does it? It would be wishful thinking to assume that the average ticket buyer actually cares about “cinema”, never mind the death thereof, but it seems clear to me that the audience’s failure to care about this particular movie could have lasting repercussions for those of us who do take cinema seriously. After jump, you’ll find five reasons why, love the movie or hate it, this bombing could potentially be Bad For Movies on the whole––and one reason why it might be kind of good. As usual, feel free to tell me why I’m a moron in the comments.
When word got out that Angelina Jolie would be playing the French/Afro-Cuban Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, a small but very vocal segment of the population jumped to decry the casting as racist. Labeling Jolie’s work in the film sight unseen a”blackface performance”, the blog Racialicious declared that Jolie (who is, you know, trying to save the world by adopting a bunch of kids of different races) should have known better than to accept the part. “Given that Jolie has two children of color, I would have thought that she might have been more sensitive to issues of race and the place of women of color instead of following in the footsteps of Al Jolson.” Even actress Thandie Newton (who was last seen in a paragon of cultural responsibility called Norbit) jumped into the debate, telling a UK tabloid that she was “shocked” Jolie had “been blacked up to play a black woman.”
Anyone who really knows the history of Hollywood blackface understands that it’s ridiculous to compare Jolie (who appears in Heart wearing a wig and a healthy dose of bronzer) to Jolson, who smeared shoe polish on his face in caricature of Black performers (a caricature that, it must be noted, was not generally considered racist at the time). Still, it’s been interesting to see how mainstream critics deal with the issue in their Mighty Heart write-ups. Newsweek devoted an entire paragraph to the issue:
The studio releasing Heart, Paramount Vantage, insists that Jolie’s makeup was not darkened for the role, and that any complexion variation is caused by the film’s lighting. If they are lying–which is probable–it’s only by a little. In costume and under natural light, Jolie looks, at most, a shade or two duskier than her natural complexion. Regardless, both Jolie and Pearl say they were blindsided by the charges. “I know that people are frustrated at the lack of great roles [for people of color], but I think they’ve picked the wrong example here,” Jolie says. Pearl is more pointed: “This is not about skin color. I wanted her to play me because I trust her.” She sighs. “Aren’t we past this?”
I haven’t found a review yet that professes Jolie’s makeup to be a problem. On the contrary: most high-profile film critics are male, and for them, a new Angelina Jolie movie is, like, the event of the year. Jolie dressed up as Mariane Pearl is not so much an opportunity to contemplate racial and cultural dynamics as it is an opportunity to fantasy role play. Anthony Lane, whose New Yorker review is devoted primarily to the “problem” of Jolie’s schizophrenic sexpot/saint split, contemplates Jolie’s “corkscrewed hair [and] tinted skin,” but is far more interested in her lips, which he dubs “the world\’s most recognizable mouth.” (He also makes the laughable suggestion that Jolie would have been somehow better suited to the career of blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield.) Certainly, no one seems to be getting more pleasure out of this than New York’s David Edelstein, who comes close to crossing the line of common decency by suggesting that Jolie has been “dipped in caramel.”
On the whole, A Mighty Heart is very much a film about reflection, perception, and projection. As a star, Jolie often functions as a blank screen for the projection of the audience’s desires. As usual, despite Jolie’s efforts to generate interest in the issues that she deems important, it seems to be much more interesting to talk about what’s it’s like to look at her.
We’ll have more Mighty Heart chatter on Friday’s edition of FilmCouch.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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Kyle Buchanan has a post at 
So: Miramax is suing Daily Mail columnist and chick-lit novelist Allison Pearson, alleging that in 2002 they gave her an advance and a two-year contract to produce a new book, on which they’d own the movie rights. To give some perspective: the deal was brokered during the Harvey Weinstein era, and Miramax now alleges that they haven’t even been able to get Pearson to return their calls since 2006––a year after the Weinsten’s gave over their stake in the mini-major to Disney and left to start their own company.
