My interest in the foreign import Offside spiked exponentially once I realized it was the latest effort from Jafar Panahi, the Iranian auteur who, let’s make no bones about this, currently ranks as one of international cinema’s most accomplished — and certainly most important — filmmakers. Like Zhang Yimou back in the 1990s, Panahi has frequently found himself the target of government interference, with all of his works banned outright from being screened in his homeland.
Lucky for us, these humanistic efforts have steadily been making their way to U.S. shores — and, more surprisingly, to the Queen City. One such work, 2004’s Crimson Gold, is a superb examination of the dehumanizing aspects of class separation, while another, 2001’s The Circle, is a harrowing account of the violence often perpetrated against Iranian women. Dramatically, Panahi’s latest effort is far less punishing than these previous pictures, which isn’t to say it’s any less critical of the way things stand in this Middle Eastern nation. Yet for all its railing against archaic (and misogynistic) ideas, it also introduces us to a handful of endearing characters (male and female), in the process humanizing a nation that is only presented to the U.S. as a boogeyman threatening — what’s the popular term? — “our American way of life.” Offside is exactly the sort of movie that George W. Bush and his cohorts in crime wouldn’t want you to see, since it reminds us (since we miserably failed to absorb the lesson from Iraq) that women, children and other innocents will be the ones paying for his proposed premature ejaculation of a war.
The protagonists in Offside are young women and young men (all played to perfection by non-professional actors), and political issues are the furthest thing from their minds. Like the rest of the globe, they’re caught up in World Cup frenzy, and the film is set on the day when Iran is hosting Bahrain for a crack at soccer’s ultimate honor. But in Iran, women aren’t allowed to enter stadiums to see sports competitions, meaning that many females disguise themselves as men in order to gain entry. The ones in Offside are the unlucky ones: They’re caught and hauled off to a holding area just outside the stadium, where they’ll remain until they can be taken away to jail. They’re not thrilled with this wrinkle in their plans, but neither are the soldiers assigned to guard them. These fellows would rather be doing other things (like watching the soccer match), but fearful of their commanding officers, they dutifully carry out their orders. This results in various conversations between the soldiers and their prisoners, in which it’s established that nobody’s crazy about this law that reduces women to the status of second-class citizens. Indeed, as witnessed by the behavior of the soldiers and many of the men watching the game (some of whom attempt to help one of the girls sneak into the match), it’s clear that the younger generation considers this exclusionary law silly, and that it’s the country’s elders — the ones with all the power — who adhere to these musty modes of tyranny and domination.
Through this enchanting and illuminating film and via press interviews, Panahi seems to be quietly hopeful that policies will eventually change in his country. It’s a lovely daydream, though reality dictates an unfortunate outcome. After all, today’s youth will quickly become tomorrow’s elders, and noble confrontation too often gets molded into complicity, compromise and the corruption of values.
WHAT IS IT about the zombie flick that brings out the social critic in filmmakers? George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead subtly touched upon racism, while his Dawn of the Dead was a glorious exploration of mindless consumerism. Decades later, Danny Boyle used 28 Days Later to examine the unchecked spread of SARS, Anthrax and, given the time and the film’s English setting, even mad cow disease.
Now, here’s Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo (whose fascinating previous effort, Intacto, was brought to town back in 2003 by the Charlotte Film Society) tackling the sequel (Boyle remains as an executive producer). Working from Rowan Joffe’s script, he’s made a zombie yarn that also serves as a condemnation of American military might in Iraq. Yet let’s put aside the sociopolitical context for a minute: Taken strictly as a full-throttle horror film, 28 Weeks Later delivers the goods.
Set (as the title implies) months after the original film, this finds the virus still affecting folks throughout the British Isles. But efforts at containment eventually succeed (i.e. “Mission accomplished”), and slowly the survivors start over in a self-contained city, all under the eye of the U.S. military. Naturally, a security breach occurs, the zombies start overrunning the city, and the American troops begin indiscriminately killing everyone in sight, whether they’re zombies (read: insurgents) or humans (read: innocent Iraqi civilians).
Moviegoers can take or leave the message beneath the mayhem, but what’s on the surface for everyone to enjoy is an expertly crafted terror tale that’s heavy on the jolts and morally complicated when it comes to several of its characters — for instance, a family man portrayed by Robert Carlyle is quickly revealed to be a less-than-exemplary role model for his kids (promising performers burdened with the unfortunate names Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton). And given the film’s final shot, 28 Months Later isn’t out of the question — let’s just hope it doesn’t bring down what’s been a bloody good show so far.
THE LEGENDARY Katharine Hepburn was occasionally too brittle for my taste, but watching Georgia Rule, it’s hard to picture anyone else in the role of Georgia, a family matriarch who runs her household the way a drill instructor lords over greenhorn recruits. It would have been a tailor-made role for Hepburn 30 years ago, since she would have brought to the part the necessary balance of outward rigidity and inward serenity. Instead, it’s Jane Fonda who now awkwardly fills the role, and, on the heels of her disastrous return to the screen in Monster-In-Law, it’s clear that the career resuscitation isn’t going exactly as planned.
Fonda’s Georgia is a one-note shrew, and one of this schizophrenic movie’s greatest failings is that it never acknowledges that it’s this woman’s puritanical behavior which started the chain reaction partly leading to the miserable circumstances that plague her daughter Lilly (Felicity Huffman) and her granddaughter Rachel (Lindsay Lohan).
Then again, it’s not just Fonda’s fault that Georgia is a poorly realized character; blame also must be directed at scripter Mark Andrus and director Garry Marshall. Marshall in particular has no clue how to orchestrate the movie’s heavy themes involving alcoholism (Lilly), nymphomania (Rachel) and possible child abuse (Rachel claims she was repeatedly molested by her stepdad when she was 12); after all, he’s the director who viewed mental retardation as little more than an amusing character quirk in The Other Sister. Here, he tries to lighten the movie’s mood by having Rachel give a blowjob to a nice Mormon boy who’s seriously trying to serve God (har har) and then painting the lad’s girlfriend and her pals as the story’s heavies.
Worthy mother-daughter sagas stretch all the way back to Stella Dallas in the 1930s and reached their zenith with 1983’s magnificent Terms of Endearment. Georgia Rule harbored the seeds of a comparable tearjerker, but because it’s been placed in the wrong hands, it fails to elicit much in the way of genuine emotion. If there’s not a dry eye in the house when Lilly and Rachel finally hug, it’s only because audiences will have cleared out by that point.
I HAVE NO IDEA how he takes his coffee, but when it comes to comedy, Danny DeVito takes it black — as evidenced by the string of dark satires he’s helmed over the course of two decades. In his hands, one can only speculate how far The Ex would have taken its dark comic undercurrents, but in the mitts of director Jesse Peretz and novice screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman, it doesn’t take them quite far enough.
Still, The Ex offers enough in the way of laughs to earn it some measure of approval. Zach Braff plays Tom Reilly, who, along with his wife Sofia (Amanda Peet) and their newborn son, leaves NYC for Smalltown, Ohio, to work for his father-in-law (welcome back, Charles Grodin, after a 13-year retirement). The trouble starts immediately when Tom is paired at the office with Chip Sanders (Jason Bateman), a paraplegic who once had sex with Sofia during their school days and still carries the torch for her. Hoping to win her back — and taking an instant dislike to her husband — Chip sabotages Tom at every turn, embarrassing him in front of coworkers and alienating him from his family. It’s a losing battle for Tom, not only given Chip’s friendliness to everyone else but also because his wheelchair confinement only serves to make Tom’s open hostility seem even more boorish.
The material is too often played for broad laughs that fail to achieve their purpose, but there’s some nasty pleasure to be had in watching the escalating feud between Tom and Chip. It’s just a shame the movie cops out by pulling its punch toward the end. By displaying a little more nerve, the filmmakers could have had a vicious pit bull of a comedy, on the order of Kingpin or DeVito’s The War of the Roses. But by neutering themselves, they’ve delivered a comedy whose bark is ultimately worse than its bite.
IRIS WOULD HAVE seemed to be the first and last word on movies dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, yet here comes Away From Her to provide it with troubled company.
Like that somber drama, this new picture, which marks the assured directorial debut of 28-year-old actress Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter), proves to be a difficult, unsettling watch, all the more so for those who have lost someone to that dreadful disease. Yet what both films also share is a commitment to portraying the ravages of that affliction with clear-eyed honesty, tracking not only the effects on its victims but also on the caretakers who provide support even as their loved ones are fading away right before their eyes.
Judi Dench was remarkable in Iris, yet it was Jim Broadbent who walked away with an Oscar. Similarly, early reviews have focused on Julie Christie’s superlative performance, but it’s really the Canadian veteran Gordon Pinsent who holds the film together. As his character watches his wife place a frying pan in the freezer or bond with a fellow patient (Michael Murphy) because she can’t recall that she even has a husband, he draws us in with his stillness, his whispered frustrations, his seething impotence. His character’s silence is deafening; you can hear his heart break a mile away.
This article appears in May 16-22, 2007.
