FINDING PASSION : 'Monster's Ball' & 'Lantana'. - movie review

The run-up toward movie-award season is getting more and more like Christmas shopping madness. All year long, whole weeks can pass with no film release of note; then comes December, and ho ho ho, an inundation. My own solution to Christmas gift mayhem is to spread it out through the year, and if film companies would do likewise, they'd spare the harried film critic his mad December dash from one opening to the next. But dash I did, and here's my report on the nasty and the nice.

First, a big lump of coal to Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky, a muddled mess of social satire, sci-fi fantasy, and New Age therapy, with Tom Cruise as the playboy publisher disfigured in a car crash; and while admirers will howl, I'm giving a smaller lump of coal to the French import, Amelie, whose fable of a charmed girl adrift in a magical-realist Paris exudes an art-house feelgoodism that made me squirm. Amelie's archly playful Paris resembles somewhat the stylized Manhattan of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, a Salingeresque comic family pathology--with Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Luke Wilson as child geniuses grown up (barely) into petulant adults--whose real genius is Gene Hackman, as the rakish and fraudulent patriarch. A slight film, perhaps, but enjoyable. Of the season's two big biopics, A Beautiful Mind offers typical good work from Russell Crowe playing tormented-genius mathematician John Forbes Nash, though the story (based on Sylvia Nasar's excellent book) gets dumbed down by director Ron Howard. Better is Michael Mann's Ali, with a smashup R&B soundtrack and an uncanny stint by Jon Voight as Howard Cosell. Will Smith is no great actor, but he gets Ali's electric boyishness, and the film evokes the courage, amid the era's poisonous racial and political resentments, of Ali's intuitive principled stand against an unjust war.

War is the business, or rather the sport, of Black Hawk Down, an unremittingly tense postmortem of the botched 1993 U.S. mission in Somalia. Give this Ridley Scott-Jerry Bruckheimer collaboration a small candy cane for its powerful visuals and hormonals (rampant testosterone), and a big lump of coal for its lame ideas. Black Hawk Down manages to preach against humanitarian military interventions--"There will always be killing, in our world!" intones one African warlord--even as it flaunts the Dirty Harry-like theme of righteous military force frustrated by craven politicians (we watch evil Somali henchmen gun down civilians as American helicopter pilots, under orders from Washington not to intervene, impotently seethe overhead). This absolute division into heroes and villains is the stuff of fantasy; and that's why what rankles in Black Hawk Down charms in The Lord of the Rings, this season's other big-budget battle epic. Now, it was certainly naughty and not nice of the film's makers to dole out their epic trilogy in three releases spread over two years (used to be, you had to earn the sequel!), but I have to give at least a small candy cane to the digital wizards who are bringing Tolkien's Middle Earth so spectacularly and hugely to life.

But it was two smaller films that won me over (note: I've already enthused in this space over In the Bedroom, and am saving Robert Altman's Gosford Park for later). Come Oscar time, Billy Bob Thornton may win mention for his laconic portrayal of a small-town barber in the Coen brothers' neo-noir The Man Who Wasn't There; but it's another Billy Bob vehicle, Monster's Ball, that should win prizes. Director Marc Forster's film has what the Coen brothers' flashy exercises in style almost always lack: a core of felt human significance. Set in rural Georgia, Monster's Ball casts Thornton as the middleman, literally, in a three-generation family of prison guards, caught between his retired and ailing father, an embittered racist (Peter Boyle), and his twenty-year-old son (Heath Ledger), who is trying to break free. Thornton's character shares his father's biases, more or less; but following the execution of a black man and convicted cop killer whom Thornton has walked to the electric chair, he crosses paths with the dead man's bereft wife (Halle Berry); and from there his black-and-white sense of blacks and whites begins to break down.

Berry's character is a study in desperate circumstances: fired from her waitress job, facing eviction from her small home, and saddled with a lovable but hopelessly obese ten-year-old son. And Berry, known for her drop-dead-gorgeous looks, delivers a jaw-dropping performance of Oscar-grade intensity. Monster's Ball is an anti-death-penalty movie, but its polemical elements never overwhelm the human drama of Berry's passionate neediness and Thornton's tersely tough male, spurred by griefs of his own, awkwardly learning the language of mercy. "I don't know," he mumbles when Berry asks why he is helping her. "Just doing the right thing, I guess." Monster's Ball delves into the wonder of how goodness, rather than bitterness, can spring up from hurt and loss.

Lantana, from Australian director Ray Lawrence, whose sole previous film, Bliss, came out back in 1986, is another superb December release. Its title is derived from a roadside plant that grows in thick thorny tangles, and that serves both as springboard and metaphor for the fates of eight characters whose interconnected lives--and in one case, death--form the film's subject. Lantana is a whodunit in reverse. The eerie opening shots reveal a body in the lantana thicket; this foreshadows a death yet to come, and it will take us most of the movie to find out not only how the corpse got there, but who it is.

Ostensibly a crime mystery, Lantana in fact addresses the moral mysteries of marriage--middle-aged marriage in particular--and its investigation centers on two characters: Leon (Anthony LaPaglia), a saturnine police detective cheating on his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) with a divorcee, Jane (Rachael Blake); and Valerie (Barbara Hershey), Sonja's therapist. Valerie has problems of her own: she and her professor husband, John (Geoffrey Rush), suffered the abduction and murder of their only daughter a few years back, and the steep decline in their passion is driving Valerie to worried despair. When an insolent gay client of hers repeatedly discusses the affair he's having with a married man--a man with an emotionally demanding wife, he emphasizes--Valerie becomes convinced her husband is the man.

Director Lawrence fits this soap opera material into a film-noir box of crossing plots and mounting suspicions on all sides. Dramatic irony abounds; typical is a scene where Leon unknowingly strikes up a barroom chat with his lover's estranged husband. Once the disappearance occurs that will lead to the body in the bushes, petty marital lies take on ominous significance; nothing is quite what it seems to be. All the twists and ironies turn Lantana into a fugue on secrecy and duplicity, so that when a character says, "I'm not going to hurt you--trust me," we can't help but shudder.

In the end, it's all about the dangers--and the hopes--of marriage. How does Sonja want her marriage to be? asks Valerie in a therapy session. "Passionate," she answers, "and challenging, and honest." That's a tall order in Lantana's view of things marital, where familiarity breeds not contempt, exactly, but a deep lassitude, which in turn breeds dread, and dread, secrecy. A tendency toward betrayal, in other words, is the default condition of marriage. "It's so easy to go out and find someone, Leon," says Sonia when his affair finally comes out. "What's hard is not to." Ultimately, what distinguishes Lantana from soap opera is the seriousness with which Lawrence and his screenwriter, Andrew Bovell (whose off-Broadway play, "Speaking in Tongues," the movie is based on), take this idea. Betrayal, in this subtly suggestive and beautifully acted film, is not villainy, but tragedy. When all is said and done, intimacy remains our only hope, but it tends to self-destruct; the real crime is how we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.

Lantana was a risky undertaking--a film-noir soap opera done as a Robert Altman-like ensemble drama. It could have been one of those yucky disasters. But Lawrence pulls it off. Lets hope he doesn't wait another fifteen years for his next inspiration.

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