Summer summary: 'signs,' 'Greek wedding,' 'rain,' & more - Screen

Some summer closeout reflections on movies I didn't get to talk about--and you might not have gotten to see--in recent months:

First, the jury is still out on M. Night Shyamalan, the young filmmaker recently hailed by Newsweek as "the next Spielberg." Shyamalan has followed the huge success of The Sixth Sense with the pretentious tedium of Unbreakable, and now a third blockbuster venture into the supernatural--Signs, starring Mel Gibson as a widowed ex-minister whose wife's death in a car accident precipitates a loss of faith, and whose mysterious cornfield cuttings presage a global alien invasion.

Signs was noteworthy for its scary previews; but the heart-stopping trailers expunged a tongue-in-cheek humor that both augments and undercuts the suspense. Shyamalan plays around with themes of alien invasion movies. A blue pink and white baby monitor, held up to the clouds, picks up strange cosmic screeches; a crazed army recruiter spouts manically about aliens; Gibson dolefully endures the impromptu confessions of a teenaged pharmacy employee caught up in end-days hysteria. There's also a curious folksy strain in Shyamalan's dialogue, like the police chief who spins country yarns and says things like "I'm gonna go back and get a cup of Edgar's coffee and try to think clear." Add the pulsing Hitchcockian music of the opening, the existential earnestness of Mel's crisis of faith ("There is no one watching out for us. We are all on our own"), and stray lines that vibrate with a Dada-like, throwaway absurdity: "Everyone in this house needs to calm down--we need some fruit or something." This is a strange hodgepodge of a film. Imagine Quentin Tarantino doing Invasion of the Body Snatchers, with a touch of Our Town thrown in.

Jamming these divergent elements together lets Shyamalan keep us distanced--he won't quite let you connect with these characters, and ultimately, I don't think he's all that interested in them. The ending discloses a revelation that makes you reinterpret all that has come before; random details, from Gibson's daughter's habit of leaving half-emptied water glasses around, to his wife's cryptic dying words, are shown to fit. Shyamalan gives this a metaphysical gloss: everything has a purpose and meaning; we're not actually on our own. But it's hard to take seriously as a religious idea, and really it's all about a certain trick of film narrative--indeed, the same sly narrative trick that worked so niftily in Sixth Sense. Newsweek's lionization notwithstanding, one can't help noting that while Spielberg's energies continually overflow boundaries of genre, Shyamalan has already made the same film twice; and that may be, well, a bad sign of things to come.

My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of those happy industry successes--a small movie boosted by word of mouth into the multiplexes. Adapted from Nia Vardalos's one-woman show, and directed by Joel Zwick, it's a real crowd-pleaser, serving up heaping portions of immigrant-family hilarity. Vardalos plays Toula, a thirty-year-old toiling faithfully in her parents' Chicago diner. Her father (Michael Constantine) agitates endlessly for her to marry; but his notions of matrimony aren't exactly romantic. "Nice Greek girls are supposed to do three things in life," Toula laments. "Marry a nice Greek boy, make babies, and feed everyone till the day we die." One day her Prince Charming walks through the door--a handsome, sensitive, artsy guy named Ian. Ian, of course, is not Greek. Toula's Mister Right is her parents' Mister Wrong--"a big xeno," her father moans, "with long hairs on top of his head!"

The ensuing comedy of ethnicity and class invites us to agonize lovingly along with Toula at her family's garish tastes and over-the-top behavior. A suburban house modeled on the Parthenon; raucous front-yard lamb roasts; celebrations where people mime spitting on one another for good luck: there's no subtlety to Toula's family, or to the film's high-concept contrasts. Ian's parents, pale wasps suffering along in stultifying boredom, writhe in agonies of embarrassment at a rowdy Greek family gathering, downing ouzo until they're blotto. Et cetera. My Big Fat Greek Wedding offers no surprises; it's all geniality and warmth. "Don't let your past dictate who you are--but let it be part of who you become," Toula's rowdy brother advises her in a moment of uncharacteristic sincerity--then adds, "It's from Dear Abby." Vardalos is smart enough to embroider such bromides with tassels of irony. It's a way of having her heartfeltness and mocking it too.

Despite the sometimes cloying cuteness, Vardalos exudes friendly sparkle, and Lainie Kazan and Michael Constantine offer inspired comic turns as her parents. In a lather of self-pity, Constantine rues his daughter's choice of fiance. "Is he good boy? I don't know. Is he from good family? Is he respectful? I don't know." Beneath the comedy lies an insight into how zealously immigrant conservatism values community as a way of knowing. Vardalos understands that the boundary between Us and Them encloses a realm of familiarity and thus of safety; and that for first-generation Americans, entrusting your child to something as capricious as love is like casting her into the sea. In the film's own comic terms, it's a question of what kind of nourishment marriage is supposed to provide. "But I love him," Toula insists. "Oh, Toula," her mother answers in consternation. "Eat something! Please!"

A far gloomier take on family life is on display in Christine Jeffs's Rain. Set in the 1970s on a gorgeous stretch of New Zealand coastline, Rain introduces first-time actress Alicia Fulford-Wierzbicki as Janey, a thirteen-year-old watching her parents' party-hearty good times dissolve in unhappiness and infidelity. Rain is a beautiful movie, whose visual effects mirror its moral and psychological ones. Slo-mo shots of whiskey pouring into a glass, or a cigarette ash falling through air, create a dreamy mix of beauty and foreboding. Perched at the edge of childhood, Janey playacts at what lies ahead. She sips from Mom's drink, smokes Mom's cigarette; finally flirts with Mom's boyfriend. "I think I need to make a few more rules around here," her mother says in dismay. But how to make rules when you yourself are breaking them?

Rain addresses the damage and danger of infidelity; but unlike, say, Adrian Lynes's Unfaithful, a recent Hollywood film on the same subject, it doesn't glamorize the perpetrators. Jeffs and her photographer, John Toon, refuse to prettify adults, showing instead the desperation in their desire, the squalor in their pleasures. At one party, boozy dancing leads to a drunken mass romp in the surf, and the flabby bodies lurching around in the moonlight is something we don't want to see. Jeffs offers little exploration of the parent's problems; her interest is the adolescent perspective, its mix of curiosity and judgment, and its unerring instinct for where adults are covering up, enjoying secret pleasures or hiding secret wounds. Janey follows a thrilled instinct toward adulthood, even as she loathes where it has landed her parents. "I want to know the truth," she demands of them. The film leaves nicely unclear whether this kind of truth can ever set a child free.

Finally, if you have to drive an hour to see one movie you missed this summer, let it be The Fast Runner, Zacharias Kunuk's epic tale of life above the Arctic Circle. Try to see it on a big screen for the full effect of its magnificent, cheerless vistas, which meld ice and sky in a horizonless prospect, highlighting the drama as if on a modernist stage. The story, based on Inuit folklore, follows two families suffering under a curse that sparks generations of ill will and moral mayhem.

Two antagonists, Atanarjuat (Natar Ungalaaq) and Oki (Peter-Henry Arnatsiaq), rival one another for the same woman, Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu). While promised to Oki, Atuat loves Atanarjuat, and we watch their rivalry play out in a three-hour-long drama of desire, treachery, exile, and revenge, orchestrated to the whine of sled dogs and the scrump of snow underfoot, and painted with long shadows blue on the snow.

Produced by an Inuit cast and crew, The Fast Runner pays close ethnographic attention to the daily details of Inuit life, from building an igloo to making a sealskin drum. This is no documentary, however. The filmmakers understand their medium; one remarkable chase scene, for instance, brings to the tundra the same thrills we have seen countless times set on the streets of San Francisco or the plains of the West. Despite its exotic locale, The Fast Runner gathers a timeless familiarity as it delves deep into the humanity of its characters. Homeric in its mythic structure, Shakespearean in its humor and its grasp of the deep obstinacy and self-pity of evil, the film arrives at the place where art, myth, and religion converge. It is an astonishing extension and triumph of cinematic craft.

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