While I've been busy lately, I've managed to find time for films on DVD. Here are my reactions to some of them (and, on a related note, it's nice to have a few spare moments in which to write).
No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007). I finally caught up with this, and, despite the considerable control the Coens yield here as directors and the film's relatively celebrated status, I ended up feeling I wouldn't have missed much had I never seen it. The adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel is no doubt smart, its portrayal of relentless, unflinching, seemingly omnipresent evil no doubt unequivocal, and yet I found it all fairly blasé. Part of this is due to my own experiences and biases; I've become saturated with stories that portray the world as hopelessly, nihilistically cruel and then pass it all off with the suggestion that human efforts against violence are futile, as if the authors or filmmakers have discovered something enlightening. Whether or not nihilism is an accurate and appropriate interpretation of the world, I honestly find it boring. In addition, for all the narrative and visual fluency the Coen brothers display, No Country for Old Men seems mechanical, like an assemblage of devices. Its lack of pathos left me neutral at best, which, given the film's central ideas, was likely quite far from the Coens' intent.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Julian Schnabel, 2007). Schnabel, a painter by trade, builds his film from slightly blurred and compressed point-of-view images, slanted close-ups, and partial shots of rooms or landscapes -- the visual effect of seeing the world through the left eye of a paralyzed man. As a cinematic conceit the approach seemed, at first, like a gimmick that could potentially grow tiresome, and some of Schnabel's third-person montages felt slightly cluttered and hyperactive, as if he had taken them from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film. But The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, based on Jean-Dominic Bauby's memoir of his life "locked in" a body rendered useless by a massive stroke, is refreshingly affecting, no matter what the film's harsher critics might say about the inherent obviousness of the sentiments on display. Something as difficult and as tedious as communicating daily by blinking in response to spoken letters leads to the unimpeded exercise of Bauby's "imagination and memory." The film's central conceit, beautifully, becomes something else: the simultaneous experience of being tragically, severely bound (or submerged, as a recurring metaphor suggests) and, through recollection and care and faith in others, unlimited. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is only partially about Bauby; writ somewhat larger, it is also about one's need for others and about the existential significance, both in life and in death, of consciousness.
Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008). I reacted to Eastwood's Gran Torino the way I reacted to his Million Dollar Baby; given my particular cinematic tastes, I'm surprised I liked it. Eastwood has historically leaned towards screenplays in which the characters are nearly types with situations, not necessarily fully-fledged individuals; he tends to explore the themes of his material in fairly straightforward, almost lock-step ways; his visual metaphors (such as the recurring use of shadows) seem a bit stock-in-trade. On the other hand, his best films recall the structures of classic American literature and theater: the characters might be types with situations, but they blend seamlessly into a larger thematic whole and become integral to a project meant to parse out the ways in which some people live their lives entrenched in the circumstances and the histories around them (or to put it another way: the fact that, in Million Dollar Baby, Maggie Fitzgerald's family members are types doesn't mean Eastwood doesn't have anything to say about class or the desire to transcend it). I suppose that for every Willy Loman, perhaps for every Nick Carraway, maybe for every Harry dreaming of the snows of Kilimanjaro, there's a Walt Kowalski or a Frankie Dunn. The finale to Gran Torino, which Eastwood presents with a classicist's sense of denouement, initially seems cheap, but on further reflection corresponds well with Eastwood's concern with personal attrition and the struggle his characters often have in maintaining their own sense of sufficiency and goodness.
Silent Light (Carols Reygadas, 2007). My first viewing of Reygadas' film since the screening I attended at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival had me thinking primarily of the film as a sensory experience. Reygadas rigorously explores religion, loss, betrayal, isolation, and community in Silent Light, and, whether he's fashioning his own ideas or making references to Dreyer's Ordet, he's doing so with a refreshing visual and aural ambiance: using natural light in an existential manner and amplifying the physical environment of rural Mexico with natural sounds, from cricket chirps, dripping water, and rain hitting windshields, to radio broadcasts and boots crunching grass and rustling against weeds. Reygadas also employs a color palette that shifts between blue, green, brown, and white. It made me wonder what the audiences who were introduced to the first color films would have made of this one; I suspect they would have been startled, as if witnessing a miracle.
Heartbeat Detector (Nicolas Klotz, 2007). A strange and somewhat cold intellectual exercise, this; although that's not necessarily a criticism, and particular not entirely in this case given the powerful conceptual structure that lies at the heart of this film. On the surface, Klotz's implicit parallels between a German chemical company's decision to downsize and the Third Reich's elimination of "undesirables" seems very dangerous ground on which to tread. But in this mystery of a corporate psychologist's discovery of his CEO's Nazi past, Klotz avoids moral equivalencies by using the parallels only as a means to raise questions about human conscience. When any entity, whether one as extreme as the Nazi regime or as seemingly mundane and everyday as a corporation, holds efficiency or "productivity" (whether commercial or racial) as paramount values, there are inevitable costs of varying, but nevertheless dehumanizing, degrees (as Scott Foundas put it in his review, "the often inhuman matters of balance sheets and profit reports"). Matters become more damaging when those responsible want to forget what they've done. For more, see this compelling discussion of the film's ideas and this thoughtful analysis of Klotz's formalism.