Double Feature
The end of the year is a good time to catch up with missed movies. Critics start listing the year’s best and they are often available for rent by now. Thus I started working on Dana Stevens’s 10 best list from Slate, which included many films I hadn’t seen. On New Year’s Eve I went for a double feature of Queen of Versailles and Looper.
Stevens cites Looper (directed by Rian Johnson) as a miss, and she’s right. The film seemed a mess to me: the editing random, the plot incoherent, the look inconsistent. You can see from the trailer above how much the movie tries to squeeze in as it jumps from diner to cornfields, from time travel to telekinesis. It doesn’t seem sure of its sci fi premise (introduced by a voiceover that disappears by the end of the film) or its visual style. The scene in the diner between the young and old Joe is one of the best in the film in part because of its clear focus. Suddenly the film pauses to reflect on its own cognitive puzzle: the older Joe (Bruce Willis) “knows” what the younger Joe (Joseph Gordon -Levitt) is feeling and thinking, even what he will do, but the scene maintains its tension anyway because their knowledge of each other (themselves!) is still incomplete and opaque. The older Joe describes the past as fuzzy, only becoming clear as it happens. It’s a wonderfully subtle interaction between two otherwise under-performing actors and a disappointing director.
Stevens does include the documentary Queen of Versailles on her list and that turns out to be a surprisingly complicated and nuanced portrait of an American dream. Beautifully directed by Lauren Greenfield, the film begins with billionaires David and Jacqueline Siegel building “Versailles,” the largest single-family home in America, and ends with their desperate attempts to sell the half-built mansion after the collapse of the real estate market in 2008. The trailer above doesn’t do justice to the subtleties of the film, though you can see the incisive commentary in juxtapositions like Jackie declaring to a group of employees “look at the bright side! at least you may not have to clean this house!” and the quick cut to a Filipina domestic making a face. Even there, though, the director shows Jackie’s own complicated sensibility. Jackie, rightfully the heroine of this story, is a fascinating creature full of undisguised desires and super-sized needs. She is less a monster, though she behaves monstrously at times, than she is an uncensored, exaggerated version of the rest of us — average Americans responding to the cultural values surrounding us. We want to own our own homes (a desire that Greenfield shows David Siegel exploits in his time-share business); they want to own a palace. We want to “feel rich,” as David declares; they want to live like royalty. By lucky timing, the film ends up ironically revealing the poverty of our cultural imagination: with unlimited resources all we can desire is much much more of the same.
