DEMENTIA | Big Apple Reviews

FALLING – movie review

Posted on February 1, 2021 by harveycritic

FALLING
Quiver Distribution
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Viggo Mortensen
Writer: Viggo Mortensen
Cast: Viggo Mortensen, Lance Henricksen, Terry Chen, Sverrir Gudnason, Hannah Gross
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 1/23/21
Opens: February 5, 2021

Poster

This is one of those rare movies that have their writers sitting in the director’s chair as well, taking a major role, even playing some chords on the piano to punctuate the difficulty of his life. In other words, “Falling” has more than a touch of autobiography: Mortensen imaging and re-imaging his life under the rule of his father who, having looked at the baby he helped create greeting him not with “say dadda” but “I’m sorry I brought you into this world. To die.” We can only wonder how the little one was able not only to survive his daddy’s acerbic personality but why this baby, later on in life, would cater to almost every whim of the dad whose temper could burst forth at any time and whose progressive dementia would turn him into a fierce, cantankerous fool who not only brought a baby into the word to die but would regularly describe his two ex-wives as whores.

Though Mortensen has one of the two lead roles, the film belongs to Lance Henriksen, with a résumé of some 260 roles (including seven that would come out at about the same time as “Falling” and a stack of others continuing the career). Though Henricksen has performed mostly as a character actor, ranging from roles as a clean-cut FBI agent, a vampire or two, a psychotic motorcycle gang leader, his performance in “Falling” may be his meatiest, one that finds the actor who has now passed his eightieth year in full command of his craft.

Half the film’s time takes place forty years earlier with young Willis (Sverrir Gudnason) giving hints of a growing misanthropy and the other half featuring Willis (Lance Henriksen) at his present age of eighty. “Falling” is a film about family dysfunction that shows Willis’s middle-aged son John Peterson (Viggo Mortensen) selflessly taking care of the crotchety old man despite the latter’s insistence that “this is my house and if you don’t like it you can leave.”

Perhaps the most humorous scene, albeit one that you would hardly find funny if you were a passenger in the same plane, old Willis is being escorted from his upstate New York farm to California, ostensibly to find a place to live as he is now unable to take care of his farm. With behavior that makes you wonder when the airline crew would pitch Willis from the emergency exit, the old man believes the passenger cabin to be nothing more than his upstate New York farmhouse, his wife patiently awaiting him upstairs. This leads him into the kind of loud, vulgar emissions, his son John obviously embarrassed but assuring the crew that he will be OK.

The less conflicted part of the film, or at least the scenes with forty-year-old Willis doting like his wife Gwen (Hannah Gross) on their four-year-old son John (Grady McKenzie). Even at that age, a macho Willis takes the lad hunting; when little John shoots and kills a duck, Willis is happy to let him keep the dead bird, bathe it, sleep with it, until they allow Gwen to pluck the feathers and cook it.

But those salad days are now gone. Old Will is not only dismissive of the two wives he chased away, but has all the grotesque features of our last White House resident. He is disgusted that his son is gay, married to Eric (Terry Chen), the latter understanding that Willis’s dementia is talking. Yet John has no problem escorting his dad to a museum where Willis, gazing at a Picasso, tells his granddaughter Monica that “You can draw that.” If you look for nuance on this raging gaffer, you will find it only in his behavior toward young Monica.

How to explain John’s tolerance of his dad? He may think of the time his dad back took him hunting, let him play with the duck he shot, and ultimately, when John at 16 (William Healy) simply could not shoot the deer in his telescopic sights, was comforted with a pat on the shoulder and the statement, “It’s OK.”

We are told that Viggo Mortensen acted in the film he wrote and directed only to win financing. But this Renaissance man, an accomplished pianist, fluent in many languages having lived in Denmark, Spain and Argentina and able to speak English like a lifelong Californian, does the incomparable job of making the audience understand and accept his ability to tolerate behavior that would send most of us running.

Story – B
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – B+

THE ARTIST’S WIFE – movie review

Posted on July 4, 2020 by harveycritic

THE ARTIST’S WIFE
Strand Releasing
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Tom Dolby
Screenwriter: Nicole Brending, Tom Dolby, Abdi Nazemian
Cast: Lena Olin, Bruce Dern
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 2/28/20
Opens: April 3, 2020

The Artist's Wife (2019)

Memo to women asked to give up promising careers to support their husband’s rise to prominence: think twice before doing this. No, don’t even think about it. You have a responsibility to develop your own talents. If you want to give some time to aiding the man in your life, fine. (Of course you want to be reasonably sure that you have the talent to get your own fifteen minutes of fame.)

The principal character, Joan Castleman, is like the title woman in Björn Runge’s 2017 movie the wife—that’s the woman who wrote the books credited to her husband who won the Nobel that she should have picked up. Claire Smythson (Lena Olin) gave up her potential in order to support the career of her world-famous painter husband Richard Smythson (Bruce Dern). This is the kind of story that is up the alley of director Tom Dolby, whose sophomore movie recalls his work on “Last Weekend,” whose Celia Green (Patricia Clarkson), a wealthy matriarch, is forced to reevaluate her role in the family. In both cases, it’s better late than never.

In “The Artist’s Wife,” Richard is as narcissistic as Jonathan Pryce’s character, Joe Castleman in “The Wife.” They live in a luxurious, modern California house, one large room devoted to the large canvasses that absorb the dramatic colors of Richard’s contemporary paintings. Not all is well. For one thing, Richard has never “been there” for his estranged daughter, Angela Smythson (Juliet Rylance), nor does his six-year-old grandson Gogo (Ravi Cabot-Conyers) have memories of the celebrity artist. Angela’s stepmother, Claire, has triple duty. She has spent much of her life supporting her famous husband’s career; she is trying to bring Angela back into the family fold; and now she must cope with her husband’s progressing dementia. For his part, the Alzheimer’s-sufferer is acting off-the-wall, delivering profanities to his class of young painters, even smashing the work of one of the young men in the group. In one scene he has trashed his own living room, leaving Claire to pick up the pieces just as she is trying to deal with the new challenges of her aging husband.

Tom Dolby, using a script that he co-wrote with Nicole Brending and Abdi Nazemian, could have tured this into a soap, particularly given the sometimes obtrusive piano pounding on the soundtrack, but instead lifts the material into art in a way similar to that exercised by Eugene O’Neill in his classic family drama “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” In a triumphant conclusion Claire may be on the way to giving herself some of the fame that her husband might never have enjoyed save for the loving support of his wife. And with a sensitive, nuanced performance by the classically trained, Stockholm-born Lena Olin in a drama that opens as a chamber piece, then brings in other members of the extended family, “The Artist’s Wife” is likely to be compared favorably to the award-winning “The Wife.”

Story – B+
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – B+

AMÉRICA – movie review

Posted on September 8, 2019 by harveycritic

AMÉRICA
Lifelike Docs
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Chase Whiteside, Erick Stoll
Screenwriter: Chase Whiteside, Erick Stoll
Cast: América, Diego, Bruno, Rodrigo, Luis
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 9/3/19
Opens: September 13, 2019 at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image

AmÃ©rica

In “The Seven Ages of Man” found in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It,” the Bard concludes:
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

In other words though it may be better than the alternative (only sometimes), old age is a pitiful part of life, even worse if the elderly spend it alone or adrift in a terrible nursing home. But sans everything? Not so, say directors Chase Whiteside, Erick Stoll in their documentary “América.” This is Erick Stoll’s freshman full-length movie though you might figure his politics if you see “Good White People,” his short doc about gentrification. For his part Chase Whiteside unfolds his first full-length doc, though figuring his politics from his short feature “Lifelike,” about a taxidermist, doesn’t sound political, but who knows? Documentary shorts are not easy to find even in New York.

While Americans are known to put their elderly and fragile oldsters into nursing homes, it’s a cliché that Chinese would never elect to do this but rather to care for the parents, who gave them so much, at home. Now it turns out that some Mexicans are doing the same for their grandmother, América, who is 93 years old at the movie’s opening and, though suffering from dementia, she can recognize the terrific grandchildren who are caring for her. “América” is filmed over three years first in Puerto Vallarta where Diego can be found riding a unicycle through a crowd and later demonstrating at least amateur level acrobatics with his brothers Bruno and Rodrigo.

The brothers’ grandmother América lives in the state of Colima, a woman who may no longer be a vibrant human being but who lucks out by having grandsons to take care of her. Diego is the most committed. He bathes her, talks to her, kisses her while straightening her hair, and forces her to exercise when all she wants to do is return to her bed. In one scene he demonstrates tough love by insisting that she stand up straight, though América wants at least to hold his hand.

Ironically, when she suffers a fall, her son Luis is blamed and sent to prison for eight months though he is quite innocent of bad intent, and it falls to the brothers, already submerged in América’s care, to get their father released. How they pay for a lawyer, and how they deal with a judge’s offer to release the man for 25,000 pesos ($1400) is not clear though the three argue, but finances and commitment to América are debated among the three, in one case leading to a physical fight. The good thing about the whole affair is at least the three threesome are together again. At times they come across like philosophers in conversation, though we have no idea how much education they’ve had.

We learn something about the Mexican social care system, a country that is awash with drug murders but still funds social workers who seem genuinely to care for their clients—at least while director Stoll’s camera is on them. (The directors share stunning fluency in their editing while Stoll doubles as director of photography.) At fifty-two minutes in length viewers will gain insights into extreme old age, grandchildren, and the social and legal systems of our friends to the south.

Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – B+
Overall – B+