Crazy/Beautiful Is So Good You Wish It Were Great
Teen romances tend to be so slick, dumb and cynically pandering that when you see one that's even remotely serious and realistic, you're inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Crazy/Beautiful is like that. This drama about a working-class Mexican-American boy (Jay Hernandez) who falls for a troubled rich Anglo girl (Kirsten Dunst) is intelligent, serious and connected to the world; it's so good that you wish it were great.
Director John Stockwell and writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi never quite find the right rhythm. Their film lingers over things you've already gotten, and skips things you want more of; there are holes in the narrative, and its ending is too tidy and happy. (The film was originally conceived as an R-rated story, but its releasing company, Disney, insisted on a PG-13.) Still, Crazy/Beautiful gets a lot of things right. For the most part, it tells the truth about teen love and sex; when it does veer away from reality to satisfy formula, it implicitly admits that life isn't really like this, and we know it.
Dunst plays Nicole Oakley, a beautiful but troubled girl who attends an academically respected, mostly white suburban high school. She's a poster child for upper-middle-class white privilege. Her dad (Bruce Davison) is a widowed congressman who appears to have given up on the idea of disciplining her; she stays out as late as she wants, does drugs, sleeps around and shows almost no interest in her future. She's a talented photographer and artist who prints her own black-and-white photos in the school darkroom, then arranges them in a jumbled, poetry-strewn diary/scrapbook; but from looking at her, you just know she never cracks a book unless she has to.
Nicole meets Carlos Nuñez (Hernandez), a straitlaced football player and academic achiever, at the beach. He's hanging out with his buddies from the neighborhood; she's on a state-sponsored work detail, picking up trash under the boardwalk as punishment for a DUI. They connect right away. Carlos' buddies watch them flirt (a realistic touch; so many high school flirtations amount to a spontaneous public performance for jeering spectators). The scene is charged with sexual curiosity and ethnic tension?and an awareness that those two feelings are possibly indistinguishable. Soon enough, Carlos and Nicole discover that they attend the same high school. (It's Nicole's home school, just a few minute from her house; poor Carlos is a transfer student who has to get up at dawn and ride two hours on the bus each day to get there.) Not long after that, they start hanging out. "Friends with potential," as Say Anything described it.
Refreshingly, the standard ethnic/ sexual/class stereotypes don't apply here. Like any red-blooded American boy, Carlos wants to get into Nicole's pants, but he's a polite, respectful guy who would like for the encounter to happen under the right circumstances?romantic, serious. Unlike some other rich white girls in teen films, Nicole is no wilting lily when it comes to sex; she and her best friend Maddy (the superb Taryn Manning, who looks like a baby Reese Witherspoon) flaunt their lean, curvy bods in a manner that's at once childishly casual and transparently exhibitionist. Even though Nicole and Carlos are supposedly way too smart and "mature" to make a big deal of their cross-cultural relationship?this is 2001, after all?it's clearly part of the reason why they're excited about each other. During a night in East L.A. with Carlos, Nicole and Maddy sashay through a street fair, hips swinging, flaunting their ripe, hard blondeness and pretending they're not trying to make an impression; then they convince Carlos to order food from a vendor in Spanish. (The vendor rolls her eyes.)
On cultural matters, the film's judgment is almost exactly right. Young people live in an increasingly multicultural world, and they make a big deal of not making a big deal of it. But the curiosity is still there, along with some of the misconceptions and stereotypes; in such a culturally tangled love story, even heartfelt, seemingly liberal feelings sound hopelessly sentimental, even a tad condescending. (After they make love, Nicole stares at Carlos' bare arm next to hers and says, "Look how good our skin looks together.") Carlos is a serious, accomplished kid from a loving home who wants to go the Naval Academy, and just might have the grades and activities to get in (and if not, he can certainly get in someplace else just as good). Nicole, on the other hand, is a wild child from a broken home; she was damaged by the death of her mother, and she resents her dad for remarrying a younger, shallower, more acquisitive woman (Lucinda Jenney, doing the best she can in the film's only thankless part). Carlos' friends and relatives fear he's squandering his potential on a relationship that won't amount to anything in the long run. And in a reversal of the typical rich-girl's-dad motivation, when Mr. Oakley has a serious sitdown with Carlos and warns him to stay away from his daughter, it isn't because he's afraid of what Carlos might do to Nicole; it's because of what he's afraid Nicole will do to him.
Crazy/Beautiful pulls off a neat trick: it takes us just far enough outside Nicole and Carlos' relationship to realize that their naysayers might have a point, but keeps us close enough to the lovers so we can root for their happiness anyway.
The film fudges the issue of whether Nicole is mentally ill, and its real ending?a tender motel room scene filched from John Duigan's Flirting?is eventually undone by a couple of improbable, tacked-on codas. Yet it's fascinating anyway, and consistently more intelligent and honest than you expect. Crazy/Beautiful genuinely seems to like and respect most of its characters?a rare distinction, considering how often Hollywood takes the teen audience for granted. Its adolescent characters are smart, but not as smart as they think, and regardless of ethnicity and class they all share emotional openness and gung-ho bravery. The adults are impediments to their happiness, but except for Jenney's snotty trophy wife they aren't cartoon bad guys; you get the sense that they really do love these hormone-addled kids and are doing what they think is best.
The overpowering sexuality of adolescence comes through in every scene, thanks mainly to the cast's intuitive, realistic performances and cinematographer Shane Hurlbut's dense, saturated colors. His images invent nothing, choosing instead to crank up the intensity of existing textures, colors and hues. The result is a film where every shot seems charged with emotion and sexual yearning, even when its teen characters are doing nothing more remarkable than riding in a car listening to the radio, or loitering in the hallways of their school. The nods to boy-meets-girl cliche are a mere formality. In its heart, Crazy/Beautiful takes young love seriously, and draws its better moments not from movies, but from life.
Born and raised in Vietnam but schooled in France, director Tran Anh Hung makes movies that draw you in, even though you're continually reminded that you're watching a movie. His films merge the meditative qualities we associate with some Asian films and the more self-conscious, energetic, pop-influenced tropes of American cinema in the 60s and 70s. His first feature, The Scent of Green Papaya, reimagined his childhood through the eyes of a Saigon maid; shot entirely on soundstages in Boulogne, it had a brazenly artificial, old-fashioned, dreamy quality, like a Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger movie set in Southeast Asia. His follow-up, Cyclo, was more kinetic?a tale of an obsessed rickshaw driver that mixed the ethnographic attentiveness of a documentary and the raw emotionalism of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader. He's the kind of director who'll spend a couple of minutes watching a character think, backed only by traffic noise or overheard conversation, then turn around and give you a long, exciting, self-consciously bravura sequence with big music and even bigger emotions. Meaning he's torn between the desire to remain invisible and the desire to have audiences notice every single clever thing he's doing?a very modern filmmaker's predicament.
Tran doesn't resolve this creative tension in The Vertical Ray of the Sun, but this domestic drama is so quiet, observant and lyrical that you'll be willing to forgive its inconsistencies and occasional slow spots. Set in modern Hanoi, it focuses on a group of middle-class, thirtysomething artists struggling to balance creativity and responsibility. The opening sequence lets you know you're in confident hands. It takes place in an apartment shared by Lien (Tran Nu Yen Khe), a young woman who works as a waitress in her sister's restaurant, and Lien's older brother Hai (Ngo Quang Hai), an actor. Hai is awakened by warmth of the morning sun and by his radio alarm clock, which plays a Lou Reed song. He proceeds to get up and stretch; in due course, Lien wakes up, and as they both go through their morning routines, Tran's camera just hangs back, watching them, letting the song turn the scene into a lovely pantomime of domestic routine. We see Lien and Hai wake up and stretch many more times during the course of the film, and each time, something's different?the narrative context, the song, their emotions. Tran is onto something; he understands David Mamet's dictum that character is nothing more than repeated action, and that when the actions change, so does the character.
Vertical Ray is an ensemble romantic drama, filled with characters that are less wise than educated and less empathetic than needy. (Woody Allen would like it.) Lien's older sister, Suong (Nguyen Nhu Quynh), is a rock who's married to a somewhat brooding and full-of-himself nature photographer named Quoc (Chu Hung); although they seem to have a fantastically healthy marriage, they're both nurturing secret lives that would devastate the family if they're found out. Lien and Suong have another sister, Khanh (Le Khanh), a middle child; she's married to a novelist (Tran Manh Cuong) who's coping with writer's block. The three sisters meet in the cafe on the anniversary of their mom's death to celebrate her life and her cooking; one of the conversational topics is a mysterious man named Toan, who clearly affected their parents' marriage even though the exact nature of his relationship with the mother remains unknown.
If Toan seems a bit hazy, that's because his primary function is metaphorical; he's the question mark that stands between any couple, however committed, and the dream of domestic bliss. The latter is the true subject of Vertical Ray. Like Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, but much richer and less self-conscious, Tran's film takes a hard look at the emotional and physical costs of love?its eternal fusion with routine and tradition; the personal sacrifices, small and large, that must be made each day to maintain happiness. There are secret affairs, secret pregnancies, secret hurts, secret longings. Sex and food play pivotal roles, and an hilarious early scene between the sisters finds room for both subjects, asking what a dick might taste like if it were lightly fried with just a bit of garlic. The characters were written to fit the personalities of the actors who played them, which explains why all the performances seem so natural and unforced. Watching it, you feel like you're eavesdropping on people you've known for years.