Frida; Roger Dodger
Movie biographies of artists are nearly always lost causes. Whether the subject worked in paint, on film or on the printed page, commercial cinema often has trouble connecting the work to the life. The result often neglects the mysteries of creativity, turning the artist's life into illustrated Cliff's Notes and marking each career milestone with a big red timeline dot. (As hard and unsentimental as it was, even the superb Pollock sometimes settled for the usual artist-bio cliches?like the moment when Ed Harris' title character looked at a dripped spot of paint on the floor and seemed to muster all his energy in order to resist the temptation to stroke his chin and mutter, "Hmm... Interesting.") The more adventurous and abstract artist biographies dig deeper?Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould was just about as good as it gets?but the more inventive they are, the less accessible they become.
Frida is the story of a woman artist who defied sexism, survived a rotten marriage (to Socialist painter and hopeless womanizer Rivera, well-played by Alfred Molina), surmounted nearly unbearable physical pain and almost singlehandedly steered modern painting away from externalized abstraction, turning it inward, making it confessional, personal, raw. The movie invents characters and combines real-life people, but it remains true to the spirit of Kahlo; it's one of a handful of intelligent, creative artist biographies that can be enjoyed as a perceptive portrait of an historical figure and as an underdog drama about one small woman's cosmic triumph over a world that seemed determined to crush her.
Filmmaker Julie Taymor?the ace theater director whose debut, Titus, was a brilliant, problematic mix of experimental cinema and performance art?structures nearly the entire film as a subjective experience. She takes us inside Kahlo's head and asks us to experience key moments in her life as she might have experienced them. Rather than roping off Kahlo's life and art, then alternating the two?the standard approach of Hollywood bios?Frida establishes the heroine's off-kilter worldview early on, and constantly reminds us that she is experiencing each major event not just as a real-life occurrence, but as potential fodder for her art. It insists on the complexity, the unknowability, of human experience; Rivera, for example, is condemned for his sexist piggery, yet the movie still lets us see that Frida loved him as a friend and respected him as an artist. One hopes this will be one of those rare Oscar-baiting arthouse movies that finds a big, appreciative popular audience. It's so good, smart and entertaining that it deserves any bit of good fortune that comes its way.
Campbell Scott always had more to give than movies would let him show. He's demonstrated real versatility in such films as Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, Dead Again and The Sheltering Sky. And as codirector of Big Night and the Odyssey Channel version of Hamlet (in which he starred), Scott proved he knew how to turn talented actors loose without derailing a strong story. But nothing he's done quite prepares you for Roger Dodger, the debut feature by writer-director Dylan Kidd. Cast against type as title character Roger "Dodger" Swanson, a verbose, suave, self-loathing, womanizing ad man, Scott is always watchable?and sometimes electrifying.
Dumped by his gorgeous, charming, extremely condescending boss (Isabella Rossellini, another oft-stereotyped actor showing unfamiliar colors), Roger tries to forget his misery by taking his visiting nephew, 16-year-old Nick (Jesse Eisenberg), out for a night on the town and tutoring the boy on how to be a ladykiller. To its credit, the movie makes it clear that the kid's purity is too strong to be corrupted by Roger; the film's suspense comes from guessing when, and how, Roger will come to understand his own rottenness, and decide what, if anything, to do about it.
As both writer and director, Kidd sometimes errs on the side of excess. Even for a talker, Roger talks too much, instantly telegraphing the few secrets he has. And the film's jittery handheld photography (by Joaquin Baca-Asay) is sometimes affected. But these are minor quibbles. Coproduced by Scott, it's an actor's movie through and through; besides Scott and the wonderfully naturalistic Eisenberg, the film features sharp work in small roles by Jennifer Beals, Elizabeth Berkley, Mina Badie and Ben Shenkman.
While it's rough around the edges?perhaps deliberately so?Roger Dodger should be considered an unlikely success: a small movie that feels big, and dares to push for something like emotional honesty. At a time when any life-sized movie built around characters risks being written off as "television" (a bizarre, self-fulfilling prophecy by America's movie critics), Kidd's modest ambitions seem nearly courageous.
Framed
Abandon, which stars Katie Holmes as a workaholic college student mourning the disappearance of her wild artist-genius of a boyfriend, is an artsy-fartsy variation of a Hitchcock thriller, with a twist ending that would be surprising if the preceding 90 minutes had made you care one whit. Writer-director Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for adapting Soderbergh's Traffic, gives studio bosses one more reason to distrust screenwriters who want to direct their own material; with its relentless, nonsensical back-and-forth structure and weirdly passive lead performance, it plays like Nicolas Roeg's My So-Called Life.