The Rabbi's Cat (2011 French film; Dec. 2012-January 2013 US release)

Frequently there is this mistaken notion, especially among American film audiences, that animation is primarily intended for children.  Yet animation offers possibilities that live-action film, even those heavily augmented with CGI, just cannot achieve.  In his adaptation of his own acclaimed five-volume graphic novel series, Le Chat du Rabbin (The Rabbi's Cat, available in two volumes in English translation), French writer/producer Joann Sfar has produced a film that makes full use of animation's potential for mixing the unreal with the real to create a provocative story.  Winner of the 2011 César Award (France's equivalent to the Oscars) for best animated film, The Rabbi's Cat (French, with English subtitles) debuted in New York City earlier this month and will enter a wider US release sometime in January 2013.

The Rabbi's Cat adapts volumes 1, 2, and 5 of Sfar's graphic novel series.  Set in 1930s Algeria, then part of France, it is a tale that examines the troublesome issue of religious conflict and the search for understanding in a world that seems hostile to the faithful.  The titular cat, who gains the ability to speak when he eats the family parrot, is a fascinating character.  His first words are a lie (he did not eat the parrot, thank you very much!) and his questioning of whether or not his new-found self-consciousness and verbosity makes him a potential Jew greatly vexes Rabbi Sfar.  The first half of the movie is devoted to exploring the fragile relationship between religion and science, as the more skeptical cat questions the validity of the Talmud even as he seeks a place among the local Algerian Jews.  Easily this could devolve into a trite, shallow exploration of faith, but Sfar is playing a deeper game here, as a visit to Rabbi Sfar's old teacher shows an uglier side to this conflict.

Intermixed among this are the relationships between the widowed Rabbi Sfar and his only daughter, Zlabya, and her love for the amusing, witty, and occasionally devious cat.  These scenes are animated brilliantly, as Sfar utilizes a combination of traditional ink animation and computers to create a very vivid, organic interplay of scene and people.  The characters, especially the cat and Zlabya, move in an entrancing fashion, due in part to motion-capture technology being utilized to create a framework for the animation clips.  Although I only saw this in 2D on the screener DVD provided to me by the American distributors, GKIDS, The Rabbi's Cat was designed with 3D in mind and in places in the film, it is easy to imagine that the layered effect, combined with very vivid colors, would likely make for a good 3D viewing experience (in 2D, it is one of the most colorful animated films I have ever seen).

Yet visuals can carry a movie only so far, as there needs to be a strong narrative to engage the viewer's interest for the entire 89 minutes.  Unfortunately, there were a few places where the narrative seemed to falter for a few minutes, namely in the scenes setting up the transition from the initial focus on the cat, rabbi, and daughter toward an African adventure (a subplot adapted from the fifth graphic novel volume).  The scene introducing the Russian Jewish painter and his mission to find a fabled African Jewish community, a sort of mystical Jerusalem, is choppy and there is the sense that things are rushed too much; an extra five minutes or so developing the transition scene would have made the connection between the two halves of the movie much stronger.

Other reviewers have remarked about how the second half of The Rabbi's Cat fails to live up to the promise of the first half, as the conclusion in particular comes under scrutiny.  At first glance, there is something to this, as the scenes involving the travel across the Sahara toward the "lost city" contain certain references to previous Francophone comics/colonial themes (such as the appearance of Tintin characters in a fashion that satirizes the dodgy racial depictions in that famous comics) that may be lost upon American audiences.  Yet there is an underlying unity of theme that pervades these scenes that tells a larger story about ourselves and our prejudices than what first appears to be the case.  If anything, Sfar may be a bit too subtle in places, at least for particular American audiences who prefer more explicit development of anti-racism/religious tolerance themes.  Take for instance these three images from a scene roughly 2/3 into the movie that I took with my phone's camera:

Here the cat is voicing a question that takes in such matters as religious belief and cultural identity and he makes even deeper connections between the human longing to emulate and to control nature and the means by which this longing is displayed in our symbols and actions.  Although he is quieter here in the second half compared to the first, the cat is still a voice of an outside observer, questioning just why we act in certain ways to particular beliefs.  This is especially seen toward the movie's end, as the travelers near their goal, only to discover that the goalposts have shifted.  It is not a comforting end, certainly not one with a nice, simple conclusion that is a Hollywood standard, but it fits with the issues that Sfar wanted to explore here.

The Rabbi's Cat is not a perfect movie, but despite its flaws in transitioning between key scenes, it is certainly a work that will linger in the viewer's mind longer than the vast majority of recent cinema releases.  The combination of detailed and excellently-rendered scenes and complex characters with a movie that refuses to have clear-cut answers to the questions it raises may make this a movie that will not appeal to those who prefer to have "light" entertainment, but for those who are willing to consider the themes that Sfar's characters raise, The Rabbi's Cat will be one of the better movies, domestic as well as foreign, released recently in the US.  Highly recommended.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

It is hard to go into a cinema adaptation of a book that you have read, much less one that you read over a dozen times between 12 and 23.  There are mental images formed from the prior reading that colors impressions, making it harder for the viewer to replicate what the reader experienced.  Add to that memories of watching the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit and it was always going to be difficult for the three-film, Peter Jackson-directed version of The Hobbit to live up to expectations.

I am no "purist" when it comes to book-to-cinema adaptations.  I understand the two media differ significantly when it comes to narrative modes and exposition.  Although I preferred David Mitchell's narrative as it made for a very strong, thematically-unified novel that covered quite a few issues simultaneously while playing with the English language over the past and possible future, the cinema version of Cloud Atlas developed its own narrative formula that if it could not replicate all of Mitchell's themes or techniques, it at least chose a few of them to tell a story that I thought was stronger than what several other viewers did, mostly because of the Intolerance-like usage of parallel scenes that switched back and forth rapidly to create a narrative stronger than any of the individual subplots.  So when I went to watch The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey, I suspected it might be a narrative that was closer in tone and tenor to Jackson's versions of the three Lord of the Rings films than to the children's classic.  For the most part, this was the case, although there were some questionable decisions made here.

One issue that Jackson's team faced was that of the three The Hobbit movies coming out a decade after the LotR films.  For the "casual fan," the one who may have watched the movies without having read the books (my dad, who watched the movie with me, is one of them), there is a need to establish this "prequel" within the context of the LotR flicks rather than vice versa in case of the books.  Therefore, the opening minutes, which showed the older Bilbo and Frodo around the time of the Party 60 years after Bilbo's adventure, was a good way of establishing a connection between the two stories.  Add to that the scenes of Hobbiton life and the film begins well in establishing links between the two sets of trilogies.  Yet there is a cost to this, as it takes several minutes to go from the montage of flashbacks (the Smaug attack, then the Bilbo/Frodo scene) to the cinematic "present."  However, this may have been one of the more necessary decisions in a film where the director took rather unnecessary roads to reaching specific plot plots.

The characterizations are uneven.  Although the main characters (Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf, and in his brief time, Gollum) are fleshed-out in terms of character traits and action, most of the other dwarves receive only broad characterization stroke or none at all.  Of course, the book itself does not devote much time to the bands of brothers and cousins that make up Thorin's entourage, but at times it seemed what distinguished one dwarf from another were their accents (so many different ones for those who were mostly close kin to Thorin) and occasional slapstick humor rather than anything substantive.  This is not a major flaw, as the cinematic narrative eschews close characterization in favor of focusing on developing a sense of "epicness," yet it was a missed opportunity here and it could affect the next two films if the landscape and action sequences fail to sustain a strong narrative force.

As for the enemies, it too is a mixed bag.  Although I have little problem with having Azog survive the battle outside Moria (seen in a flashback sequence) and having him instead of his son Bolg be the orc/goblin seeking revenge, his revenge story does not make all that much sense within the context of them actively hunting down Thorin's company without there being any apparent word given outside of the Blue Mountains and the Iron Hills that Thorin intended to march east to Erebor.  This lack of clarity is compounded by the dubious relationship between Azog and the goblin king, as the latter seems ready to defer to Azog once the latter arrives.  This felt like Jackson made an unnecessary and complicating departure from the books, as Azog could have easily taken the role assigned to Bolg in the book and that the goblins could have been those of the goblin king alone and that someone from that party could have merely escaped to warn Azog/Bolg and let the troop buildup begin then rather than having a couple of extraneous action/fighting scenes just to have more of those within the first film.

In general, the action scenes did not appeal to me.  Much of that is due to my general loathing for CGI-laden fight scenes, as these feel so artificial that there is little amazement and much annoyance that comes of them.  The fighting within the goblin hall was just so ridiculous even for the very low standards of this subgenre of cinema that its tedium led to answering of emails and checking time.  It just felt too drawn-out.  It didn't help that it followed just after the Bilbo/Gollum scene, which perhaps was the best scene in the movie, as it preserves most of the spirit of the riddle game from the book (both editions) while providing a bit of a hint about the Ring's shifting power between this movietrilogy and the LotR trilogy with the coloring of the Ring/Ghost world.  Sadly, after this there was almost thirty minutes of near-continuous fighting, interspersed with maybe five minutes of the dwarves, Gandalf, and Bilbo reuniting.

By the time the movie ended, it felt as though Jackson tried too hard to stretch elements from the LotR appendices into what amounts to a medium-length children's novel.  It is hard to fault him for trying to create a cinematic cohesion with his earlier LotR movies, but there were times were there was a dissonance between the source material's lighter tone and the more action-oriented tilt of this movie.  Although much of this is due to audience expectations, I cannot help but be annoyed to see that the cinematic Bilbo ends up killing in this movie, as that will likely diminish his later abhorrence of the impending violence between the dwarves, elves, and men over Erebor.  The dwarves go from near-silly to almost deathly-serious in blinks of the eye frequently enough that at times it becomes hard to tell which is predominant for the movie.  In the end, that perhaps is the most fitting commentary on The Hobbit:  An Unexpected Journey:  it is a movie that isn't quite sure what it wants to be and that it spends an inordinate amount of time trying to waffle between preserving the feel of the LotR films and the tone of the original book that the whole is left wavering between a good cinematic experience and a flawed one that may get worse in the following two films.

Lincoln (2012 film)

Abraham Lincoln has fascinated historians and the American populace for over 150 years.  He has been condemned as the person whose anti-slavery rhetoric became a direct cause of the American Civil War; his ideals forged a truer, more united states of America.  He was a wartime tyrant to many, suspending the writ of habeas corpus; he personally corresponded with and pardoned hundreds of deserters.  He could not show the depths of his grief when one of his sons died; he wrote a letter to a grieving mother that is immortalized as one of the finest examples of English-language letters.  He was in origin a Southerner whose name, even today, stirs up some resentment among certain Southerners.  He was a leader who was known as much for his indecision as for his monumental decisions.  In short, Lincoln embodied a host of contradictions that when encased in one human soul, became somehow larger than life and even more important after his death than during the crucial 49 months of his Presidency. 

These qualities have led to hundreds of biographies and a few cinema treatments over the intervening years.  In the just-released Lincoln, director Steven Spielberg tackles a defining moment of his Presidency, yet one that 147 years later is largely whitewashed in high school and college US History coursebooks.  Many have long presumed that the Civil War was largely fought over slavery (an issue that to this date stirs up fierce arguments among Southerners; see the comments to this post I made in April) and that the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (which abolished chattel slavery and non-criminal involuntary servitude) was a foregone conclusion.  If anything, that amendment perhaps stirred as much fierce debate and controversy than any other amendment outside of later civil rights-related amendments (14th, 15th, 19th, 24th).  It actually failed on numerous occasions during the course of the war to get the requisite two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress before it could even be submitted to the states for ratification.  Lincoln focuses on the pivotal month of January 1865, where after the 1864 elections the Republicans had gained more seats in Congress and the lame duck session was debating the bill before the March turnover, in which the Thirteenth Amendment is finally passed.

It is an interesting decision to focus on a relatively neglected moment in Lincoln's life/Presidency, but Spielberg and the screenwriter Tony Kushner do an outstanding job of portraying the many faces of Lincoln during this time.  The movie opens with Lincoln outside, greeting troops, black and white alike, after they are being deployed for the winter campaign.  This scene, in which soldiers from both of the segregated regiments recite parts of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to him, serves as a foreshadowing of events late in the movie, when the final vote is to be held and those who have the most at stake for the amendment's passage show up.  It also serves to show Lincoln as the folksy yet pensive leader, one who mingled at times with the troops in order to remind himself of the war's brutality.

The majority of the film focuses on the negotiations that take place during the three weeks leading up to the amendment's vote.  We see the bribes, the offers of patronage that were a common feature of pre-1880s federal government employment.  The factions within Lincoln's government, the aptly-named Team of Rivals, are on full display, although it is rather telling that the new Vice President-elect, Andrew Johnson, plays no visible role in the movie (perhaps because he had yet to establish himself back in Washington after serving as military governor of Tennessee).  The splits within the Republican party, between the old Whig Party members and the Radicals (led in the House of Representatives by Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens), foreshadow the break of 1866-1867 with Johnson's administration.  There is a lot covered here (not to mention the conflict between Lincoln, his wife, and their son Robert over Robert's desire to become a commissioned officer) that more than justifies the movie's nearly 2.5 hour length.

For such a long movie, there are very few dull moments.  Too often when it comes to war-related films, directors/producers feel the pressure to include "action" scenes, full of explosions and carnage.  Wisely, Spielberg eschews this, outside of a few moments here and there, instead focusing on the greater story of the tensions between Lincoln's cabinet members (in particular between Secretary of State Seward and Secretary of War Stanton) over the issue of whether it is better to achieve a quicker, negotiated peace with the Confederacy that would allow for them to rejoin/resume membership in the Union (even the terminology for readmission is a semantic mess, which Lincoln references at a key point roughly one-third into the film), even if it meant that slavery would not be abolished and that there existed the strong possibility that the Supreme Court might rule that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation might be unconstitutional after the military exigencies that justified it had ended.

Yet even with all of these historical events providing the necessary narrative tension to sustain a movie of this length, it is the acting that makes Lincoln an outstanding biopic.  Daniel Day Lewis does a superb job in showing Lincoln wearing all of his masks, even the ones that are perhaps a bit distasteful for those who wish to write hagiographies on him.  The voice, a high tenor that sounds wry, weak, conflicted, angry, and weary as the mood dictates,  fits not just the historical accounts of Lincoln but it also fits within the movie's constraints.  What was surprising, however, was the sympathetic treatment given to Stevens (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones).  Long reviled (at least in the South) as being an uncompromising firebrand who believed that full racial equality should be achieved immediately rather than in stages, not to mention being opposed to any sort of amnesty to Confederate leaders, Stevens is portrayed as dour and occasionally malicious, yet also with the zealot's love for justice that transcends personal failings.  Jones does an outstanding job of capturing these elements of Stevens' personality, while also illustrating the often-overlooked capacity to compromise when the greater good is threatened to be outdone by the Democratic-led, racist-tinged opposition to the amendment.  Although she receives much less screentime than either Lewis or Jones, Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln provides a nice counter to Lincoln's carefully-crafted public mask of stoicism.  Her outburst regarding her son's desire to join the Union Army references her earlier grief and her near complete mental breakdown when another son, Willie, died of typhoid fever (after the war, she was committed for a time).

There were remarkably few changes for dramatic effect, as even Stevens's paramour is a matter of historical record.  Instead, Lincoln may be one of those rare biopics where the historical record is itself so dramatic and lending itself to being portrayed as a battle of strong wills that the conflicts that occurred in the House chamber in January 1865 provide most, if not all, of the desired dramatic content.  Lincoln's close-up examination of this momentous time in Lincoln's Presidency captures almost perfectly the breadth and depth of his life and character and it perhaps may be one of the best biopics to be released by a major American studio in years.  Highly recommended.

Cloud Atlas (2012 film)

I first read David Mitchell's 2004 novel Cloud Atlas almost three years ago.  At the time, I read it rapidly (if I recall, I was at a walk-in clinic, waiting to get treatment for a sinus infection) and only the vaguest of impressions stuck with me at the time; I did not choose to review it, despite recalling that I was impressed with how Mitchell structured his six tales to create something that was much more powerful than the sum of its parts. 

So when I learned that there was a movie version coming out this past weekend (I am not much of a cinephile), I was intrigued, more by wondering how in the world the Wachowskis could take a story that was comprised of an intricate series of chronological "first halves" (ranging from the mid-19th century through the early and mid 20th century on to contemporary, 22nd century, and post-apocalyptic times) that then reverse their course until the first story is completed last and make a coherent movie out of it.  The only solution that I could conceive of before attending a showing this afternoon is to utilize a series of cut-ins that tell a series of parallel thematic/plot events similar to that employed in D.W. Griffith's 1916 masterpiece, Intolerance.  More or less, my guess was correct for how the Wachowskis chose to adapt the book.

Cloud Atlas was a very ambitious book, striving to tell through the medium of parallel, reincarnated lives humanity's struggles to define itself between the poles of order and freedom; equality amidst deprivation and inhumane treatment of others; and love versus hatred and fear.  The novel's six stories contain echoes of the other tales, yet each has the time and space to create its own haunting melody that underpins the others.  This works well for a tale from which the reader can take a few minutes (hours, days, weeks...) to pause and to consider the connections.  A movie is much more immediate, requiring sharper transitions and more clear parallels for it to work for those who are not familiar with the source novel.  In this regard, the movie stumbles at times, as in order to preserve a thematic unity between the tales (as the lovers encounter and re-encounter each other; their fight against the repressive social order of the times; the ways of fight or flight embodied in action; and the resolutions), much is left unsaid until near the end, confusing many audience members (including my father and uncle, among others in the audience with whom I saw the movie) who are not used to such rapid-fire transitions without bridging dialogue.

Yet this is a quibble; the movie certainly is not for those who are not willing to invest a lot of time puzzling out the various connections beyond the easy ones such as the comet-shaped birthmarks.  The decision to have a core cast of characters (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugh Grant, Hugo Weaving, Susan Sarandon, among others) is not strictly necessary from the perspective of those who have read the book, yet it does provide a grounding point for those who are new to Mitchell's original story.  The actors, for the most part, provide subtle connections between the eras/tales through their varied responses to events that resemble those of their prior "lives."  Hanks in particular shows this sense of interlife moral development in his role as Zachry, yet most of the others also possess these moments of personal crisis in their scenes. 

The novel focuses much more on the issue of collective humanity than does the movie, which at times relies too heavily on standard Hollywood tropes such as romantic love interests, shoot-em-up action scenes, and other "action-oriented" scenes in an attempt to appeal to viewers who favor such elements in their films.  This fixation on these tropes occasionally weakens the impact of individual scenes, as the car-chase in the Luisa Rey era felt too much like a pastiche of other such scenes and a bit gratuitous in light of the unfolding stories.  Despite moments such as this, there were virtually no longeurs during this nearly three hour-long film, as the cut-ins, especially toward the climactic final 40 minutes, serve to augment the power of each individual scene.

It is hard to imagine this film finding universal appeal; familiarity with the novel is a major plus (as the stories, despite the constraints of cinematic technique and audience expectations for "action," are very faithful in spirit, if not always in word, to the novel) and multiple viewings may be required for the full effect to be achieved.  Cloud Atlas is perhaps the most ambitious movie that I have seen ever since I watched Intolerance on Netflix earlier this year.  Its use of parallel stories that interrupt each other until the final crescendo of resolutions does resemble Griffith's classic favorably, not to mention that its themes will resonate with most readers once the initial confusion is dispersed.  Cloud Atlas may not be the sort of movie that many viewers will "like," but it certainly will be one that several may "admire" for its adroit presentation of a complex story and for the lingering thoughts that may persist long after the final credits roll.