Dysfunctional Feel-Good

What Just Happened, Barry Levinson's newest film starring Robert De Niro, is yet another confirmation of that old saying, "Hollywood's favorite subject is itself." Industry insiders love to validate their fantasy-bubble existence by making movies that bask in the absurdity of their profession; it's the easiest way to broadcast self-awareness and fight off that ubiquitous fear of becoming a cliché. Most of the time, it's disingenuous (there's no way to reconcile the fact that Frank Oz made the sharp behind-the-scenes satire Bowfinger before becoming a behind-the-scenes self-parody with troubled projects The Score and The Stepford Wives), sometimes it's self-indulgent (Steven Soderbergh's experimental Full Frontal), and once in a blue moon it's spot-on (Robert Altman's The Player).

What Just Happened, though entertaining, falls somewhere between disingenuous and self-indulgent. Barry Levinson is a veteran filmmaker who embodies the idea of an artistic dabbler -- he has no voice of his own (he's less than an auteur), but he's not just a hard-hat director-for-hire (he's written the screenplays for at least half of his pictures). He's a man of modest talent who's capable of making a decent movie, but his work is rarely worthy of more than a passing glance. The quality of his output is usually determined by the screenwriter with whom he's working (read: when he's not the writer), and on What Just Happened, he has veteran producer Art Linson in the scribe's seat, adapting from the writer's own memoir.

Though fictionalized for the big screen, the story maintains the unmistakable air of vindication. Linson, like Levinson, has been in the business for close to 30 years (he's produced everything from The Untouchables to Fight Club to Into the Wild), and it makes sense that after several decades in Hollywood, he'd have a few bones to pick.

Those bones he chooses to pick are what separate What Just Happened from other Hollywood insider flicks. Linson posits his fictional self Ben (De Niro) as a neutral middleman sorting through the insane demands of narcissistic artists while trying to placate the financially-minded studio heads.

Yes, in this movie, the artist is the bad guy (or at least the lesser guy). It's made crystal clear from the opening sequence, when Ben is at an audience preview screening for his newest film, Fiercely, an arthouse project starring Sean Penn that's meant to garner awards and acclaim for Ben and the studio. The film's director is Jeremy Brunell (Michael Wincott), a loose cannon, barely rehabbed junkie whose idea of artistic honesty is made clear at the climax of Fiercely, when the hero's lovable pooch is brutally shot in head (on screen, with blood and brains splattering onto the camera lens). The audience is, of course, disgusted, as is the studio head Lou (Catherine Keener). The screening is seen as a disaster, and Ben is assigned the impossible task of forcing Jeremy to change his ending.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in Ben's chaotic life. Throughout his day, he must contend with sleazy agents, inept assistants, two ex-wives (and his children from both), and most hilariously, a psychotic Bruce Willis, who shows up to the set of a film wearing a grizzly man beard that he refuses to shave. Each encounter further fuels Ben's mounting dissatisfaction and self-loathing, and it becomes increasingly obvious that Linson sees himself as the bumbling, lone voice of reason in a logical desert.

It's unfortunate that the film is not nearly as insightful or profound as it clearly wants to be. It all feels old hat; there's no great revelation about how the Hollywood machine works that hasn't already been revealed and re-revealed countless times before. As a character study, it fails, because De Niro's character is defined only by the people surrounding him. It's deductive development-- he's not this guy or that guy, so he must be... It leaves Ben with large holes that keep him on the page and away from audience sympathy. In the end, he's just another anonymous cog in a familiar and over-exposed machine.

Pleasant Surprise

Rachel Getting Married is a fantastic film that puts the digital chamber drama in its final resting place- no two-bit indie hack will ever come close to equaling Jonathan Demme on a bad day, and this film finds the director firing on all cylinders.

Demme, a humanist filmmaker with incomparable instincts, is an underrated master of the form who in recent years has gravitated toward increasingly obtuse material that's allowed critics the luxury of dismissing him. He's made a handful of well-received documentaries (The Agronomist, Neil Young: Heart of Gold and last year's Jimmy Carter: Man from the Plains), but his narrative choices during the last decade have been challenging.

After drowning in awards in the early '90s (with The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia), he became preoccupied with cinematic exercises that were respectable in intent but hardly easy to like. Like Gus van Sant, Demme seemed hell-bent on confounding expectations by making movies that broke unspoken rules of engagement. Van Sant remade Psycho frame for frame, Demme remade The Manchurian Candidate and drastically altered the role of the main character. Both were seen as disrespectful and pointlessly provocative, and both filmmakers seemed gleefully aware of the feathers they were ruffling. This kind of transgressive filmmaking is interesting from an academic standpoint, but it doesn't exactly make friends.

With Rachel Getting Married, Demme is still playing with form and expectation, but this time his cinematic genre-bending is in service of a story that is rich with perceptive observations of the human experience, as well as being (gasp!) thoroughly entertaining.

This, plus an astounding offering by Anne Hathaway (the word "revelation" was invented for this kind of performance), equals The Dark Knight's closest competitor for best film of the year thus far.

This is no doubt, thanks in large part, due to the sharp screenplay by Jenny Lumet (the famous Sidney's daughter). Additionally, the cinematography by Declan Quinn is unusually adept at breaking down the wall between audience and story; it appropriates documentary convention (in aesthetic, not in structure) to bring immediacy to the drama; but unlike other digital films, the handheld camerawork feels extraordinarily premeditated. This is to its credit. Demme has always been in complete control of his camera, and here he utilizes the digital revolution to tell a story in a very deliberate way.

That story unfolds during two days as two large families convene under one roof in the Connecticut countryside to celebrate the marriage of Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Sidney (the surprisingly good Tunde Adebimpe, lead singer of TV on the Radio). The movie begins when Rachel's unhinged sister Kym (Hathaway) arrives, fresh out of rehab, and immediately starts to wreak havoc on the bride's plans for a peaceful, uneventful ceremony.

There's a palpable tension between Rachel and Kym that stems back to an unspoken family tragedy, and it's clear that all of Kym's spiritual damage is related to that one specific incident. The nature of the incident is revealed but hardly point of the movie; Demme is too wise to dwell on the lurid roots of family dysfunction, nor does he waste time basking in the cynicism of the situation--the point of the movie, unlike so many others, isn't "look how fucked up these people are", it's "look, they're just like us".

Demme's interested in the entire spectrum of human experience, not just the pain and suffering of it. The fact that the pain and suffering exists is an incidental truth. Younger filmmakers have taken the same material (Margot at the Wedding and The Celebration come to mind) and rendered it practically unwatchable by exaggerating the nihilistic tendencies of their characters. Those films seemed to call for the destruction of the family; Rachel Getting Married defiantly affirms its necessity. This is why Demme doesn't resort to the usual indie histrionics -- he doesn't need to throw a fit to make his point, because he's not angry. He's more interested in the idiosyncrasies of familial interaction; the centerpiece of the movie is a lengthy post-wedding sequence where the multi-ethnic nature of the gathering takes front and center as the two families joyously merge in a tribal dance. It's a moment where the film's priorities are laid bare -- all conflict is put on hold as everyone dances in celebration. This optimism is the whole point of the movie, and it's what makes Rachel Getting Married the most dysfunctional feel-good film of the year.