Awakened by Sounds of the Sixties

When Dr. Oliver Sacks (“Awakenings”) worked with a young man whose brain tumor had severely impaired his memory, the boy’s responses revolving around sixties rock and the slang of the time inspired Dr. Sacks to describe the young man as “The Last Hippie.”

This essay in Dr. Sacks’ book “An Anthropologist on Mars” inspired director Jim Kohlberg and screenwriters Gwyn Lurie and Gary Marks to create their film “The Music Never Stopped.” While drawing on the analysis and experience of Dr. Sacks with his patient, the film is a story taking place, as all stories must, over a shorter period of time than the facts of the real patient and his family. The director and writers have given us a quiet film with simple, real characters. “The Music Never Stopped” allows us to know Gabriel Sawyer, his father Henry and his mother Helen as they reacquaint themselves after an estrangement of almost twenty years.

The film tells the story of a man’s memory, its lapses and lacks, its vagaries and weaknesses, and surprising strengths. Back in 1968, Gabriel was a teenage boy, in a band, possibly in love, whose friend and bandmate had just received his letter from the government, and his number (112). At the height of Gabriel’s feelings about the Vietnam War, he clashes with his father’s feelings about protesters and rock music. Their inevitable argument escalates, and Gabriel leaves home to live his musical dream in Greenwich Village. Not an unusual story to this point. The Sawyers don’t hear from their son again until 1986, when he is found with a debilitating brain tumor and irretrievable memory loss. That no one will ever know any more about Gabriel’s life between 1970 and 1986 is known from the outset, and yet we hang onto every word, every moment, hoping against hope that somehow the Gabriel his parents once knew will reappear.

Part of the total willingness to wait this out is J.K. Simmons, here playing Gabriel’s father Henry Sawyer. I recognized Henry Sawyer. He was of the “Great” generation, he hated rock music, he hated the war protestors, he had worked hard for his American dream and couldn’t understand those who didn’t appreciate the status quo and sacrifice, having served in one war himself, and lost a brother to another. In essence, though, he was the father of a teenager. Simmons is pitch perfect here, every grimace, every smile, every repressed emotion was on target. He’s one of those character actors we know very well long before we know his name -- the father in “Juno,” Will Pope in “The Closer” TV series, a psychiatrist on at least two iterations of “Law & Order,” among many, many others. You know him when you see him, which can doubtless be said of several actors in this film, like Cara Seymour as Gabriel’s mother Helen – she also played Carey Mulligan’s mother in “An Education.” Here (as then!) she is wonderful, strong, often silent, and standing and speaking up when it’s time.

The music that is a part of Gabriel is also a part of the audience that surrounded me when I saw the film. It is “our” music just as the ballads and waltzes of the forties and fifties was the music of Gabriel’s parents. We had the same arguments about music and politics that the Sawyers had. “We” are older than the demographic Hollywood films generally aim at, but I tend to think that every generation has the music argument – to the parents, whatever the younger generation likes is just “loud.”

The music is all important here – Gabriel is not communicative even after the tumor is removed from his brain, and his father reads whatever he can find searching for help. He finds it in the person of Dianne Daly, a music therapist played with sweetness and strength by Julia Ormond. Dianne explores what’s left of Gabriel’s memory with music, discovering his love of sixties rock – the Beatles, Cream, Dylan, and most particularly the Grateful Dead. Gabriel is so set in that time that he is unaware that certain of his musical icons have been dead for years. But when he is informed of such facts, he cannot retain the new memories for more than a few minutes.

Despite his detestation of the music his son loved, Henry educates himself on rock music of the sixties so he can talk to Gabriel. The past is revived when no future is possible. This is not a long film, and it is not overpopulated with characters, so each scene is carefully crafted and carved out of life – Gabriel talking to his father about the music, about Vietnam, Gabriel developing a crush on the girl who serves him lunch in the café; Henry and Helen remembering the past differently until Helen reminds him that his memory is not the only memory of any given moment. Helen, the mother, as usual stuck in the middle in the 1980s as in the 1960s, always the inner strength of the family.

The highlight of the film is Henry’s determination to win tickets to a Grateful Dead concert, so he’s always listening to the rock radio stations, even in his hospital bed after he’s suffered a heart attack. The journey that brings father and son in tie-dyed T-shirts to a Dead concert is bumpy and real, making the joy of connection even greater when Gabriel finally does form that new memory of learning a "new" Grateful Dead song along with his father.

Everyone in this film shines, but most notable are Simmons and Seymour noted above; Lou Taylor Pucci as Gabriel, ever a child, emotional, always seemingly just a little bit stoned; Mia Maestro, charming as Celia, a kind server in the café of the rehab facility on whom Gabriel develops a crush; and Scott Adsit as the rather dour Doctor Biscow who gives only bad news on Gabriel.

“The Music Never Stopped” is low-key and heartfelt, sweet and sensitive. The soundtrack is dynamic and includes the Beatles, Crosby Stills & Nash, Bob Dylan, and more in addition to, obviously, the Grateful Dead. While the film was apparently a favorite at Sundance, I’m guessing its distribution is limited, so get out there and see it now.

~ Molly Matera, turning off the computer but neither the light nor the stereo….

Slapstick Shakespeare

A delightful mariachi band greets the entering audience in the BAM Harvey Theatre. The scene is more like Tijuana than an ancient Roman/Greek city, but the pleasure of the setting overrides any purist hankerings. And of course, any purists in the audience of a Propeller production had best put on their seatbelts – they’re in for a bumpy ride, despite the all-male company.

In “The Comedy of Errors,” the errors are made by everyone in Ephesus about the identities of two sets of twins in their midst. The comedy is … rather brutal. Think “Animal House” via the Three Stooges. As a play, “The Comedy of Errors” is slight – a smidgen more than a one-joke show. That said, the vigor and energy and acrobatics of Propeller and the Touring Company in this production -- already sold out at BAM -- keeps its audience laughing for most of its two hours and odd minutes.

As with all the plays depending upon mistaken identity and twins, “The Comedy of Errors” must move swiftly so as to avoid the audience having a moment to think. The premise: Aegeon, a Syracusan merchant, had twin sons with his wife Aemelia. He bought another pair of twin boys to be their servants. Then they were separated by a storm at sea, leaving Aegeon with one of each (one son, one slave), and the mother missing with the other boys. Some twenty or thirty (depending on who’s speaking) years later, the father’s pair take on the names of their missing siblings and go off in search of them. That presents us with two characters named Antipholus, one of Syracuse, one of Ephesus, and two slaves named Dromio, ditto. As theatrics require, the Syracusan Antipholus and Dromio arrive in Ephesus, and are immediately mistaken for their resident twins. No one figures this out, of course, until a tedious scene at the end. Many comedies require as much suspension of disbelief as a musical, and this is one of them.

That bit of backstory may appear long, but it is much shorter than the exposition the character Aegeon delivers in the painful opening of this play. Richard Clothier (an excellent Shylock in Propeller’s flawed production of “The Merchant of Venice” two years back) plays the Duke of Ephesus with marbles in his mouth. He and Aegeon (John Dougall) open the play with the exposition above, plus the overwrought trade war between Ephesus and Syracuse, slowing the pace the musicians had set. They almost lost the audience between being unintelligible and dull in their pseudo-realism in a farcical story. Luckily, as Aegeon spoke of his sons and slaves, the characters introduced themselves in a manner more befitting a farce by way of a window in the back wall. Two Antipholuses (Antipholi?), wearing identical costumes, two Dromios, wearing costumes identical to each other's as well.

This production by the madcap Propeller company, directed by Edward Hall, is non-stop hilarity of the juvenile and generally vulgar sort. Don’t get me wrong, I laughed like hell. Although I started disliking the Three Stooges decades ago, this company of players is so skilled at such antics – and clearly Shakespeare would never have tired of the Three Stooges – that my “matured” sense of humor was replaced with the puerile. This is a bawdy Elizabethan comedy via many, many stooges. Nonetheless, I consider the best part of the show to be the mariachi band (don’t think these are separate people – they’re members of the company who appear as characters as well) that sets the pace and tone from the get go, and comments on the action as a musical chorus ought.

What does this play need? Shortening. Cut the beatings by half and the lines by a quarter, and this difficult play could work for a broader audience. As it is, Propeller’s production moves swiftly, contains lots of laughs, excellent integration of musical humor, and some good performances, particularly:

- Dugald Bruce-Lockhart as the more charming Antipholus of Syracuse. Not that he doesn’t beat his Dromio, just not as much;
- Sam Swainsbury as the resident Antipholus of Ephesus, who is cruder, drunker, and has a fantastical long monologue to the Duke in the latter half of the play that is hilarious;
- Richard Frame as Dromio of Syracuse with the biggest, longest fat joke in the world;
- Jon Trenchard as Dromio of Ephesus, whose monologue “I am an ass indeed” becomes a dancelike solo as he enacts every blow dealt him by his master, mistress, and anyone else who feels like it;
- Robert Hands as Adriana, wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, is very funny, way over the top, on occasion grating, but then so is Adriana;
- David Newman as Luciana, Adriana’s virginal sister who’s just as prone to violence as the rest of Ephesus. Newman’s interpretation is not at all virginal.
- Tony Bell as Pinch, a “conjurer” à la southern Evangelical con man. He had one of the most vulgar physical jokes of the evening, but handled himself well.

The players of Propeller are brazen, brave, clever, and talented actors and musicians. The play is, however, repetitive at best. Still, since most productions fall short, and this one keeps the energy high and thought processes minimal, I can safely say this is the best production of “The Comedy of Errors” I’ve seen.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to read some Shakespearean verse

Hey There Li'l Red Riding Hood.....

On St. Patrick’s Day I avoided drunken crowds by going to the movies. I chose “Red Riding Hood” because I felt it would be foolishness requiring no thought. I like a good fairy tale as well as the next person, very possibly more. I have the Yellow and Blue Fairy Books at home and will pick up the other colors as I come across them. I like the Grimms, Perrault, “Fractured Fairy Tales,” and enjoy the use of old folktales as fodder for re-tellings customized to our own times.

“Red Riding Hood” had almost enough budget to be shot for the big screen, but retains the look and feel of the small screen. It includes many an interesting visual element, but that is largely all it is – a series of shots, moments, images. While it has a beginning, middle, and end, with some satisfaction in that last, the film missed many marks.

This is not the Little Red Riding Hood who, at 8, skips along collecting flowers on the way to Grandmother’s house. At 8, this Red Riding Hood, Valerie, is trapping a rabbit with her friend Peter, and she’s the one who carries the knife. This Peter has some relationship to Tchaikovsky’s Peter, with a twist; the red riding hood, played in this film by Amanda Seyfried, is that “Li’l Red Riding Hood” that Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs were singing to in the Sixties. (And just for a little fun, here it is: )

Director Catherine Hardwicke opens with the vastness of snow-covered forests and mountains. It could be the Black Forest, site of many a frightening tale. It has green trees and leaves and undergrowth like any other forest; its blackness is about the closeness of the trees, the darkness due to lack of light. It’s magnificent, but terrifying to humans. Small clearings are made near water sources so that people may live, clustered together in a small spot of light inside the darkness. That’s where so many of the stories of fairy tales come from, the homes shut tight against the night, and its monsters. Hardwicke makes good use of the shadows in darkness, something running past the camera too fast to be identified. Rustlings in the straw. Animal or human? Benign or evil?

In this story the town is made up of little straw houses with pikes sticking out of the sides. Since these have never kept the wolf at bay, one wonders why the people would endanger their livestock and children with such spears all around, but this is the movies. The little straw houses look fake and flimsy, and at one point, during a party/dance scene, someone even sings of the little pigs and the wolf blowing the house down. This bit of sly humor upped my hopes for the film. But then it moved on.

Peter, the boy and man Valerie has always loved, is played by Shiloh Fernandez (fifteen years ago he would have been played by Joaquin Phoenix – looks like a bad guy, but is he?). Fernandez does the job, but there are no sparks here. Then there’s Henry, the nice moneyed boy (that is, the one whose father is the town blacksmith) to whom her family has engaged Valerie. Henry is sincerely played by Max Irons, but he’s rather dull, except in one smoldering scene with Julie Christie.

Amanda Seyfried’s Valerie is the porcelain heroine with a knife in her boot. She has very large blue eyes and she widens them. A lot. She, too, is rather dull. Pretty, looks good in the big red cape. But that’s what she is – “the pretty one.”

The incandescent Julie Christie as Valerie’s grandmother is much better than her material, with inconsistencies that shout “directorial choice.” Virginia Madsen tries hard as the girl's mother, Billy Burke better as the father. The young people are attractive in their various ways, but otherwise uninteresting, with the exceptions of Kacey Rohl as Prudence and Shauna Kain as Roxanne.

Lucas Haas was wasted (as usual) as Father Augustine. The doors to his odd little church depict a haloed saint on one side, and a wolf on the other. This mixture of Christianity and animal worship – after all, the terribly feared wolf could have been worshipped in an earlier society, and the town still does sacrifice animals to it -- is an element that deserved some exploration. Alas, it was left right there on the church step. It was Father Augustine who called in The Church to save the town from the wolf after it killed Lucy, Valerie’s sister. The Church is represented by an Inquisitor type named Father Solomon, who is also father of two little girls who ride with him in his brig-like carriage and are never seen again.

Father Solomon is played by Gary Oldman, who can generally be relied upon to be creepy and/or funny. Here he is neither. He’s just a run-of-the-mill nasty church guy with silver fingernails.

Creepiest bit is the torture device Father Solomon brought to town. It’s somewhere between the Trojan Horse and the storybook wolf itself with victims in its belly. Except this huge elephant is based on the Bronze Bull of ancient Greece, and its victims are baked alive.

Elements of the many versions of the original tale are employed here – Valerie’s grandmother’s house is outside of town (oooh, why??), there are woodcutters, the church is holy ground so the wolf cannot pass there, and finally inserting stones in the belly of the wolf, an idea from a related story. Elements of the old story come from different time periods and places, and their use depended on the story’s purpose, and the moral it was used to teach.

In this story, there’s really no moral. It centers around one family – one rather drunken woodcutter, one wife, two daughters, with the older daughter Lucy the first killed by the local wolf in some time. Said daughter was in love with younger daughter Valerie’s betrothed, and eventually the truth of the elder daughter’s patrimony comes out…. Well it’s a soap with more serious consequences than most.

Director Catherine Hardwicke made pretty, atmospheric shots. There is, of course, snow so as to show off the red, red cloak. Not to mention the blood of the wolf attacks and the nasty churchmen. That red hooded cape grows as long and wide as the biggest bridal train you can imagine.

My favorite sequence in the film is seen through Valerie’s mask, when Father Solomon has bound her as a sacrificial offering in the town square. Her friend Prudence comes to speak to her after Valerie's been denounced as a witch. We see Prudence’s face through the eyeholes of Valerie’s mask, and the scene is quite effective. For the moment. Unfortunately the director doesn’t keep such energies flowing for long, and the scene moves on to the rather expected.

I would guess the screenwriter David Johnson had a fine time researching many a tale to pick elements for this one, but alas, the script is pedestrian in spots and predictable in others.

This does not mean the actors couldn’t have done better work. That they so consistently did not means that Ms. Hardwicke was more concerned with getting the shot than finding the characters, or expanding on the story into more than a period romance. While the film moves along at a good pace, shot by shot, storyboard frame by frame, Hardwicke didn’t direct her actors to be anything but costumed puppets hitting their spots. Some of the actors have their moments, but most (and some surprisingly) do not.

Interestingly – meaning I think she had had something in mind -- Hardwicke brought the camera very frequently to the town’s women, in particular the mothers – Julie Christie as the Grandmother to Valerie and Lucy, Virginia Madsen as their mother, the wonderful and slightly scary Christine Willes as fiancé Henry’s grandmother; even Shauna Kain as motherly sister to Claude. (Claude was a mentally challenged boy who could barely speak, but who was clearly sweetness and light. Just the type Inquisitor types like to call witch.) If in this focus Hardwicke had had something in mind, however, she forgot along the way.

“Red Riding Hood” felt to me like a basket of opportunities missed, as well as the point.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to get out there into a 70 degree day!

Russian Gogol via Australian Rush Leads to Laughter

The Australians are back! Last year Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush bowled us over with their production of “Exit the King” on Broadway. It was a scrumptious show, combining hilarity and heartbreak, exported to America from their Australian theatre company Belvoir. They've done it again. This year, the duo have re-created the production that jump-started their careers two decades ago, the dramatization of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, “The Diary of a Madman,” with a script written by David Colman, Rush, and Armfield. Oh happy we, who have the opportunity to see this bravura performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre.

This extraordinary production is a brilliant telling of Gogol’s tale, replete with shadow characters, music and musicians who “speak” back to the infamous Madman, Poprishchin. Poprishchin is a government clerk of the ninth grade, an impoverished “gentleman” who earns his tiny attic room as a civil servant with the tiny claim to glory of being chosen to sharpen the big boss’s quills. This is the mid-nineteenth century, Russia, and it’s cold. Poprishchin’s garret is bare but for a bed with a flimsy quilt, two throw pillows, a small table and chair, and stacks of newspapers, one easily twice his height. The room is reached by a poorly lit staircase we see at the foot of the stage, and topped by a leaky roof with a dirty skylight.

Over two acts, we watch Poprishchin devolve into delusion. For the first half, this is deliciously hilarious, with Poprishchin falling for the daughter of the big boss, a pretty, snobby little thing who wouldn’t deign to notice him. Then he “hears” conversations between her dog and another, including the claim of one that she – the dog, not the lady -- had written letters that must have gone astray. Letters? Poprishchin must find this correspondence, and does. The story of the boss’ daughter falling in love with a servant of the bedchamber – that is, a gentleman with a gentleman’s job and station – is told through the dogs’ correspondence. The act of retrieving that correspondence was not without peril to Poprishchin, and he wears the scars for the rest of the play. His daily diary entries inform us of the doings of his world, including a vacancy on the Spanish throne. Naturally, this leads the out-of-place Poprishchin to believe that he is the missing King of Spain, hiding in Russia until the Spanish delegation comes to install him on the throne.

Follow? You will. Everything Geoffrey Rush’s Poprishchin says makes perfect sense, even when it’s quite mad.

This is all exceptionally sad, of course, but we don’t respond to the sadness until it slaps us in the face in the second act. We just laugh uproariously. Geoffrey Rush is loose-limbed, his long hands seem to reach down to his ankles, he can do things with his arms you wouldn’t believe and might not even see until you look beyond him to the massive shadow he casts on the stage walls. He is vocally foppish, his reddish hair styled to be odd and clownlike in a frightfully fragile way. His feet don’t appear to touch the ground, his hands flutter to keep him afloat. Even if you had the pleasure of seeing Rush’s Tony-winning turn in “Exit the King,” you ain’t seeing nothin’ yet.

Accompanying Mr. Rush’s journey is Yael Stone, playing the Finnish maid Tuovi – a delightful creature who rushes about bent over, scrubbing, practicing her Russian (which we thankfully hear in bad English) and trying to take care of the ever worsening Poprishchin; Ms. Stone also plays the aloof love interest Sophia, a vision in white; as well as a fellow resident of “Madrid” in the final scenes. At one point she even joins the musicians in the box creating the auditory world of our favorite Madman. This young woman is remarkable, malleable, we adore her immediately as the grateful and kind servant with enormous energy and humor. If anyone could have kept Poprishchin sane, it would have been her, but it was too late.

What Poprishchin does not have, he creates out of his surroundings and his imagination, and it’s all marvelous until he exits his reality into his much pleasanter world of unreality. No amount of beatings will bring him out. Before the twentieth century (and probably late into it), the mad were hidden away and abused, so the viewer must wonder why anyone would be expected to come to his “senses” while being whipped. Staying mad seems much safer, if not saner.

The Musicians are Paul Cutlan and Erkki Veltheim, and the play cannot be considered separately from them. They are additional voices to the scenes, they comment, they respond, they goad, they aid. Alan John’s music (after Mussorgsky, per the program) is mournful and joyous, still and spritely, by turns. It and its performers provide additional levels to the story.

Costume design is clever and hilarious and remarkably useful by Tess Schofield, set design by Catherine Martin is dark, dank, dangerous, delightful. Lighting by Mark Shelton, sound by Paul Charlier are outstanding, creating aural and visual shadows against the stark set.

Once again, these artists have given us hilarity and heartbreak in one evening. “Diary of a Madman” is a rare treat, a perfectly integrated production of script, sound, and sights brought together in profound harmony by Mr. Armfield with a virtuoso performance from Mr. Rush. In years to come, you want to be able to answer “yes” to the question: “Did you see his Poprishchin?”

The good news is, it’s still running. You have until March 12.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, still chuckling at a look here, a line there, over a week later.

A Wintry Tale Well Told

Told with perfect pacing, driving needs, obstacles aplenty, goals pursued up to more obstacles, with a never-ending build of extraordinary tension, “Winter’s Bone” is a storyteller’s story. The film is riveting through to its totally satisfying and vaguely frightening end.

The acting is simple, straightforward, totally believable. Raw. The reality of the emotions, sights, sounds is exhausting. “Winter’s Bone” is unrelenting, it has no comfort zone, and much as we may try to insulate ourselves from the cold and the rough and the horrors of the world Ree Dolly inhabits, we cannot.

There are many films and stories with unlikable characters, but this one has some pretty despicable folk in it, including some that initially appear pretty rotten, but who then pale in comparison to the characters we meet as the story progresses. Seventy-odd years ago, seemingly similar characters were rather amusing in old black-and-white movies showing bootleg alcohol stills and caricatures of the impoverished people residing in them there hills -- shotgun-toting hillbillies scaring off revenuers. In “Winter’s Bone,” the same people are still in the same place, still insular, no longer caricatures, and now the stills are meth labs, and the enemy is not revenuers – it’s all outsiders and sometimes their own kin. The untamed country builds shadows in the foliage and around the next hill that hide deeper secrets than any city alleyway. And just to confuse the viewer, “Winter’s Bone” has a few, treasured moments of kindness, even sweetness. Its people are terrifying, and sometimes surprising.

This film works on many levels, first and foremost good storytelling. The teenaged protagonist, Ree Dolly, is met with a real problem of survival in the early minutes of the film. No messing around. She spends the next 80 or so minutes hitting brick walls built and supported by mean ungenerous, unkind people, most of whom are related to her. Each push for desperately needed information fails, but Ree keeps on because the stakes are so very high. She moves forward, trying to climb over and skirt obstacles, finding she cannot, then changes her goal to suit new facts. This is great storytelling.

Director Debra Granik does a sterling job with the excellent screenplay she wrote with Anne Rosselini based on a novel I’m afraid to read by Daniel Woodrell. The pace of the film is unrelenting, the story pushes, heroine (and that is a correct characterization here) Ree pushes back, the tension builds to an unbearable point more than once. This viewer’s shoulders and fists were tight, praying for release.

As Ree’s uncle, John Hawkes combines fierceness with gentleness, and his performance is, not surprisingly, pitch perfect. Also showing up with a reliable, quiet characterization is Garret Dillahunt as the Sheriff, a despicable and difficult job in a hostile region. Deep, dark work is done by a string of wonderful actors with great faces that will imprint in your mind’s eye – Dale Dickey, Casey MacLaren, Sheryl Lee, Ronnie Hall, Shelly Waggener. These people are so good you’d think they just live out there in the hills and aren’t actors at all.

Most amazing of all these fine, fine actors is Jennifer Lawrence as Ree Dolly. In the film's opening shots, I looked at her and saw a slave to her family. She is tough as nails and soft as a baby blanket; she is big sister, teacher, mother, and finally father. Ree is insightful and courageous, resilient and smart enough to be frightened of her own relations while doing her best not to show it. Ms. Lawrence’s performance is the spine of the film – and all without dazzling special effects. The girl is amazing.

There’s a chance I won’t watch this film again, in the way I’ll never re-read Jerzy Kosinski’s “The Painted Bird” which gave me waking nightmares. The actions and the rules of these present-day characters in the Ozarks are more terrifying than any zombie movie could ever be.

“Winter’s Bone” tells a fine nerve-wracking story, a terrifying tale of a community with rules known to all, where transgressors will be held to account. Where the toddlers are taught to shoot, skin, and stew a squirrel. Where kindness and decency are more readily punished than crime. These people are tired out by the time they’re ten.

When we are worn to the bone, we are revealed. “Winter’s Bone” casts light on all sides of the human animal, and reveals the dark in all of us.

Now that’s a great movie.

~ Molly Matera, signing off, still listening to the film's fine score.

The Most Disheartening Film of the Year

“Blue Valentine” has a smart script by writer/director Derek Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne, and Joey Curtis. Although it includes scenes of joy in a child’s laughter and scenes of sweet young love, the story does not make for a film one enjoys. It also does not make for a film in which one is quite sure who to root for.

Scenes depicting the excitement of a burgeoning relationship and degeneration of a marriage are delightful and devastating by turns. Morose, somber, far from sober, Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling revel as they dive deep into their characters. These two young actors are powerful players and will rule marquees for years to come. They are scintillating, sincere, articulate in their realistic mumblings.

The story of Cindy and Dean is told in non-linear fashion, from the opening scenes of a beautiful child calling a name -- of her friend? her sister? We are immediately involved. We see the couple, married with said child, at a stage in their marriage they might survive, or might not. We jump back to see the couple in their past, separate, then coming together. It’s a lovely story. We jump forward to today, back to yesterday, and see tomorrow. Despite the time travel, the film does have a beginning, middle, and end. What it does not have is a single protagonist with goals. We’ve no idea what Cindy wants, what she’ll do to get it, or what’s in her way. Dean, on the other hand, wants one thing from the get-go: true love, romantic style. His obstacle: reality.

Alcohol compounds Dean’s beliefs and dissipates his lovability. As for Cindy, it appears that Michelle Williams loves to drop us into the depths of despair – from her character in “Brokeback Mountain” and in her entirely brilliant but demoralizing “Wendy and Lucy,” this character Cindy is the third in her triumvirate of misery. Please, Ms. Williams, do some other kind of film next. Who knew from her “Dawson’s Creek” days that she would grow up to do offbeat indie type depressing movies. Oh, right. “Dawson’s Creek” wasn’t exactly jolly.

Cindy’s father, expertly played by John Doman, appeared a dreadful bully to her ineffectual mother, the subtle Maryann Plunkett, and one might have expected the story to go another way. Why marry if your husband will end up treating you like garbage? But Cindy’s search for love had different consequences. The sweet relationship between Cindy and her grandmother Jen Jones led to her choice of profession and to meeting Dean. All these characters are portrayed brutally and brilliantly. The actors’ performances are understated, the effect of their underplaying bringing home the reality of this story, forcing us into the room, even when we’d rather be anywhere else.

Aspects of this film are great: A+ for execution by the actors and editors Jim Helton and Ron Patane. “Blue Valentine” shows us the moments in a life that brought the characters from sweet vulnerability to trust to love, then drops us into a pit. Is it the non-linear structure that denies the characters an arc? I don’t think so. They started with hope and ended with none. Not much of an arc if you ask me.

By the devastating end of this film, we understand all, pity all, and can’t wait to walk out into a brisk, downright cold winter night just to breathe clear air.

If you’re a fan of the actors in this film – and who wouldn’t be – you’ll want to rent the DVD, but with all the choices out there at this time, don’t spend your money for the big screen.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to write a review of a better film.

Long Flaxen Bouncing Golden Hair

If you want to be happy, go see “Tangled.” It is pure delight. The animation is stunning, the hair, the wind, the flowers, the hair, the faces, bodies, that hair -- the attention to detail is exceptional. Not a 3D fan, I enjoyed it here, perhaps because it was used to enhance the animation, not take the place of story.

Music and lyrics by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, respectively, were clever, funny, warm and sweet. Some sample rhymes – dreamers, femurs; deadly, medley. Help me, how wonderful are those. Each and every song moves characters and story forward and they are well placed in the witty and wild screenplay by Dan Fogelman (based on the fairy tale “Rapunzel” by the Brothers Grimm, of course).

There’s a long list of wonderful people voicing characters from guards to thugs, each character fully delineated and hilarious. As for the main characters:

• Zachari Levi (from “Chuck”) is the voice of the thief, Rider (who looks more like Jake Gyllenhall), and he’s quite charming, smarmy, contrite, sincere, and very funny. He also sings quite sweetly.
• Mandy Moore is Rapunzel, and of course her voice is just right for this blossoming young girl. She’s full of life, exuberance, and joy, whatever her circumstances. And she’s very funny.
• Donna Murpy does a great job as the wicked kidnapping old crone. She’s a hoot, and her singing, of course, scores.

The horse from the palace guard, Maximus, is just too fabulous. As much a dog as a horse, Maximus competes in my heart with Pascal the chameleon, who is Rapunzel’s best friend. These animals’ facial expressions, body language and action are brilliantly drawn, and are intricately woven into the story.

Rapunzel has created wondrous paintings in her tower prison, vibrant, colorful scenes of nature, earth and sky, and most particularly the highly affecting lanterns released from the royal palace every year on the anniversary of Rapunzel’s birth. When she finally gets out of her tower into the world, Rapunzel lives her paintings, in particular those birthday lanterns. The release by the king and queen of the first lantern in memory of their kidnapped daughter is followed from the top of the castle through the streets and plazas and onto the ships at sea. The light is sublime, the colors exultant, the emotional impact extraordinary. Beware, those prone to weeping at sheer, sweet gorgeousness.

“Tangled” just gave so much pleasure I cannot recommend it more heartily. It was directed by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, but of course this is an animated feature. Art Direction, individual animators, a huge number of people were gathered to put this gorgeous gift together. Apparently this was the most expensive animated film ever made by Disney or anyone else, but it’s so damned delightful, who could complain.

“Tangled” has lots of action, frying pans, slingshot moves with long golden hair, dam busting, and the good guys and bad guys satisfactorily getting their due. Go on, let your hair down.

~ Molly Matera, logging off. I have more movies to see before the Oscars....