Bayside resident Mark Metcalf is an actor who has worked in movies, TV and on the stage. He is best known for his work in "Animal House," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Seinfeld."
In addition to his work on screen, Metcalf is involved with the Milwaukee International Film Festival, First Stage Children's Theater and a number of other projects.
He also finds time to write about movies for OnMilwaukee.com. This week, Metcalf weighs in on "Atonement," "Cloverfield" and "Charlie Wilson's War."
"ATONEMENT" (2007)
I do not ordinarily like films that trick you at the end by changing the reality. Usually, it is done in an arbitrary way and feels like it was done just to manipulate the audience. Ever since "The Sixth Sense," films from Hollywood do it all the time. I am very much over that.
It doesn't bother me so much in "Atonement" because it is a choice made by the character representing the author in the story, and it is a choice that allows the author to acknowledge her own betrayal and in some small way to atone for it. It is a literary trick. Maybe that's why I forgive it.
The moment of betrayal is very clear and all the action ripples out from that moment the way water flows away from the point of entry of a rock dropped into it. The rock floats gently to rest on the bottom but the ripples move on, endlessly one's vision through the crystal clear surface, throughout the lives of the characters.
In this film, that moment has everything to do with class. The class system in period English movies and literature is almost a cliché. The gardener or the son of the housekeeper, that the children of the manor have grown up and played with, turns out to be handsome, smart and ambitious, but he is forever kept from taking his rightful place next to his playmates when they are all grown because of the circumstances of his birth. He is lower class.
In this country, we profess to have no class system. The very nature of our democracy and the country's origins fights against a class system. Yet, if you see beneath the surface of "John Adams," you see that the freedom won by the working people was determined and defined by the owners of slaves and the masters of wealth and land. They were not aristocracy in England, the land from which they had come, but they were establishing a new aristocracy, one determined by wealth and education, not by birth, and our lives are still described by it. They were trying to do the right thing, but they were hampered by their need to preserve and protect their own well-being.
I have not read the book from which "Atonement" is adapted, but Alice tells me it is one her all time favorites. She is quite a good writer in her own right, so I trust her. The film is very good. It is quite a bit more than a typical post-Victorian tale of the English class system betraying the individual. There is a wonderful erotic love story at the heart of it.
The truly damaging betrayal, which is the central theme and is begat by a false feeling of betrayal in an adolescent, informs and motivates the long and creative life of the author, which is where the trick that I usually do not like comes in. The one flaw is that the main character has to be played by three actresses. It is necessary because she ages from twelve to eighty. There is some similarity in appearance between the three but because there cannot be a perfect replication of look and manner, your attention is taken out of the story for a moment and something is lost. It is minor and easy to live with, but it is a problem.
"CLOVERFIELD" (2008)
I really did not want to like this movie. I do not like "scary" movies or monster movies, unless they are so cartoon-ish that I can watch them with Julius, my son. We keep each other from being too scared.
Not that it matters, but the monster seems to be somewhat humanoid, insect-like and reptilian all at the same time. It drops babies all over the city who are specifically insect-like and whose bite is toxic in a particularly bloody way. It isn't frightening the way "Alien" is when the monster comes out of John Hurt's chest, because it isn't surprising in any way. But, there is a cringing kind of panicky feeling that begins to overtake you as you watch. It may be the claustrophobia of seeing it all through the lens of a hand-held camcorder. That gimmicky device is handled very well.
Far better than in "Redacted." And there is comic relief running throughout because the man holding the camera is kind of a Seth Rogen-like doofus, smitten with a girl who is traveling with them through the demolished city.
The broken city is perhaps what is most compelling about it and most questionable. Throughout, but especially at the beginning, there is a Sept. 11 feeling. Something has attacked Manhattan. Buildings are collapsing. The authorities are trying, but failing, to maintain order. People are fleeing, evacuating the lower part of Manhattan. No one knows what is happening or how long it is going to last.
I had several friends who were there on that day and it feels much like they described it, only in comic book form. I don't think it does a disservice to the memory of that day. If you let it remind you of how deeply we all felt the panic from the bizarre attack that we all suffered and how terrifyingly unknown the future became at that moment, it may seep in that we are still in a kind a numbed state waiting for the other shoe to drop and that we may be more slave to our fears than we are willing to admit.
I think it succeeds at what it sets out to do and what it sets out to do is not reprehensible, so it meets my new criteria for whether it is good or not. It is what it is, knows it and takes a bit of joy from being that.
"CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR" (2007)
Mike Nichols, who directed "The Graduate" and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?" and a few other very good movies; Tom Hanks, who won two Oscars in a row for "Philadelphia" and "Forrest Gump"; Julia Roberts who was the "Pretty Woman" everyone fell in love with and "Erin Brockovich"; Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has done more great work than there is room to list here; a timely political story based on the truth and a war.
It sounds like a can't-miss kind of film.
But it does.
It fails because Nichols is a cold, dispassionate man making a film about a man who is obviously over the top in his indulgences and his passions. Hanks has become an actor who does all his work inside the frame of the film, nothing spills over, and nothing indicates that there is more to the life of the character he is playing than exactly what is asked for in the script.
Roberts may be old enough for the part chronologically, but she still has the innocence about her that allowed her to play a prostitute who seemed virginal and she can't pull off the sexual power or the passion that seems to drive this woman.
The script, while clever and occasionally witty, skips from highlight to highlight, from moment to moment the way a made-for-television film does, hurrying along to its climax without gathering any momentum or concern from the audience. Hoffman is the only one doing any kind of work that we take notice of or care about. It should have been his story. It was his war.
Mark Metcalf is an actor and owner of Libby Montana restaurant in Mequon. Still active in Milwaukee theater, he's best known for his roles as Neidermeyer in "Animal House" and as The Maestro on "Seinfeld."
Originally from New Jersey, Metcalf now lives in Bayside.
