Norman Oppenheimer (Richard Gere) is a freelance political fixer, and in popular fiction terms such a description conjures up visions of slick men in three-piece suits juggling cell phones and commanding transactions of millions of dollars in fees and payoffs. Norman is anything but. We first see him badgering his nephew, a lawyer named Philip Cohen (Michael Sheen), for the contact information of one of his clients. Though Norman talks as if he’s experienced in the world of political connections, Cohen’s reaction is caution veering toward alarm. There’s something between the two men that’s unexplained but points to general mistrust on Cohen’s part of not only Norman’s motives, but his effectiveness. Norman is a hustler, but unlike the stereotype, he’s not a particularly good one.
Nevertheless, Norman’s annoying persistence eventually pays off, and he gains the confidence of the Israeli Deputy Minister of Trade (Lior Ashkenazi) by gifting him with a pair of shoes he could never afford for himself. However, the payback isn’t immediate. In fact, it’s three years before the deputy minister, now the prime minister, spots Norman at a political conference in Washington and, thanks to the attention, Norman is suddenly the talk of the town, the town meaning New York, where the cream of the Jewish political world live and work, rather than the nation’s capital. And for a brief time, Norman is a star, but as writer-director Joseph Cedar has been suggesting all this time, it’s the only time in Norman’s life he will be in that position, and his fall is the tragicomic comeuppance of the ultimate self-deluding man.
Along the way, Norman’s stories about a dead wife and daughter, not to mention his many allergies, become themselves the stuff of myth; his boasts of connections squandered in the past misty and frivolous. All Norman has going for him is his limitless capacity to debase himself for benefits that are never really clear. Ostensibly, he’s trying to help a New York synagogue receive much-needed funding for improvements, and he leads the rabbi (Steve Buscemi) so far on that in the end he does more infernal damage than he would had he done nothing at all. Was he striving so hard for the good of the synagogue, or for his own reputation, which, heretofore, amounted to pretty much nothing?
If this sounds like a plot better served by literature than cinema, Norman doesn’t present the kinds of highs and lows you might expect from a conventional political thriller like, say, Ms. Sloan. It’s mainly a character study, but in Gere’s skilled hands, the character never really comes clean in our minds. Norman’s follies are a mystery to us. Maybe to him, too.
Now playing in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
Norman home page in Japanese.
photo (c) 2017 Oppenheimer Strategies, LLC
What’s immediately compelling about Aneesh Chaganty’s thriller is its cleverly curated mise en scene, which takes place on a computer desktop. The story unfolds in a series of screenshots depicting photo files, browser searches, chat messages, Tumblr posts, Facebook timelines, and, most provocatively, Skype conversations. By obviating the need for placing the viewer’s POV directly into the action, Chaganty has more control over the mystery elements of the story, which is just as well because that story is pretty trite.
Jackson Heights, located in the western part of Queens and serviced by numerous subway and bus lines, has been called the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in the world. Add to this legend the fact that it was the first place in New York City to launch an annual Gay Pride parade in the wake of the murder of a gay Latino man, and you’ve pretty much got the reason for why Frederick Wiseman spent the better part of 2014 patrolling the streets, hanging out at community meetings, and visiting the myriad small businesses that service the area. In Jackson Heights runs more than three hours, and yet you get the feeling that Wiseman only scratched the surface. His main concerns are commerce and ethnic dignity. He loves just pointing his camera at store fronts and dropping into nail salons, tattoo parlors, and gay bars just to see what’s going on. He also spends a lot of time with a group of Spanish-speaking business owners trying to come up with a strategy in their battle against developers who are finally targeting the neighborhood because it seems to be the last low-rent but vital commercial stronghold in not only New York City, but the whole New York metropolitan area. These confabs are fascinating in the way they not only explain what these people are up against, but also their philosophy about making business something that gives as much to the community as it takes.
Though the sardonic comic style that drives the best parts of this feature has become the default mode for Hollywood animation of late, the physical gags are more in line with the classic Looney Toons shorts of yesteryear, so it’s no surprise that Warners produced and distributes Smallfoot. Set in the Himalayas, the movie is given plenty of opportunity for characters to drop long distances into the snow, screaming all the way.
Barbara, the preteen protagonist of this earnest work of empathy, played by newcomer Madison Wolfe, is one of those troubled free spirits who channels her anxieties into flights of fancy that threaten to spin out of control. She wanders forests and beaches with a pair of rabbit ears on her head and clutching an old, worn purse, gathering mushrooms and laying bait for giants, which she believes exist. As the title of this movie, adapted from a graphic novel, suggests, Barbara thinks it is her mission to slay these creatures, and even though the director, Anders Walter, depicts them on screen, the viewer is constantly reminded by other elements in the story that they represent something darker in Barbara’s unconscious.
Though based on a best-selling kids’ story written in 1973, The House with a Clock in Its Walls feels overly determined as a film, as if it were conceived and developed from scratch by a bunch of Hollywood executives. Some find it curious that torture porn maven Eli Roth directs what is basically a Harry Potter concoction with a few more jump scares and less literary ambition, but by now Roth is firmly in the establishment, and the movie has already proven to be his biggest box office hit to date.
The jump scare has become a tired cliche of horror films, a method that was never that necessary in the first place. Suspense and terror are often more potent when the viewer is allowed to perceive threats in an organic way. In a sense, John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place takes off from this premise, but that’s not its primary appeal. He and his scriptwriters don’t provide a lot of back story, and it takes a little time for the viewer to fully understand the danger at hand. It’s not clear where the monsters who kill and eat humans came from, though indications imply that they’ve been around for three months as the movie starts. These creatures have no sense of sight, and can only locate prey through sound, so the movie is by necessity quiet. Even the music, when it’s used, is subtler than what you normally hear in horror films—most of the time, anyway.
Whatever one thinks of Israeli policy and militarism, Israel’s filmmaking contingent more often than not addresses the country’s sticky matters with imagination and verve; which isn’t to say they necessarily confront their problems head-on, but they don’t ignore them. Samuel Moaz’s Foxtrot is built around a unique narrative that bookends an absurd tragedy with a play-like dramatic comment on that tragedy. Michael and Daphna Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler) live in a nice Tel Aviv apartment whose privileged air of complacency is shattered when they receive news that their son, carrying out his obligatory military service, has been killed. Immediately, the couple becomes disoriented and incapable of providing each other with the consolation they so desperately require. It’s obvious the relationship has been strained for some time, but instead of bringing the parents together, the news drives them further apart, partly owing to the nature of the tragedy. Michael, it turns out, was deeply traumatized by his own military service, and news of his son’s death only works to make the past come back with unexpected fury.
As some of my colleagues have noted, the Japanese arm of Warner Bros. has dropped “Asians” from the title of this surprise box office hit, and while we can probably surmise the reason for the elision, the Japanese socio-historical relationship with its continental neighbors is so fraught with problematic baggage that any attempt to parse it would likely result in the inflation of bad stereotypes.
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