Though I wasn’t surprised that someone had finally decided to adapt Edmond Rostand’s play as a musical, I was surprised that the producers of the original stage production adapted for this movie chose twin brothers Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the rock group The National to write the music. Though The National’s music can be quite dramatic, it’s also built for the kind of singer I don’t normally associate with musical theater, and in that regard the songs here don’t quite make up for the lyricism that is supposed to be a hallmark of the title character’s poetry. That said, Peter Dinklage in that role gets by just on the strength of that amazing face of his, and director Joe Wright, who loves to show off as much as Cyrano does, makes much of Dinklage’s craggy features and moony eyes.
The actors Wright chose to play Roxanne (Haley Bennett), the object of Cyrano’s hidden affections, and Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), the handsome young soldier who recruits Cyrano’s literary skills to woo Roxanne, are a little too generic, especially when they have to share scenes with Dinklage. Only Ben Mendelsohn, playing the nobleman De Guiche with lots of pancake makeup and rouge, holds his own with Dinklage, but their scenes together are few and far between. For sure, the juxtaposition highlights Christian’s simple-mindedness to the point where you can’t believe that Roxanne doesn’t see through the ruse earlier than she does.
If Wright can be commended for anything it’s the way he folds the backdrop of war into a story that most adapters tend to relegate as historical baggage and atmosphere. The National’s songs, which always contain a heavy dose of melancholy, work quite well in this context and while Wright seems to enjoy himself more when staging comedy (and Dinklage is also a great comic actor) he understands the ending is almost pointless without the sense of loss that war brings. His movie will never be the last word on this classic play, but the imagination at work is commendable at times.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Sometimes, the circumstances surrounding the making of a film help make the experience of watching it richer. The most obvious example that comes to mind is Jafar Panahi’s Offside, a movie that was set and filmed during an actual 2006 World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain. In the final tense scenes, as a group of young women who have attempted to illegally sneak into the game are carted away by the police, the whole city of Tehran explodes in celebration when the Iranian team wins. Knowing that the revelry was not staged makes all the difference.
Directors Fanny Liatard and Jeremy Trouilh attempt something similar but more complicated. Their debut film is set in Cite Gagarine, a housing estate that was built on the outskirts of Paris in 1961, the year that Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man ever to venture into outer space and after whom the housing project was named. The film itself takes place as the projects were being torn down in 2019, and yet most of the action is set within its walls. Our hero, 16-year-old Youri (Alseni Bathily), also named after Gagarin, has lived in the projects ever since he immigrated to France as a young child; it’s the only home he’s ever known. True to his namesake, he’s obsessed with outer space, and studies the stars with a native intelligence that’s extended to the practical. He builds an observatory on the roof and helps neighbors set up satellite dishes to catch broadcasts and even repairs the elevators and replaces lightbulbs. During the course of the film, most of Youri’s neighbors, also immigrants from a wide range of backgrounds, move out to new digs as the building around them is prepared for demolition, but Youri stays, a squatter in a homemade plastic curtained cubicle filled with technology of his own devising.
Mostly abandoned by his mother, who’s off with a new boyfriend, Youri’s only companions are his best friend Houssam (Jamil McCraven) and Diana (Lyna Khoudri), a girl from the local Roma community, meaning she doesn’t have a fixed address by definition. Together, they create their own separate world thanks to Youri’s “spaceship,” for want of a better word, which contains its own greenhouse and facilities for providing sustenance amidst the general extinction.
Unlike other recent movies about the banlieues, Gagarine is hopeful and buoyant, even when Youri’s schemes turn to sabotage. And while its air of magical realism can sometimes feel forced, it honors the hopes and dreams of France’s marginalized communities without trivializing them. In the end, Youri wants to do right by the people he knows, and even the authorities are forced to bend to his ingenuity. Though it’s mostly unrealistic, Gagarine is a perfect tribute to the power of the unique imagination.
In French, Romany and Russian. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).
In 2007, Jikei Hospital in Kumamoto installed a “baby hatch” where infants could be deposited anonymously, presumably by parents who are unable to raise them for whatever reason. Since then, the hospital has received about a dozen babies every year through the system. The purpose has always been to give new mothers who feel they cannot have the child they are carrying an option other than abortion, but, more significantly, it allows the mother (or father, for that matter) to remain anonymous, since one of the reasons mothers don’t give their babies up for adoption is that they don’t want to be identified in official documents, such as the family register (koseki). The baby hatch has always been controversial.
In an interview with the Asahi Shimbun that appeared Feb. 21, the head of the hospital, Dr. Takeshi Hasuda, who came up with the idea for the baby hatch, talked at length about “isolation births” (koritsu shussan), meaning those instances when a woman gives birth alone and, usually, in secret. As with infants dropped off at the baby hatch, the reason a woman may have a child in isolation is to keep it hidden from others, and, as Hasuda points out, giving birth is often dangerous, even when done in a medical institution. Isolated births are thus doubly dangerous to both the mother and the child. In recent decades, the practice of isolated births has become more of a problem as parents found it ore difficult to sidestep bureaucratic requirements. When births happened at home and were assisted by midwives, a woman could manipulate the birth registration with the help of the midwife. So if the mother was, say, unmarried or underage, the child could be registered as the issue of an older married sister or even the birth mother’s own mother. In some cases, the baby chould be given to a third party without the authorities knowing. However, nowadays almost all births take place in hospitals, so such subterfuges are much more difficult, if not impossible. Consequently, many teen pregnancies end with mothers giving birth in isolation.
This phenomenon was broadly discussed in the media after a Vietnamese technical trainee, who believed she would be deported from Japan if it were known she was pregnant, gave birth to twins in 2020 in secret and the twins died. (We have already written about this story here.) Though the trainee’s circumstances were different from those of most Japanese women who opt to give birth in isolation, the dangers are the same. More to the point, medical institutions that want to address the problem have to contend with its main cause—the registration of the child’s birth, which is mandated by law and requires the name of the mother. As Hasuda told the Asahi reporter, there are no laws in Japan that even acknowledge such a phenomenon. All births in Japan must be reported to the relevant local government within 14 days, and if the required documents are not filled out “properly,” they can be “rejected.” What Hasuda meant was those situations when documents are submitted without a mother’s name. In that case, the baby cannot be placed in a family register and, for all intents and purposes, does not exist as far as the authorities are concerned.
According to various human rights groups, Iran is believed to execute the most people per capita of any country in the world. The list of crimes subject to capital punishment seems endless, everything from murder to homosexuality to apostasy, and when the country’s celebrated filmmakers, whether accepted or banned, address the subject they tend to focus less on the condemned than on the system itself. One of the most startling depictions of capital punishment was in Saeed Roustayi’s 2019 film Just 6.5, which was not only allowed to be screened in Iran, but went on to be the biggest non-comedy box office hit in the country’s history. The movie is not about the death penalty. It is a police thriller about the various means, both legal and extralegal, that the narcotics forces use to bring drug pushers to justice, and much of it takes place in Iran’s notoriously crowded prisons. Roustayi didn’t flinch from anything, including the methods used for mass execution, which are truly horrific. Perhaps it’s because the people who are being killed are seen in the movie to be addicts and dealers that the authorities felt it was OK to release the movie as it is—it certainly could be seen as a deterrent of sorts—but, then again, the authorities banned Mohammad Rasolouf’s 2020 Berlinale winner, There Is No Evil, whose depiction of mass hangings wasn’t as graphic. What they objected to was Rasolouf’s overall theme, which is that the death penalty destroys the souls of the people who, as the movie so colorfully puts it in its four separate stories, “pull the stool out” from under the prisoners. By extension, the entire nation’s soul is compromised.
Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha’s Ballad of a White Cow isn’t as accomplished as Rasolouf’s film, but it does attempt to come to grips with the moral destruction wrought by state-sanctioned murder. Whereas Rasolouf dealt directly with the executioners, Moghaddam and Sanaeeha take a wider look at the bureaucracy that oversees the justice system carrying out these killings, but they do so in a manner that allows for a more nuanced dramatic reading of the issue. Moghaddam herself plays Mina, a single mother whose husband has been executed for killing a moneylender. A year after his death, Mina and her brother-in-law (Pourya Rahimisam) are summoned to the justice ministry’s chambers where they are told that a mistake was made, and that the real killer of the moneylender has confessed. (Mina’s husband did attack the moneylender, but the fatal blow was delivered by another man who showed up later with, presumably, a similar grudge.) At first devastated and then righteously incensed, Mina demands an apology in addition to the meager compensation she receives, but none is forthcoming from the stolid bureaucrat, who simply says it was “God’s will,” which turns out to be a leitmotif in explaining many of the hardships that Mina and her 9-year-old daughter, Bita (Aviv Puffaoufi), who is deaf and unaware that her father is dead, suffer at the hands of Iranian society, which cannot countenance a fatherless family, regardless of the circumstances that made it so.
Struggling to pay the rent with a low-paying job in a milk factory and staving off her brother-in-law, who believes she is hiding her dead husband’s money, Mina is at her wit’s end when a mysterious man shows up at her door saying he is an old friend of her husband’s who has come to repay an ancient debt. This middle aged man, Reza (Alirez Sanifar), gradually insinuates himself into Mina’s life, helping her find a new apartment when she’s kicked out of her old one and endearing himself to Bita, who has come to understand without being told that her father is never coming back from “abroad.” Meanwhile, the bureaucracy grinds on and while Mina does exact some satisfaction, she is continually set upon by other forces, not least of which is her in-laws, who now want custody of Bita. Reza, as it turns out, can help there, too.
Plot-wise, Ballad of a White Cow often shortchanges its characters’ motivations: The viewer may wonder why Mina doesn’t see through Reza’s subterfuge given how intelligent and even hard-headed she is portrayed to be. Moreover, Moghaddam and Sanaeeha give Reza a back story that seems conveniently and conventionally tragic, thus setting an unsubtle dramatic tone that’s retrofitted to justify Mina’s burgeoning feelings for him. Nevertheless, as a snapshot of Iranian society the movie has the power to infuriate, thus reinforcing its main point, which is that the death penalty is so easy to apply here because the people it nominally protects are so cold. In that sense, it conveys the banality of evil behind the system more forcefully than does Rasolouf’s film. In one scene, Mina visits a realtor whose office is modern and flashy and who tells her in a matter-of-fact way that none of the landlords he represents will rent to a widow. Your first impulse is to laugh because the cruelty seems so automatic.
In Persian. Opens Feb. 18 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).
For such a small film with modest comic goals, the Norwegian road movie Los Bando takes on a lot. Ostensibly, it concerns the ambitions of a group of small-town teenagers who yearn to play rock n roll and intend on competing in a battle of the bands contest in a city on the other side of the country, but it also takes the time to explore each band member’s personal investment in the journey, which isn’t a bad idea except, as mentioned above, it’s supposed to be a comedy and the laughs are often sacrificed to make trite points about what a drag it is growing up.
The environment here has something to do with it. The band’s guitarist, Grim (Tage Johansen Hogness), is a talented instrumentalist but sucks as a singer, except he doesn’t know that and his best friend in the band, drummer Aksel (Jakob Dyrud), is too chicken to tell him. Besides, good singers are almost as scarce in their home town as bass players, which is why they recruit Thilda (Tiril Marie Hoistad Berger), who may be only 9 and plays cello rather than bass, but she’s a badass on that cello. A power trio with a crappy singer and a kid cellist is better than no power trio at all, so they conspire to secretly make it to Tromso for the competition, but how to get there? That’s where Martin (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) comes in. A motor sports aficionado with no drivers license but a secret music jones, he steals his missionary brother’s “Jesus van” to help Los Bando Immortales realize their dream, thus setting in motion not only a road movie of self-discovery, but one that involves three chase elements: Martin’s brother; the police, since Thilda has been reported kidnapped; and various parents and concerned adults. As it happens, each member of the band has an agenda that the competition is meant to assuage, either a girl or a mentor that needs impressing, a parent whose neglect needs to be called out, or simply a means of proving one’s worth to oneself. And while the movie hits all the required beats on its way to satisfying all these needs, including side trips to save a bride in distress and a karaoke contest to earn gas money, it tends to do so without any dramatic strain, making the whole movie somewhat pedestrian in style and tone. Even the music, which you’d expect to be pretty cool since Norway is the birthplace of death metal, is limp. Only Thilda rocks out convincingly.
In Norwegian. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite(03-3352-5645).
Though conventional Hollywood action films are most viewers’ go-to source for visceral entertainment, you really can’t beat a good documentary that thoroughly examines an incident involving extreme danger. Because it was produced by National Geographic, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s The Rescue is pretty wonkish in its detailed depiction of the rescue of 12 young soccer players and their coach from a flooded cave in northern Thailand in 2018, but without explicitly drawing attention to the inherent drama of the incident, it’s harrowing in the most direct way, even when you know how it turned out due to the extensive coverage it attracted from world media. The main reason for this is that the rescue was considered impossible for the longest time, and the film explains why over multiple episodic sequences where various rescue experts, including Thai’s version of the Navy Seals who helped coordinate the operation, frankly expressed doubt that they could pull it off. Even U.S. Special Forces, whose assistance was also requested, didn’t provide much hope.
The two people who did have hope and, by extension, become our hosts through this complicated process, were British cave divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen, who discovered the boys deep in the cave system (they had apparently been exploring the caves as tourists when a flood occurred, trapping them). The discovery, however, was the easy part. What proved extraordinarily difficult was getting them out, since it would involve transporting them underwater through a series of very narrow passageways. Consequently, the directors and their crew could not film the rescue firsthand, and thus had to rely on Stanton, Volanthen and their crew to both record whatever they could and then describe afterwards how they did it, and the pair, fortunately, are articulate, succinct, and, most importantly, vivid in their sharing of the experience. These are men who absolutely love what they do, which is why they’re so good at it, and while their determination to save the boys sprang from their basic humanity, it was stimulated by their natural desire for challenge.
The drama is automatic: the waters weren’t going to subside anytime soon since monsoon season was starting, and the clock was ticking since oxygen in the cave was limited. The two divers had a bit of luck in preparing for the rescue when they discovered, almost by accident, a quartet of public workers also trapped in the cave but closer to the entrance. While trying to help them out of the cave some panicked, which prompted the rescuers to adopt a radical but necessary method to save the boys: make them unconscious before bringing them out. This is why the Seals and the Special Forces were enlisted, despite their initial doubts, because it required split-second timing. In addition, an Australian doctor was recruited to devise a special drug protocol to sedate the boys for something that had never been done before. The divers themselves had to administer these drugs, which meant they need training, too.
Throughout the movie, the pessimism that ruled the moment is offset by not just the amazing bravery of the rescue team, but also by the incredible ingenuity they used to address each problem as it arose. This is the kind of dramatic dynamic that fictional filmmakers can only imagine, a constant push-pull of hope and despair that keeps mounting. The Rescue is simultaneously exhausting and exhilirating.
In English and Thai. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6268-0015).
As a movie about anti-Asian racism in America, actor Justin Chon’s directoral debut takes a heavy-handed approach that doesn’t do its theme any favors. The bad guys are bureaucrats and employers who clearly see the main character, Antonio (Chon), as representative of an inferior human subset. Chon, who also wrote the screenplay, intensifies this aspect matter by lending Antonio a backstory that essentially gives these bigots an excuse to reject him: Adopted from Korea, raised in a broken home, handicapped by a criminal record, and possessed of no viable education. On top of all that, the only “bankable” skill Antonio has is tattooing, an art that many people have a problem with because of the “kind of people” who get tattoos, especially in the South, where Antonio has lived almost his entire life.
It’s a lot of baggage to carry for a first-time director, and while Chon’s passion for the project is apparent in his portrayal of Antonio, the movie buckles under the load. The crux of the plot is Antonio’s resident status. When he was adopted by an American couple, they neglected to file the proper documentation that would ensure his citizenship, so when he is arrested for ignoring the racist come-ons of a literally stupid cop (Emory Cohen), his case is tagged by ICE, which, since this is during the Trump administration, sets the wheels in motion to have him deported, even though he knows no language other than English and left Korea when he was a toddler and thus has no known relatives there. His only legal hope is his family—wife Kathy (Alicia Vikander) and step-daughter, Jessie (Sydney Kowalske)—and the child Kathy is expecting. Antonio’s lawyer (Vondie Curtis-Hall) tries to get the court to see that if he is deported, his children would be left without a father, but given that Antonio is not as gainfully employed as his wife, who’s a nurse and whose ex-husband (a cop) could be tapped for child support, and doesn’t have much in the way of employment prospects, his suit isn’t a very strong one. Chon further stirs the pot by giving Antonio a combative personality that fires up with the slightest spark of resentment. Desperate for money to pay his legal fees, he returns to a life of crime, thus seemingly sealing his fate, or at least as far as these kinds of movies go.
The heavy-handedness seems hardly necessary given the movie’s subtheme of Antonio being not only stateless, but drifting in a world that won’t have him because our existence is so dependent on labels that precede us. He introduces an older woman, Parker (Linh Dan Pham), a refugee from Vietnam, who tries to introduce him to his Asian heritage, even if Vietnam isn’t Korea. Though at base there’s something rather trite about this subplot, it works to highlight Antonio’s isolation from his birthright, which should be American by default but can’t be due to the nativist sensibility that still finds non-whites unacceptable as real Americans. When Antonio attends a party thrown by Parker’s family, he feels for the first time a sense of belonging, even if he doesn’t fully understand it. Even Kathy gets into the spirit by singing the title song, which connects their New Orleans home to the larger world represented by Parker and her monolingual father.
Had Blue Bayou been formulated simply as an issue movie, or a more intimate study of a man without a country, it would have probably conveyed Chon’s ideas more readily, but its reliance on melodramatic plot devices that detract from the credibility of its message makes it a chore to sit through.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225).
As the title so starkly conveys, the theme of Lee Daniels’ biopic of the woman who many believe to be the greatest jazz singer of all time is the constant struggle Billie Holiday endured just to exist, but the story that Daniels tells, while rooted in her drug addiction and the attendant scrutiny by law enforcement, ranges beyond the overt systematic racism of those in authority to focus equally on those Black men who kept her down at every turn, and not just sexually. For that reason, the movie is often a veil of misery and pain punctured occasionally by one of Andra Day’s stupefyingly redolent impersonations of Holiday in performance, so depending on what you bring to the movie, your appreciation may vary widely. For sure, this is not a hagiography, nor an appreciation of artistic genius, and it shouldn’t be. But it sticks Holiday in an unflattering box, removing most of the personal agency from her tale.
Daniels’ canniest choice is to build the plot around Holiday’s most indelible hit, “Strange Fruit,” a poetic but unblinking depiction of a lynching. The song was so controversial that eventually even federal agents forbade her from performing it lest it stir up bad feelings in Black audiences, who would then recycle the resulting resentment into non-compliance with laws designed to keep them “in their place.” Holiday knew this and, according to the movie, sang it for the express reason of provoking those emotions, so, in a sense, the FBI had a point by dint of their own racist fundamentals. The script, by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, connects Holiday’s combative artistic sensibility to her heroin addiction, which she never really renounced even when she attempted to kick it, as well as her chronic choice of abusive partners. Some reviewers have griped that focusing on this aspect of Holiday’s emotional makeup shortchanges her as a human being for the sake of dramatic force, but there’s a lot to be said for the image of a strong black woman who refuses to bend to others’ wills even when that stubbornness might kill her. However, Parks miscalculates by centering much of this conflict on the relationship between Holiday and a Black federal agent, Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), who is tasked with finding dirt on her. That Fletcher is Holiday’s most avid fan first and her lover later adds too many subtexts to a movie that already feels top heavy with meaning, aside from whatever information you might glean about her actual life. Fletcher was apparently a real person who regretted his role in Holiday’s ongoing suffering, but the sex stuff was apparently all Parks’ idea.
Consequently, the biggest problem some viewers will have is with the sexual violence and the drug use, which are explicit to the point of physiological repulsion. Day, an R&B singer who has never acted before, is, quite simply, astounding, and not just because of her vocal chops. If she deserved that Oscar nomination in the eyes of the Academy, it’s likely because very few other actors can imagine putting themselves through what she did to realize Parks’ and Daniels’ vision, regardless of whether you think that vision was worth pursuing.
Opens Feb. 11 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).
The United States vs. Billie Holiday home page in Japanese
Last week, the Cabinet decided it would ask UNESCO to list a gold and silver mine on the island of Sado as a World Heritage Site. The government says the mine, which opened about 400 years ago and closed in 1989, deserves recognition as a prime representative of Japan’s “industrial heritage,” since at one time it produced more silver than any other mine in the world. However, South Korea has already challenged Japan’s version of the mine’s history, saying that the mining company used forced labor from the Korean peninsula during the time when Korea was a colony of Japan. According to a Bloomberg report, the Japanese government “has said little” about the “human rights conditions at the mine.” South Korea’s Yonhap news agency says it is believed that more than 2,000 Koreans worked there between 1910 and 1945. The difference in narratives surrounding the Sado mine mirrors the dispute the two countries had over another Japanese mine that eventually went on the World Heritage list: Hashima, an island off the coast of Nagasaki Prefecture. The South Korean government says that the coal mine on Hashima also used forced labor, but the materials and exhibits at the site claim that the Korean laborers were well-paid and well-treated. South Korea has accused Japan of whitewashing the mine’s harsh conditions.
The Japanese government’s selective memory when it comes to recounting the history of its mining sector isn’t limited to sites it hopes to make into tourist attractions. On Feb. 3, Yonhap reported on the 80th anniversary of a mine disaster off the coast of Ube in Yamaguchi Prefecture that killed 183 workers, 136 of whom were Koreans. The Chosei coal mine, located under the seabed, collapsed at about 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 3, 1942.
None of the bodies have ever been recovered. A local citizens group has over the years recorded testimony and gathered documents about the disaster, and some of it indicates that as early as Nov. 30, 1941, the mine tunnel was showing signs of leakage. However, the company did nothing and kept sending miners into the tunnel. Yonhap says that, at the time, the Japanese media only gave cursory coverage of the disaster, which is one of the reasons the bodies were never recovered. The mining company and the country itself, which was still at war, preferred to forget about it. The South Korean government, however, has not forgotten, and its Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization Under Japanese Imperialism has cited the Chosei disaster as an example of corporate negligence that needlessly put Korean forced laborers in a dangerous situation.
The local citizens group was established in 1991 and subsequently provided the South Korean government with the results of their research. They identified the victims of the disaster and contacted survivors of those who were Japanese nationals. In 1992, surviving families of the Korean victims established its own association. Every year since 1993, the two groups carry out a memorial service on Feb. 3 near the spot where the collapse occurred, though last year’s ceremony was cancelled due to the COVID pandemic. In addition, the Japanese group installed a plaque on the site with the names of the known victims and have worked to conserve the mine piers, which are the only relics still standing. In 2013, the two groups started a concerted effort to recover any remains from the site and repatriate them. The Korean side has been lobbying the South Korean government to positively negotiate with the Japanese government to carry out the recovery. However, according to the Japanese side no progress has been made in this endeavor since the Japanese government has not responded at all, either to South Korean entreaties or to their own.
One member of the Japanese group told Yonhap that she believes if the two governments cooperate on the recovery effort “friendlier relations…will improve as a result,” which is a pretty optimistic view of the matter considering how stubborn the Japanese government has been about denying that there were any Korean forced laborers in Japan during the colonial period. There are also vested interests involved. The mining company behind the Chosei disaster eventually morphed into Ube Industries, the largest private employer in Yamaguchi Prefecture, which happens to be the home constituency of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who has taken a personal interest in promoting the Sado gold and silver mine as a World Heritage site. The city of Ube also has a PR working relationship with the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, which, of course, has said nothing about the disaster or the groups working to recover remains of the victims, but, then again, no mainstream media have ever covered the matter in Japan, only a few independent journalists and Akahata, the organ of the Japan Communist Party. Some vested interests aren’t so easy to see.
It was inevitable that Meyer Lansky get the gangster biopic treatment, and considering Lansky’s special place in the annals of the American underworld, Eytan Rockaway’s version of that life is disappointingly generic. A Jew and proud of it (but devoutly secular), Lansky was a financial wizard, a genius with numbers who parlayed his accounting skills into a position at the upper levels of organized crime for a large chunk of the mid-20th century. He single-handedly developed Cuba’s casino business before Castro dismantled it, and then had a hand in inventing Las Vegas with his protege Bugsy Siegel. More importantly, while he also allegedly had a hand in a lot of murders—at one point he led the wittily named hit squad Murder Inc.—he was never indicted for anything more serious than tax evasion, and died of lung cancer in his 80s in Miami. The movie, in fact, is about him soliciting a writer, a fictional conceit of Rockaway’s, to pen his biography, but according to his rules, which have less to do with making him look good for prosperity than with giving him at least some control over his legacy.
In that regard, Rockaway’s best, perhaps only, good decision was hiring Harvey Keitel to play Lansky in his dotage. Keitel brings his own legacy to the role and commands every scene he’s in, emphasizing Lansky’s self-importance as a historical figure while refusing to whitewash his most atrocious actions. The actor plays up Lansky’s old-fashioned wit and belief that his presence alone should be intimidating enough, and you believe the character when he warms to his interlocutor, a down-on-his-heels writer named David Stone (Sam Worthington, made up to look like Tom Selleck, for some reason). The scenes between the two men, which often take place in a diner where Lansky knows all the waitresses on a first-name basis, get to truths about how certain men believe that intimidation is the right of a successful operator and give Lansky the kind of extra dimension that’s difficult pull off in these kinds of biopics.
Unfortunately, the rest of the movie squanders this insight for the sake of cheap cliches. Stone is being blackmailed by the FBI into getting intelligence from Lansky about where he supposedly stashed $300 million. The writer is also trying to reconnect with his daughter after divorcing his wife. And the flashbacks, which recount Lansky’s rise and rise over the years are, despite whatever historical interest they provide, nothing more than opportunities to show how vicious the mob is when carrying out its prerogatives. Rockaway also implies that Lansky’s Jewish heritage was exploited twice, first by the US government, which allowed him to brutally eliminate the German Nazi influence on the docks of the middle Atlantic states in the years leading up to and including WWII, and later when he helped bankroll the new state of Israel, promising them weapons as well. Both subplots are used narratively to explain Lansky’s fortunes in that the governments of both the U.S. and Israel “betrayed” him, a supposition that, in Rockaway’s hands, is simplified to the point of irrelevance. Lansky the historical figure deserves better, and so does Keitel.
Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).
