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A Prophet (2009) * * *

More Niels Arestrup than you know what to do with

 

Whenever I see one of these acclaimed foreign films, I inevitably examine each scene's potential to appear in the Hollywood remake. Thus in France's A Prohpet, I was asking myself how future-remaker Neal H. Moritz (producer of the Fast & Furious movies) would render the intricacies of prison life. Would he have hard rock echoing down the halls a la The Departed? Would he favor action over low-key prison drama? Would he replace the Corsican/Arab dynamic with Aryan Brotherhood/Nation of Islam tension? Would the climactic shootout be discharged in favor of explosions, presumably as Main Bad Guy is about to escape the prison via a helicopter?

I can only think about these things for so long. My attention should really be on the film in front of me, not the American remake two or three years down the pipeline. So eventually I shake those thoughts out of my head and get back to the subtitles. But don't let my waning attention lead to believe A Prophet is a boring film: for most of its two and a half hours, the movie is an enthralling look at the inner workings of a French prison.

The DVD packaging of A Prophet (or Un Prophète as it's said in French) takes pains to compare the movie to The Godfather, but perhaps that would make more sense if The Godfather was set in Sing Sing. Minus a half-dozen forays to the outside world, A Prophet takes place entirely in a bleak, colorless French prison, where a young Arab named Malik (Tahar Rahim) rises in the ranks of the criminal underworld. He starts off downright cheruibc: lanky and clean-shaven and sporting a buzz cut, and you see him and say to yourself this young man will not last long.

I'm proud of that left arm but not the ear

A Corsican mobster (Niels Arestrup) spots his prey and presses Malik into his service. But before he can come under the protection of Arestrup's criminal gang, he must perform a terrible deed for them: kill a fellow inmate. The lead-up to this act is haunting, as Malik anguishes over what's to come; the act itself is easily the most effective scene in the movie, as shocking as anything that has come or will come out of Hollywood. You will cringe, and you won't be able to get the image out of your mind.

What comes next is the rest of Malik's life, as he moves up in the prison underworld. The film takes place through his eyes, but we the audience are treated to his physical and moral transformation. Rahim is excellent as he morphs Malik from an ignorant street boy to an expert on this cutthroat world. He grows hair, gains muscles, and develops a ruthless glare with his eyes. At various times he is haunted by the specter of the first man he kills, and these scenes are great ones, because Rahim does not overdo his reactions to the visions and the director does not overplay their campiness. The ghost visitations could have been portrayed with an over-the-top Jacob Marley vibe, but these are not. I don't know if a Hollywood film would even dare try such a thing.

The best scenes are either dreamlike or actual dreams: the specters of Malik's first murder, a premonition featuring deer jumping on a country road, and a trip to an airport where Malik, dressed in a suit on a mission for Arestrup, gawks at all the "normal" people going about their business. As someone tells Malik, "you straddle two worlds," but gradually we see that he can only thrive in one.

Unfortunately, A Prophet suffers from the trappings of many mob movies. I have seen many a complicated plot in my day, filled with murky relationships, double dealings, and secondary mobster characters who exist to be whacked. As hard as I tried, I couldn't tell at times who was trying to kill who or why the heroin was going here instead of there. Whenever criminals fight each other and names like Marcaggi and Lingherri are tossed around, my mind starts to wander, and I can't help but think that writers like to tie complicated relationships like this together just so they can unravel messily.

Director Jacques Audiard said that he hoped A Prophet would "create icons" for his audience, particularly for minorities who are much less visible in French cinema. My own belief is that Audiard's plan is noble, but he's going about it in the wrong direction. Why should we look to create a French Scarface, or an Arab Michael Corleone? You can make an enjoyable movie about an antihero, but you shouldn't aim to have them emulated. I fear that when Malik is filmed strutting around prison in slow motion, to a pop standard, that's the direction we're headed. And you can be sure Hollywood won't skimp with the mob glorification, they'll just toss in an explosion or two to make it different.

Django Unchained (2012) * * * 1/2

Adult supervision is required

It's got guts. It's got gore. It's got a theme song.

Django Unchained doesn't want to meet your expectations. It's an epic with half of the action set in one locale. It's a Western transplanted to the South. It's full of sudden gunplay, anachronisms, and Australians in Mississippi.


But it's a Quentin Tarantino film. We expect all these things from him, whether the movie wants us to or not.

I apparently drew Django with an overcoat

Tarantino is adept at providing us with characters who break their stereotypes, making them walking conundrums. The title character, Django (Jamie Foxx) could have been a meek ex-slave who at every moment longs to free his wife and save his people from oppression. But that would be too simple. Instead, as soon as he's unchained he takes on what is essentially an undercover role: a black slave trader who must get inside a plantation and act as if he's not repulsed by everything he sees. This is a job he does well -- very well.

He's joined in his quest by "Dr." King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter who presents his own contradictions. Schultz is not afraid to gun down men in front of their sons, but he gets weak-kneed even being in the presence of an immoral institution like slavery. Indeed, one of the most startling scenes of the film is when Django acquiesces to the execution of a slave over the protest of Schultz, all so he can stay undercover. Racial expectations, it must be said, are tossed and flipped like pancakes.

Django's main strength is its acting. Foxx is intense, suave, and manly -- he has almost made a sex symbol out of slave. Although I can't confess to having seen any spaghetti westerns, I can imagine Foxx does well playing a straight-shooting and ruthless character from the mold of that genre. Waltz is a gem, deserving the Oscar in every moment he is onscreen. It must be something in the way he talks--in perfect German-accented English, perpetually optimistic--that so charms me.

I was impressed by the supporting characters in Django, too, though the actors are by no means small-time. Leonardo DiCaprio chews the scenery as Calvin Candie, the plantation owner who is both a Southern gentleman and a sadist (he looks like he's having fun in the role, which is a change from the mopey characters he so regularly plays). Likewise, Samuel L. Jackson is in fine form as the Uncle Tom/House Slave. His role is meant to be both unpleasant and comic, and Jackson exudes both traits with relish.

And the acting goes hand-in-hand with the film's other main strength, its excellent script. Another well-deserved Oscar for Tarantino, who's specialty, I'm learning, is crafting an extremely tense scene before explosive violence. There must be two or three such scenes in this movie: someone is dead by the end of each one. You'll know when they arrive. My heart doesn't usually pound as much as it does during one of these Tarantino-Tension scenes, which is the name I will give them until I think of a better one. That is rare for a filmmaker these days. Equally rare is scripting dialogue that sounds perfect, dialogue that is like an art form unto itself. Witness every time Schultz speaks, for instance. It's like he has an invisible dictionary floating right there before him.

Right in my first review I'm torn. Originally, I was going to give Django three stars because I was put off by how quintessentially Tarantino it is. Contradictory characters: check. Elaborate set-pieces: check. Brutal violence: check and check--at some points I was laughing at how much blood there was. But the writing is so good, and the acting hits every key, that I have to give it that extra boost. Spaghetti westerns have never appealed to me (though as I said, I haven't seen one), and I still enjoy a moral compass in a movie. But there's lots to appreciate in Django, and I can't help but give an extra boost to a film that can make a treasure out of almost every line.

Hello world

My plan is to review movies on this blog, whether they be ones released yesterday or ones released back when Cary Grant was just getting his start. I want to review every movie I've seen this year, old or new.

A word about star ratings: I use 'em for the sake of convenience. Roger Ebert once said, "Any movie rating system is of course arbitrary and silly," and it won't do any good to try and compare two films with the same star rating. Stars will tell you immediately whether a film is worth seeing or not (the threshold generally being three stars), and that's why I like to see and use them, because I know whether a critic liked or disliked a movie immediately.

Here's a quick guide to the star ratings I'll use:
* - Bad
** - Poor
*** - Good
**** - Great

Half-stars mean that the motion picture in question had a little something extra to push its rating up.