Happy Birthday Frances McDormand

I think everybody agrees that Frances McDormand is great. Even people who don't get all warm and fuzzy when watching Almost Famous. In terms of leaving a powerful cinematic legacy, she's got an ace in her deck: her husband. He has a brother who helps him make films now and again, and occasionally, they bring home to work, and cast her in small parts to make her feel appreciated. She had a tiny little part as Jon Polito's secretary in Miller's Crossing.

But seriously, no matter how many terrible movies she makes with Charlize Theron, she'll always have the one-two-three punch of Blood Simple, Fargo, and The Man Who Wasn't There (all three directed by her husband and his brother - their names escape me).

These three punches would knock out most any other actress who got in the ring with her. She was the relatively uncomplicated heroine in distress in Blood Simple, she had a brief cameo in Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing, and then played the celebrated character of Officer Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Five years later she appeared in her husband's The Man Who Wasn't There, a brilliant, brilliant undervalued, little-seen film in the Coen oeuvre.

She has done good non-Coen work, such as in Almost Famous, Mississippi Burning, and Wonderboys. As Marge Gunderson, I find her mixture of idiosyncracies amusing every time I revisit Fargo; she is part mother-hen, part Colombo, possessing a cunning unshared by the other police officers and locals in Brainerd. She is also sweet, kind, and fearless in the face of circumstances that are not sweet and kind.

However, she can play a fiery bitch when she wants to, as when she plays the unsatisfied, adulterous manipulator of her taciturn husband in The Man Who Wasn't There: "I hate wops" she says about her own family after her brother's wedding party. I've heard her belligerent performance in the movie Friends with Money steals the show from her fellow actresses, Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, and Catherine Keener. And I've read she is fantastic in Laurel Canyon. I will get around to seeing both films eventually, but, it really doesn't matter, as her MVP status has already been cemented in my mind by her tremendous Coen triumvirate.






Previous "My Favorite Actresses" Birthday Retrospectives:

3. Samantha Morton
2. Uma Thurman
1. Judy Davis

The Last Detail (1973)

Billy “Bad Ass” Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and “Mule” Mulhall (Otis Young) are two SPs who’ve been assigned to escort a fledgling sailor from where they are stationed, Norfolk, Virginia, to the Naval Stockade at Portsmouth in New Hampshire. The prisoner, not even 20, has received an eight-year sentence for a minor crime. Buddusky and Mulhall take pity on the kid, Meadows (a 22-year old Randy Quaid) and instead of following the original plan of getting him to the brig early and then using the rest of the scheduled time spending the stipend on partying, Buddusky and Mulhall decide to let the kid join them.

Once the trio has reached the point in their destination with enough time left allotted for them to pick up the mandatory trip later, they find themselves looking for ways to pass the dead time while also showing the kid an impromptu last hurrah of hedonism. The film is in no hurry to get back on track. It is in the weariness I felt with its loitering that I realized I was missing the point. The scenes of Buddusky, Mule, and Meadows twiddling their thumbs at a party Meadows has inadvertently gotten them invited to, the awkward languor at the whorehouse, the many moments of listlessness are not a lack of focus on the film’s part; it is the focus. Without ever stating it outright or even really acknowledging it, the film presents Buddusky as a man in the grips of existential despair: the first time we ever see him, he is napping, unoccupied, in the Sailor’s lounge at the Navy barracks. That’s what makes him the wrong choice to lead the guys to Portsmouth: he hasn’t figured out a way to deal with his own existence – his only solution is momentary benders of sex and booze, punctuated by fights spurred by anger it is unlikely he knows the source of. He doesn’t know how to mentor himself, let alone mentor Meadows. Mulhall is right when he tells Buddusky that he's "a menace"; Buddusky could very easily lead them over a cliff, all the while assuring them that “yes, this is the right direction, trust me!” They are a volatile trio, not only because Buddusky is the unappointed leader, but because Mulhall isn’t assured enough to know when and where to properly repress Buddusky’s hell-raising methods of killing time. And forget about Meadows: dull-witted and carrying a defeated air of resignation due to his punishment, he is as malleable to Buddusky’s influence as can be. After spending time with Buddusky, Meadows grows to look up to him, and even Mulhall gradually finds himself astonished with what a character Buddusky is.



Jack Nicholson has a peerless ability to fascinate even when doing nothing, sometimes even more attention-grabbing when he’s doing nothing than when he is strutting and grinning, when you see the fear that’s been hidden under layers of self-assurance. Buddusky takes Nicholson’s irrepressible mischief and magnifies the cockiness; it took a while, for me at least, to notice that much of it is posturing, more for his own benefit than for others’. Everyone has a way of dealing, and Buddusky’s is seizing his already bursting Id and letting it overflow dangerously in an attempt to submerge the anxiety created by his own profound dissatisfaction. You get the sense that even though Buddusky will continue to medicate himself with booze and brothels in the future, secretly he’ll know how futile it is, and this is where Nicholson’s knowing face, his uncanny intelligence, make him perfect for subtly tormented rascals. Marlon Brando was good at playing these roles as well, but without exuding the sharp intellect of Nicholson. Brando’s dissatisfaction was more instinctual; Nicholson’s is cerebral.

But Buddusky is much less thoughtful than that. He’s a sailor, not an intellectual (like the demonically malevolent Jack Torrance), and often acts without thinking, often to great amusement, but at the safety of his companions. This is the role that must have landed him the part of Randall P. McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Billy Buddusky and McMurphy are one and the same: both are irascible, rebellious, and decent men who are cockily aware of their awesomeness, but are nobly inspired to use their awesomeness to benefit the less fortunate people not born as Jack Nicholson. Consider that the final step in Buddusky’s plan is to get Meadows laid. McMurphy goes out of his way to get Billy Bibbitt laid in Cuckoo’s Nest, with disastrous results. Buddusky wants to show Meadows a good time just like McMurphy wants to take the boys fishin’ in Cuckoo’s Nest, risking life and limb for other peoples’ pleasure. Sure, the fishing trip had an ulterior motive – McMurphy wanted some time alone with Candy, but he could’ve easily escaped for that without 15 mental patients trailing behind. Both are compassionate men, and Buddusky does his best, from the very beginning, to make Meadows feel better:

Buddusky: “You know, Meadows…this eight years, it ain’t necessarily eight years.”
Meadows: “It isn’t?”
Buddusky: “No, it isn’t. They’re going to knock two years off right at the beginning for good behavior, so, that’s six years right there.”

Another brilliant ingredient in the film's success is seeing Hal Ashby’s droll sensibility via his positioning the camera just so, as when he watches Buddusky, Mulhall, and Meadows shopping for candy and soda in a concessions room. He shoots with the wooden doors of the entrance in the foreground, the door handles prominent. While noticing the odd inclusion of the unclosed doors, Buddusky, inside, at a distance, appears, milling past the open entrance from the right side of the room to the left, and I laughed. Three sailors browsing for concessions is not just three sailors browsing for concessions. Ashby composes his frame to produce comical, poignant images in a manner that is as triumphantly assured as Jim Jarmusch. There’s also a good deal of irony, notably the playing of the upbeat U.S. Navy tune, “Anchors Aweigh,” a tune that evokes the innocuous, sexless, clean image of the heroic seaman fighting patriotically for his country. It’s played over the opening credits, seemingly fitting for a film about servicemen, and later, over the ending, as Buddusky rudely spits obscenities to an agreeing Mulhall about the shit they have to put up with. After witnessing the vulgarity, rudeness, grumbling, and despair contained in the personalities of the sailors in The Last Detail, playing “Anchors Aweigh” for them seems absurd.


Grade: A

Le Scaphandre et le Papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) (2007)

I have no experience with disability, but I have heard that when a person, through birth or by an accident, loses function of one or more of their senses, the others become twice as strong. The body’s nervous system and its natural ability to redistribute the lost power of the terminated faculty to the others is not a minor miracle. I often think of the human body as low and crude, considering the animal mechanisms of pissing, shitting, and copulation, while forgetting the corporeal computer that regulates and commands the more nuanced functions, like the ability to distinguish textures through the fingers. True accounts have displayed the body’s sometimes extraordinary urge to remain alive, despite compounded inflictions. In some cases, the person who resides in the body is regretful of its stubbornness, compelling those who have no conception of such rotten and eternal incapacitation to dispute righteously about the ethical consequences of such an attitude.

But Julian Schnabel’s film, refreshingly, does not have issues of euthanasia or the like on its mind; it is a film that celebrates life and finds heartbreaking joy even in the tiniest remainders. It is far from sentimental, but Jean-Dominique Bauby is gifted with one of the more fortunate assembly of caregivers, and another film about a less successful extreme stroke victim could find just as many convincing reasons to despair as this one does to reassure.

Firstly, Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), when ambulatory, was the editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, a chic and cosmopolitan playboy and mogul. We see brief flashbacks which sweep with him through photography studios populated by cool bohemians in his employ and see how intoxicating a pleasure life must have been for him. So it seems especially cruel that he should be stricken with a sudden and devastating stroke, leaving him paralyzed from head to toe, face contorted into a twisted bundle, utterly unable to express himself save his eyes, one of which must be sewn shut. Amalric’s one eye is more expressive than most actors’ entire faces. What at first seems like a somewhat endearing look of dumb animal helplessness is in fact a bursting inner life: his eye questions, it pleads, it is sometimes delighted at the compassionate solicitude it receives. Amalric is astonishing.

Schnabel insists on shooting the first quarter of the film strictly from Bauby’s point-of-view, a conceit that might cause some to scoff or roll their eye(s), but which worked for me in presenting the heightened consciousness that results from the redistributed powers of the faculties Bauby has lost now allowing his eyes and ears to absorb stimuli twice as richly. Do yourself a favor and watch The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in a quiet room, alone, to fully absorb the sights and the ambience which Schnabel has subliminally amplified. If you allow it, this film will envelop you enough that, when Bauby’s hushed voice-over enters, you’ll be startled to remember that it is not you being looked at and fussed over.



Again, despite my admiration I was nagged by the thought that the fussing would not be graciously spent on a poor black man in the same sort of paralyzed state or even a man the same age and appearance as Bauby, but without his celebrity. He (and we) are often blessed with a revolving door of gorgeous women, who he (and we) are welcome to gaze at close-up, pore-invading, eye-swimming glorious close-ups of actresses like Anne Consigny, Olatz López Garmendia, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Marie-Josée Croze. Garmendia plays Bauby’s physiotherapist, Croze, his speech therapist, Seigner, his concerned ex-wife and the mother of his children, and Consigny is the assistant sent by Bauby’s publisher to take dictation for his book. If you have not seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, you’re probably curious as to how someone in Bauby’s condition could have possibly dictated a book...


Using a long, tedious process, his speech therapist, Henriette (Croze) lists off the alphabet in front of him in the order that the letters would most frequently be used (E is the most popular, followed by S, then A, then R, and so on). He blinks when she lands on the letter he is looking for. At first, the process is used merely to communicate with him, but by the end of the film, he has expressed a desire to write a memoir detailing the swirling, trapped inner life of a man with “locked-in syndrome.”

The primary shortcoming of the film is that it is adapted from Bauby’s memoirs of the same title. While the book’s completion represent a Herculean effort, it is a book which would probably not have received such attention had it been produced under normal circumstances. Bauby often narrates his thoughts and often his thoughts are groaning clichés: the diving bell is a heavy suit worn underwater symbolizing his isolation and confinement and the butterfly is his imagination taking flight away and above his caged body. These symbols could be interpreted by a child, conceived by a child, as symbols for isolation and imagination, and it may sound overly harsh to say that the warm acclaim that met his book had little to do with the actual content.

That is not to say that he is not interesting or funny or complex. He is all those things and more, and we come to empathize deeply with Bauby, despite cross admissions of bitterness and self-pity, sometimes stated outright by him via narration, sometimes revealed to us at the same time as he blinks it to Henriette, as when he tells her, but not us beforehand, that he wants to die. Thanks to Henriette (the warm and lovely Marie-Josée Croze, who resembles Naomi Watts) Bauby’s existence remains tolerable, and sometimes even satisfying, as he learns to take comfort in things that he would not have thought twice about while on the go. He is forced to cultivate patience, infinite patience, in his awful condition.

Besides Croze and Amalric, there are stand-out performances from Consigny, Niels Arestrup, and Jarmusch regular Isaach De Bankolé. Most rewarding, though, are the two scenes with the magisterial Max von Sydow as Jean-Dominique’s father, Papinou. As of April 10, 2009, Von Sydow will be 80 years old. I pray that we get 80 more.


Grade: A-

Session 9 (2001)

Shot in high-definition video and featuring David Caruso in a major role, Session 9 can often feel like a made for television horror film on the USA network. Unusual for a shitty TV movie though is the much better than average performance of Scottish actor Peter Mullan (who played “Mother Superior” in Trainspotting). The film invites the viewer to study Mullan; what is noticeable immediately is the incongruity between his brutish physique and his gentle face. His character, Gordon, is tired; strangely, instead of being buoyed by the recent birth of his infant daughter, he seems troubled and lethargic. Of course, this could just be the natural results of being a new father: sleepless nights due to the infant crying, etc. But the camera considers him with ominous angles, lingering, suggesting that this is a draining of spirit, not just a lack of sleep.

Mullan’s worn-down susceptibility makes him perfect for a man who could be inspired to commit mad, desperate acts. Like the protagonist of a certain monumental little horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, Gordon’s fragile psyche starts housing bad ideas influenced by a sinister building. The building is a defunct mental hospital.

Perhaps I’m being picky, but I didn’t think the dilapidated architecture and crumbling interiors were photographed or dwelled on to utilize their fullest potential. Other than a sinister hallway with a chair sitting insinuatingly at the farthest end, opportunities for establishing dread through atmosphere are neglected in favor of jolting sound effects, which punctuate the story regardless of whether or not they are required in the context of the moment. There are many such cheap tricks employed to frighten: one of the men on the crew, Mike (Stephen Gevedon, who co-wrote the screenplay) tells a story about one of the female patients at the institution who claimed that her father would rape her three times a week, sometimes doing so while wearing a black robe. Other times, the father would drive her out to a field where the rest of her family was waiting in black robes. Incestuous ritualistic blood orgies would ensue, involving lots of creative depravity. It has nothing to do with Mary Hobbes, the ex-patient who is at the heart of Session 9, rendering his little story gratuitous. It might have been disgusting if it had not been so transparently eager to disgust, a juvenile impulse common in people who like to boast how jaded they are. You got a fucked up story about cannibalistic necrophiliacs? Well, I got a story about shit-eating quadriplegic serial killers. Urban legends and tales of freaks and transgressions are effective when they are called upon later by a film, such as the horrifying tale of Charles Grady, or folklore about disappeared children made to stand in the corner. But here, Mike’s little story is self-contained and serves a cheap purpose.

Brad Anderson, co-writer and director of Session 9, says in his commentary, “Good old-fashioned scary movies are harder to find these days. You couldn’t have made The Exorcist [1973] today with that script and that kind of meticulous character development.” If he’s suggesting that Session 9 likewise achieves meticulous character development, then he is sadly mistaken. Aside from Gordon, the other four crewmembers are thinly-conceived stock characters:

Phil is the mean ball-buster

Hank (Josh Lucas) is the plot device used to create tension with Phil (Hank stole Phil’s girlfriend, you see)

Mike is the smart one (we know he’s smart because we see him reading during his lunch break)

and Jeff (Brendan Sexton III) is the dumb new guy.


Most of the dialogue is exposition, and it is especially laughable when it involves Phil and Hank’s feud. Standard exchange:
Hank: “I only fuck Amy to beat on Phil.”
Phil: “Fuck you Hank. Eat shit and die.”
Hank: “That’s what Amy does to me…when I have sex with her.”
Phil: “Keep it up fucker.”
Hank: “I do get it up. That’s why she’s with me now. I’m having sex with your girlfriend, which you do not like.”
All the while I was nervously thinking, “Those guys have to work in close proximity to one another. Tense.”

Later Hank disappears and the film attempts to trick us into thinking Phil has killed him, you know, because they’ve been telling each other to fuck off the whole movie. In addition to David Caruso’s often inappropriate over-intensity, there’s some unfortunate unintentional comedy: the recordings of the talk therapy sessions that a psychiatrist conducted with Mary Hobbes seem cartoonishly contrived. The doctor’s voice sounds fake and unnecessarily malevolent while Mary’s is overly hysterical. Mary suffers from multiple personality disorder, and changes her voice on the recording to suit each. You’d expect the voices of her multiple personalities, “The Princess,” “Billy,” and “Simon” to be silly, but the voice of “Billy” is sort of disquieting and the voice of “Simon” is the most disturbingly evil voice I think I’ve heard in quite a while. In fact, Mary does not reveal “Simon” until the final recorded session

...the eponymous 9th, where “Simon” describes what it was that caused Mary to be institutionalized in the first place. The potent capturing of this evil must be credited to the person who did the voice-work for “Simon.” Brad Anderson must also be credited for putting the voice over a terrifying nightmare Gordon has. And the final words of the film are chilling.


The film’s amateurish qualities should not be forgiven, especially when considering the squandered greatness of the premise. However, Peter Mullan’s performance and the evil voice of “Simon” combine to set Session 9 apart and deem it worthy of seeking out.


Grade: B-

The Red-Band Trailer for Joel & Ethan Coens' newest film Burn After Reading

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

It took me a while to write this because if I’d written it any sooner, my frustration and anger would have inevitably resulted in exaggerated negativity. But to claim that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was mediocre or unsatisfying does not come close to explaining the utter demoralization and betrayal, yes, betrayal, that I felt when it ended. I’ve read many other reviews and opinions on it and most range from “Better than Temple of Doom" (I’d like to strangle those people) to “vaguely unsatisfying, but what’d you expect?? you Indy fans are impossible to please lol!” Other reviews have blamed the fans for bugging Spielberg to do another and then when he finally did, they chastised the unhappy fans for “biting the hand that feeds them.” Well, the first time I heard about a potential fourth film back in 1998 or 1999, I prayed the idea would be aborted. And it was aborted, but unfortunately, the abortion had a fedora put on top of it and was filmed and then shown worldwide to millions of people, some who take the Indiana Jones trilogy too seriously, like me.

One has to look no further than the M&M ad featuring an anthropomorphized M&M version of Indiana Jones to know just how completely Steven Spielberg has been absorbed into the George Lucas merchandising whore machine. In an introduction to Temple of Doom, Spielberg actually refers to Lucas as his “best friend.” Spielberg, a seemingly discerning and talented filmmaker, counts the man responsible for the Star Wars prequels as his best friend.

The Star Wars prequels were Star Wars in name, but were lifeless, soulless shiny corpses propped up for no higher purpose than profit. That, and a has-been’s desperate, pathetic attempts at reclaiming cultural relevancy; George Lucas directed exactly 0 movies between 1977 and 1999. He had nothing, no ideas, no imagination, no wit, nothing except a giant tank of embalming fluid. Episodes 1, 2, and 3 were cadavers from point A to point Z, cadavers dripping with shiny preservative balms and spicy oils to disguise the putrefaction. They didn’t fool anybody. These costly husks of celluloid appear to be loathed by the majority of the people who witnessed them, and I imagine even the apologists’ numbers will dwindle as the years go by.

Steven Spielberg, seeing the defilement of popular cinema by this man

...his best friend, thought it would be a good idea to look to this same man as his muse, collaborator, and confidante in resurrecting another beloved movie franchise. Clearly Spielberg, unlike everyone else, did not feel dubious, or even slightly skeptical about how good Episodes 1 – 3 were.

Now we have this, this hollow, thoughtless, careless shedded skin of a movie, a worldwide billboard advertising Steven Spielberg's indifference to his own greatest character. Spielberg’s apathy is clear in every frame. He doesn't give a solitary shit and instead of the usual Spielbergian wonder, he brings as much enthusiasm as a kid absent-mindedly completing a homework assignment.

Even The Lost World, the relatively substanceless sequel to Jurassic Park had excitement, suspense, effort put into it. It was exciting. I was excited only twice during Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first time when Indiana Jones finds himself in a household with ‘50s décor populated by mannequins and discovers that he’s in the middle of an artificial neighborhood about to be decimated by an atomic bomb testing, and the second when Cate Blanchett squeezes both of a sitting Harrison Ford’s knees, imagining for a moment that those were my knees.

The atomic bomb sequence is weird because Indiana Jones, in his trademark outfit, is such a funny anachronism in the fabricated suburbia of the dummy neighborhood on the testing site. But it is this very oddness that gives it the appearance of imagination, as opposed to the rest of the film, which is as lifeless, dull, and uninspired as The Mummy Returns. It is unspeakably depressing that Spielberg has cranked out a rip-off of a movie that rips off the original which he made. The Mummy has more dazzle than this. The Phantom has more conviction.

This franchise should have been cremated when it died in 1989. Lucas and Spielberg are not filmmakers, not visionaries, not directors any longer; they are grave robbers, necrophiles, and whores.



Grade: F

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)

I actually saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade before I saw Temple of Doom because, at the time, Temple of Doom was considered too frightening for the young me. Being raised in a strictly Roman Catholic household, I have also seen the final installment several more times than the other two, largely in part due to the film’s reverent consideration of Christian lore. Spielberg has said often that he made Last Crusade as way of penance for the gruesome, pagan milieu of Temple of Doom. This most certainly explains the considerable absence of the raw, rough feel of the previous two installments. Last Crusade has been varnished and whitewashed not only in content but in the look of the film – it doesn’t have the gritty, dusty, shadowed coarseness so appropriate for the dirty adventures of a rugged archaeologist. The four year gap has lessened Spielberg’s talents at evoking the right visual texture for Indiana Jones, a man often covered in spider webs, sweat, earth, and blood. Last Crusade is too polished, too fine, too sterile in the way it looks, which in turn, affects the way it feels. Where Raiders and Doom felt like they were covered in the soil and the overgrowth of the locations they were set in, Last Crusade too often looks like it was set on a soundstage. Even when Indy and Dr. Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody) descend into the grimy catacombs and collect smudges and dampness on their appearance, the cinematography does not properly capture the texture of the surroundings. It is in watching Last Crusade that one realizes how important the settings were in Raiders and Doom, both often ensconced in the swamps, thickets, and wilderness. Spielberg, in his success, has further and further secured himself in the comfort of silk interiors, and in returning to the story of a man who scrounges through vegetation and muck for a living, is preposterously reluctant to get his hands dirty.

However, once one accepts the fact that Last Crusade is not from the same template of the two cinematic classics that preceded it, there are lots of features that maintain it as a worthy addition, specifically the humor.





Ironically, the very thing that inhibits me from embracing Last Crusade as zealously as the other two is the very thing that makes it so enjoyable and pleasant, the light-hearted breeziness. It zips along with a lively good humor, while offering action sequences seemingly more so out of obligation than out of genuine interest in exploring (not good in a movie about an explorer). It is not until the tank, horse, and truck mayhem near the end that the action deactivates from autopilot, but when it does, it is enthralling.

But back to the breeziness; it is puzzling that the very thing that makes the film lose points with me is what makes the film move along faster than the other two. All three films ended with me wanting more, but Last Crusade was over minutes after it started and left me feeling more than satisfied with the poignant coda it graced on the trilogy. Funny, that.

In the end, I think Last Crusade was an essential addition. I would rather a great sequel to a great original remain untrilogized than to slap on a rote and soulless third film simply to make it an official trilogy (I’m looking at you, Coppola) but Last Crusade has got plenty of soul, despite being more than a little rote here and there.

Grade: A-


* A review of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

* A review of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)