Saturday, January 28, 2006
Good Movies
After The Cider House Rules we rented another movie by the same director, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, director Lasse Hallström's 1993 movie about backwater entrapment and the complicated nature of human relationships. Hallström's gift is in portraying feeling. He is really amazing in his ability to evoke nuances of feeling — the way he strips down scenes to their emotional centers and is able to give that emotion its full voice. He trusts the material, the actors, the audience. The movies are both somewhat sentimental, a bit slow, but still engrossing; without embarrassment, both movies are affirmations. There are no bad people in Hallström's movies — they simply have problems, or are just doing their job. Mistakes are rectified, events are muted when painful. Not real life, not great art with its deeper ambiguities, but not a waste of time.
There is something to be said for a creative person who knows his limits and strengths; Hallström never veers away from the story and the characters, always gets terrific actors and fine scripts to work with. That is no accident. He is able to draw amazingly potent performances from star and bit player — from children. DiCaprio, very young in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, is just wonderful. The combination of Tobey Maguire, an actor with an elfin presence and resonant, heartfelt voice, with Michael Caine in The Cider House Rules was perfect. These are movies that pluck you out, lift you from the daily distractions. Both films are taken from novels that were then adapted by their authors. They both take place in marginalized hardscrabble country settings — away from the sensual energy and hardened joys of urban experience. What a relief these movies were.