Miller's Crossing

What is the motivation of the main character?

At the start of Miller's Crossing, Tom thinks that everyone has clear motives. He tells his friend Leo "Friendship's got nothing to do with it… you do things for a reason." 

Tom is suicidal, but he's also too afraid to kill himself. He drinks (1st shot of the movie) and smokes more than anyone, maybe that will kill him, but he's too afraid to kill himself in a more direct way, so all of his actions are meant to provoke people who could kill him without hesitation. Repeatedly he makes bad bets, hoping that someday Lazarre, his bookie, will get fed up with him and kill him. He even tells one of Lazarre's men to "send someone by to break my legs. I won't squawk." He wants to be beaten, broken and killed. He could easily get money from Leo or Caspar to pay off Lazarre, but he doesn't. Also, Tom continually switches sides in a gang war, but no side kills him.

Throughout the movie, Tom gets beaten up, and not once does he try to defend himself. No one seems to hurt him either. The indestructibility of the film noir hero then becomes a curse Tom has to live with. No matter what he does, he cannot die. In gangster films, the main character usually dies at the end, not Tom. The Coen's put their signature dark twist to the gangster genre by giving us a gangster who wants to die all along, but survives the whole movie without even a scratch.

Tom is the best friend and consiglieri of Leo, the head of a criminal organization in an unnamed American city in 1929. From the beginning of the film, Tom tells Leo that he should let Caspar, the leader of the prominent italian mafia in the city, kill Bernie because he has been selling information on fixed fights. Caspar explains Bernie "is a horse of a different color ethics-wise. As in, he ain't got any." Miller's Crossing is about ethics. Tom's with Leo, and that means he can't be with anybody else. All he does is for the benefit Leo. At first Tom counsels Leo to avoid war. The whole movie can then be seen as a complicated game Tom plays for Leo. Leo and Tom meet to discuss what they should do.

There's a great POV shot of Tom looking at Leo. Leo is in a huge office, and he's visually trapped with lamps to his right and left, a chair in front of him, and one at his back. He also has his desk right behind him. In front of him, huge, barred windows. Leo has his back turned to Tom, looking out. And where one would imagine there to be a beautiful view (this being the great office of a powerful man) there is a big, forbidding, grey building. Leo is deprived of both freedom, and the simple pleasure of a nice view. As I said, this is Tom's POV shot. Tom, and everyone else in the movie recognize that he is the smartest man playing that he "knows all the angles." It is he who sees everything. He sees the terrible shape that his friend is in, and how he can get him out. The next thing he does is to put on his hat (his symbol of power and great intellect) and goes to betray his friend.

So he switches sides to Caspar, to see if he can destroy him from the inside. Slowly, he turns Caspar's crew against him, and they end up collapsing, leaving Leo the last standing after the war. 

Either of these two readings of the movie could be correct. Every time I see the movie, I come up with a different reason for why Tom does what he does. But part of the brilliance of the movie is that there is no clear answer because Tom himself, by the end of the film, does not know.

 Leo- "I guess you picked that fight with me just to tuck yourself in with Caspar"

Tom- "I don't know. Do you always know why you do things, Leo?"

Verdict- 4/4

Miller's Crossing (1990) 1h 55min. 

Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts made me laugh out loud (and often), something that doesn't happen to me a lot while I watch a movie. Don't get me wrong, I love great comedy, but rarely do I laugh. For me, that would be enough to proclaim Liberal Arts a great movie. However, it also made me think. In fact, I think I will need a second viewing to process all of the ideas this movie has to offer.

Liberal Arts is about Jesse, an English major who found out the hard way that there are simply no good jobs in his field of expertise. Jesse works at a college admissions office. The film starts by showing us how bored he is with his life. Interview after interview he is shown asking routine questions in the same dull, monotonous manner until the last question, which he seems surprised to be asking. "You don't want to go to college?"

He thinks to himself, how could anyone not want to go to college? He has an idealized picture in his head of "college" being a time and place where young, free individuals get to read whatever they want, and talk for hours about matters ranging from philosophy to classical music to pop culture. This we find out a little later in the film when he visits his alma mater to attend an old professor's retirement party.

While there, he meets Zibby, a sophomore who shares the same enthusiasm about college. They start a relationship, not sexual, but truly romantic. Elizabeth Olsen plays Zibby. Olsen is a marvel, someone with exceeding beauty, incredible talent, and abounding joyful energy. Thanks to her,  Liberal Arts has been one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had at the movies this year. I was a little let down by the final 30 minutes of this movie, but only because it shifted focus away from her.

Jesse meets his mentor, a teacher he once admired, a student who sees college as a nightmare, and a young hippie who just seems be around to give advice and then disappear again. A series of conversations with them reshape the way Jesse sees life and send him back to his regular life a little wiser and a lot happier with an enthusiasm about life that he had about college.

This is a splendid movie directed and written by the likable Josh Radnor, also starring him as Jesse. Is he the next Zach Braff? maybe, but he has not yet made anything in the level of Garden State. Liberal Arts comes close though. They would make a great double feature.

Verdict- 3.5/4
Liberal Arts (2012) 1h 37min. It's unrated but should be PG-13. High school students will be able to appreciate it.

Bonnie and Clyde

During the 1960s Hollywood, along with the rest of the United States, underwent a radical transformation. The grand epics and good old fashioned genre films such as Westerns and Musicals,  became unpopular, and Hollywood started losing millions. In a desperate attempt to make some money, studios started to green-light risky projects they would never have considered in the golden age. One of the greatest of these films was Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde tells the story of  a couple of sympathetic thieves, sometime lovers who go from state to state robbing banks, and having great fun at it. They send  pictures and poems of themselves (written by Bonnie) to the papers, and become celebrities of the common people who, at the time of the Great Depression, were disillusioned enough with banks to cheer for the people standing against them. In fact, one of the best scenes of the movie happens when Clyde helps a poor farmer shoot-up his former home which "the bank took."

 I love that "The Bank" is never given a specific name. It's just an abstract enemy that can stand for the economic system that failed the country during the Great Depression, and the government that failed the filmmakers of 1967. Bonnie, Clyde, and everyone else they meet fight against

Bonnie and Clyde is an explicit, violent movie. The filmmakers, as well as the characters, had the guts to go against what was accepted at the time. It had no problem showing skin and blood, being grim as well as perversely funny at the same time. For example, there is one bloody shootout in the film (it usually gets big laughs) where a character drops everything she's doing and runs around screaming, while the fight rages on around her. That juxtaposition of comedy and violence is one of the movie's biggest strengths. Something critics and studio executives did not understand was that something could be both funny and violent, effectively providing both shock and laughter simultaneously.

In their journey, Bonnie and Clyde encounter a C.W, a dimwitted mechanic who provides some of the films best jokes. In my favorite, C.W parks the getaway car while Bonnie and Clyde are robbing a bank.  They also meet Buck, Clyde's brother, played by Gene Hackman, who gives one of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and of course funny performances of his career.

One thing I must add is that this film is a beauty. The wardrobes, set designs and its graphic realism truly transport you to rural 1930s U.S and that makes the whole film much more enjoyable and the ending much more powerful.

Verdict- 4/4

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) 1h 51min.